A couple weekends ago, Tyla and I headed to a new (for us) park in Bellevue. It’s small but it has a nice little swimming area with life guards. Mandy and Ike joined us for the sunny fun and I snapped a few photos. You can also check out my quick Photosynth from the park. Well, technically it’s the view FROM the park. I didn’t want to look too creepy photographing other people’s kids.
In the old days if your computer ran slowly and you asked a geek how to make it faster, they would probably say “Add more RAM.” With most computers having 4-8GB of RAM now, memory isn’t generally an issue. There’s still a new answer to that question: Get an SSD.
I had my first taste of a solid state drive years ago when I built my media center PC. I wanted something quiet and lower power. Once I saw first hand how fast it was, I started on a mission to replace the main operating system drive in every computer with an SSD. They were expensive at first but now the costs have come way down, and while they’re still significantly more expensive than the older spindle based hard drives, they’re not cost-prohibitive in most situations.
How much of a difference does it make? I ran benchmark comparisons of the SSD and the old HD in my computer. The average speed of reading data off the disk is 2.5 times faster with the SSD. That’s for reading single big files though. More common is that you’re reading little pieces from a bunch of small files all over the place. For that, an SSD really shines. In random access tests for small files, the SSD was more than 40 times faster! The times when you notice an SSD the most are when booting the computer (or resuming from a sleep state) and when you open programs.
If you’re interested in buying one, you can find them for around $0.40-0.50/GB. Don’t go too much smaller than 120GB for your operating system drive. Windows doesn’t take nearly that much space but by the time you get it installed, do some updates, and install a bunch of programs, it’s not too hard to use that much space. If you don’t want to spend much time shopping around, consider the Samsung 830 it’s not quite the cheapest but it’s a good bang for the buck.
I just realized that this photo was taken halfway between my birth and today. Wow. Anyway, now that I feel old, here’s a shot from my Junior year of high school baseball. This was the best team I’ve ever played on. Our coaches were awesome and our team was really good. That’s me in the #12 jersey in the middle of the back row.
I dug up the stats sheet from that year:
By now you should hear Bruce belting out Glory Days loud and clear.
The video of the recital by one of our organists at church is finally completed! This was by the far the most complex event recording I’ve ever done. There were 4 video recorders and a professional audio track. Getting everything synced and color corrected proved to be quite the challenge, but I’m happy with the result. It’s just over an hour long, but you can jump to specific songs if you look for the links in the description. Dave has the audio tracks and recital program notes available on his DropBox account. Congratulations to Dave for finishing is graduate degree!
I do a lot of video recording at church. My usual setup involves 2 GoPros, a Canon T2i, a Kodak Z3 and a Sony sound recorder in case the main sound recording flakes out. That’s a lot of gear to lug back and forth. Also, the T2i only shoots 12 minutes of video at a time so it means I have a lot of clips to synchronize in Premiere when I get home. It was time to simplify.
Church now has a Canon VIXIA HF R500 camcorder. It shoots 1080p video and will do that for hours on end. That takes the place of the T2i as the main video source. I still set up a GoPro and the sound recorder for now but those are small and easy to deal with.
The Canon camcorder isn’t as good as the T2i in terms of video quality. Shooting in church is generally a low-light situation and the camcorder just doesn’t have the sensor in it to handle that super well. The result is acceptable though and given how much simpler it makes my life, I’ll go with it.
I’ll probably still lug all the gear with me every once in a while, but generally I think I’ll be using this camcorder.
Things were a little different last year. Our little man has really grown up. I love you!
A few weeks ago we got to take Elijah to his first camp site. I wasn’t brave enough for us to spend the night, but he had fun toddling around in the dirt. Mom and Dad took me camping when I was about the same age but we were in a tent in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. From what I’ve heard, I didn’t have a ton of fun on the trip. Actually come to think of it, I wasn’t really a great camper until much later in life. As a kid I think it’s a little harder to understand the joys of sitting outside and relaxing. That’s what I did all day during the summers anyway!
Patreon.com lets you see who else supports the same shows as you and then you can see what other shows they support. It was via that feature that I learned about I Like To Make Stuff. I’ve been looking for a good woodworking podcast that’s in my skill range (as opposed to The Wood Whisperer which is awesome but way over my head.) I Like To Make Stuff has been very interesting and I’ve already picked up quite a few tips and tricks even for the projects that I have no interest in doing. They’re pretty short and packed with good stuff. If you like wood working, check it out.
Sometime back in February or March, I picked up a new RC airplane kit. Just like my previous planes, this one was from the guys at FliteTest. It was a kit for the FT Duster and instead of getting the regular electronics package, I decided to step it up and get something more powerful. I went with “The Beef” package from Lazertoyz.com. I still haven’t seen the move Planes yet, but this RC plane is designed to look like the lead character in that movie.
Even though I’ve had it for so long, I just finished building it last week. I was spending so much time on house projects (including the back yard) that I just didn’t have the energy to spend on a hobby.
The build itself went pretty smoothly, but still included a few screwups. It wouldn’t be a project of mine if I didn’t mess something up. It’s just foam, hot glue and tape though so everything is fixable. I was so excited to get out and actually fly it that one night after putting Elijah to bed, I hurried down to the park before dark to see if it would fly.
The plane has optional landing gear but I decided to put some on. Actually I didn’t build new landing gear. I just borrowed it from one of my previous planes. When I tried to take off, the angles weren’t right and the landing gear folded underneath so I hand-launched it instead. My plan had been to just take a short hop and then land, but hand launching requires more throttle so I just took off into the air. I immediately knew I had a problem: the plane was a bit too nose heavy and I didn’t have enough elevator control to overcome it. Extra throttle gave me enough lift to stay in the air, but that’s not a great solution. I wanted to get it back on the ground as quickly as possible to try and fix it before things got worse… Cutting the throttle meant that the nose came down and I couldn’t hold it up with the elevator so I landed pretty hard. The landing gear (which I didn’t really need in the first place) and the extra speed combined to rip the entire wing off the fuselage. Ugh. 6 months of waiting and then I had a destroyed plane in 34 seconds.
As I was driving home, I realized that I put myself into this pickle with my fancy new transmitter. I had adjusted the travel on all the control surfaces to be relatively tame, but that backfired by not giving me enough control to overcome the nose heaviness. If I had been quicker in my thinking, I could have switched to the “high rates” mode and gotten a little more travel on the elevator.
Thankfully some hot glue and tape fixed the plane back up and you can’t really tell it was in such a major accident. I swung by the park for a quick flight on the way to work the next day. I double-checked all my settings, adjusted my transmitter to give me more throws on the elevator and then hand launched without the landing gear. It flew beautifully! I had no idea how long the battery would last on this plane so I came back in after 7.5 minutes, landing slowly enough to not do any damage. I then took this “Hurray! Success!” photo.
But of course the story doesn’t end there. I got my battery tester out and realized I still had a little over half a battery left! Time to throw it back in the air. As soon as I took off the second time, I noticed that the plane was MUCH more touchy. I figured out that I had accidentally bumped the “high rates” switch on the controller and generally that’s good to leave off for takeoff and landing. Well I tried to get it all corrected but it all happened so fast that I nose dived in from about 10-20 feet up. That broke the prop and the motor mount, but again, those are fixable/replaceable.
This is roughly the course that each of my scratch builds have taken. It’s nice to only have a few dollar worth of foam in the air though! I would be a lot more disappointed if I had just crushed a fancy balsa model.
Recording Public Events
The more I do it, the more I learn because I keep finding new ways to screw up! If you want to check out my work, a lot of it ends up on the church’s YouTube page.