I spend some effort managing my weight. One of the things I do, that most people can also do, is walk. Walking can buy you a free lunch, calorie-wise. Here’s the deal…
Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for category The Home Front
Review: E-Flite Blade 350 QX Quadcopter
2014 Mar
2014
6
The Blade 350 QX quadcopter is an almost-perfect example of its class. Three flight modes provide almost the perfect range from well behaved and safe to crazily agreeable to any insane set of control inputs you supply.
It is light, provides a reasonable flight time with the supplied battery, and you’re pretty well guaranteed to have more fun than you expect fooling around with it.But that’s not all. The 350 is powerful enough, and stable enough, to carry a Go Pro camera and take awesome HD movies and stills from the air. You can spin the quadcopter in place and create a fabulous pan, or fly right up to something you otherwise can’t get to and take a closeup. Or just fly around and take a look at the countryside.
Everything you need is supplied in the package; the quadcopter, the hand controller, batteries, a charger (12 vdc… meant to hook to your car’s electrical system so you can recharge in the field), and you even get a set of extra blades. Which you are unlikely to need if you are even just a little bit careful. The manual is a little dense, and because of that you’ll have to read it carefully, but everything you need to know is actually in there within twelve pages.
Read the rest of this entry »
But mom…
2011 Aug
2011
13
When I was a young fellow, I lived in a fine house on a gentle hillside in Pennsylvania. We had a barn, about a hundred feet away, which had an upstairs, where we parked the car; a loft, where we kept some ducks; and on the reverse side of the barn, downhill, an entrance to its basement, as it were, where we kept various things such as the lawnmower, the odd length of lumber and so forth. In between the house and the barn was gentle hillside, carefully mowed, bordered with forsythia and pussy-willow, which flattened out into a 3/4 acre lawn. Altogether a lovely and pastoral place to grow up.
One summer evening, my mother asked me to fetch something from the bottom of the barn. It may have been a gallon of paint; I vaguely remember something like that. Anyway, I shook my head emphatically, no! I was young enough, or she was gentle-hearted enough, so that the response wasn’t getting boxed about the ears (which, IMHO, would have been the right response) but instead, an inquiry as to why not.
I told her, earnestly: “I might get struck by lightning bugs!”
She laughed, and to tell the truth, I don’t know if she made me complete that errand, or not. What I do know is that it cemented my memory of those little flashers — and her merry laugh — permanently.
That house — and the yard, and the hillside — is still (barely) under my family’s control. The federal government took it in a land grab for the Tock’s Island dam project, a project they failed to complete, although they certainly ruined a lot of people’s lives and homes in the process. But my mother, being pretty darned sharp, negotiated a deal with the feds that she could stay there, and the house around her, until or unless the water actually was going to rise. She guessed right, and that never happened.
So I have occasion to visit the place. One of the things that saddens me when I visit is that the fireflies (lightning bugs) are gone. Where once they turned the yard into an amazing display that looked like a thousand fairies dancing, now there is just darkness.
The town (Milford, Pennsylvania) has grown into an over-crowded, over-taxed, over-illuminated tourist trap. I suspect that has something to do with it. Perhaps the overuse of insecticides played a part as well. All I know for sure, though, is that place is significantly diminished by the lack of fireflies.
At least I have my memories. Not so much for kids who grow up in the area now.
Python, TkInter, OSX (OS X) and making it all behave
2011 Feb
2011
13
I use Python a lot. Python 2.5.1 to be specific. And inside Python is TkInter, which, with a little work, will give you a handy way to put a GUI together. But there are problems. To say that TkInter is poorly supported and poorly documented under OSX is to understate the case rather dramatically. So you’re left to Google for answers, and mostly, they aren’t to be found — or if they are, they aren’t obvious or easily found. So I’m going to provide some answers here that have taken me quite some time to collect, and hopefully keyword and title them so that a Google search will actually get you to the solution you need sooner rather than as much later as it did me!
Read the rest of this entry »