Finally made an overnight hike to one of the AMC backcountry huts. These huts are maintained by the Appalachian Mountain Club along the Appalachian trail for hikers to visit, either on their way along the trail or as a destination all their own. The huts are 100% off the grid, and Zealand Falls has that added benefit of being off any cell phone service at all. I was truly ‘cut off’ from the rest of the world.
The hut crew (or ‘croo’ as they call themselves) was wonderful. They apparently are ‘on’ for 11 days out of 14, preparing meals and helping travellers as they come through. That doesn’t mean it’s a 24hr a day job. A lot of the time for them is spent on the trails themselves. Not much to do between breakfast and dinner!
This hike was the longest one I’ve done so far. 18 miles over 3 days, staying one night at Zealand Falls, and two nights at Highland Lodge. It was also my first ‘backpacking’ trip (in that I was carrying a decent pack. No cooking or overnight gear, but I had all the required bits for backcountry travel). It’s the next logical progression for me learning how to handle myself camping and backpacking again. My first trip to Crawford Notch did not involve overnighting away from the lodge.
So, what did I learn? Well, a couple interesting things.
That whole thing about “cotton kills” and “use only synthetics?” I’m a believer. I didn’t get actively rained on, but I sweated a bunch and on Saturday morning had to hike through some wet brush. I was wearing all synthetic fabrics, and never got chilled, even though I was pretty damp.
Never. Ever. forget the bugspray. I brought it, wondering if I’d need it. 2 mosquito bites inside 4 minutes of hitting the trailhead had me hosing myself down with Cutter bugspray.
Bring something to relax with. I didn’t have a book with me, and my cell phone was useless (as well as having poor battery life. Remember, no power at the huts other than 2-3 hrs of light in the early evening). I own a solar charger, so I could have worked on charging up the phone, but solar chargers / external batteries are heavy.
Gear needs to be good. In this day and age where you can buy anything ‘on the cheap’ or ‘stupidly expensive because it has some famous persons name on it’, buy things that are high quality and dependable. My waterbag (which fit into my pack) broke on the second day. It was a cheapo knockoff. I fortunately had a spare stainless steel bottle, but that was irritating.
Hiking socks are gods gift to feet.
When they say ‘bring earplugs’ for sleeping in the huts, they ain’t kidding. One guy in my area was like the sleep apnea poster child. *shudder*
I continue to be impressed at the quality of AMC’s food and offerings. Breakfast and dinner were excellent.
Chocolate chip Clif bars are the best lunchtime backpacking food ever.
Hiking / Trekking poles. First time I’ve used them for any extended period of time. I sort of surprised myself finding that carrying them both in one hand during the flat / open trails worked just fine (and I saw several other hikers do this). But having them for the clambering up and down climbs, as well as crossing water and mud? Totally worth it. I also had NONE of the ‘numb / bloated hands’ problems I’ve had in the past. Worth it.
I wrestled hard about whether to bring my Canon camera with me, and in the end decided against it. If things got super-wet, I couldn’t guarantee I’d keep it dry, and it was just too much weight. I took photos with my cell phone while on the trail, and then hauled out the SLR when I got back on Saturday.
I’m ready to go back. There’s a few more hut trips planned with friends through the summer. I’m really looking forward to it.
In part 1, I described the new sport of FPV Drone Racing. In this posting, I’ll tell what it’s like to try and take those Youtube videos and star-eyed ideas and make them real – IE, build and fly my own drone.
Once I understood the details of what a 250mm racing drone was, I had to buy one. Getting parts and pieces and assembling the entire series from scratch was daunting. What sort of ESC’s, what sort of flight controller, etc etc.
That was March 14th. Little did I realize, I had made a classic blunder that’s all too common in this new sport. The frame I ordered was from China, and would take at least 3 weeks to arrive. Agony! Oh well. Lets make the best of it. I spent the intervening time building out my secondary parts inventory. A transmitter and receiver. Batteries. A carrying case to hold it all. Charger. I would be ready.
Finally, the frame arrived, and it was time to get to work. I unpacked the (small) box and laid out all the parts. Have to admit, the box looked less than promising. After driving myself bonkers looking at FPV videos, talking with folks online, etc, this sure didn’t look like what I had hoped it would be.
Opening it up and sorting through parts, things started looking better. Everything was there, and it even looked pretty good. Machining was good, parts were as expected, all I needed to do now was put it together. I had chalked off the evening to do the assembly, and it took all of that to get from “piles of parts” to something that started to look like an actual drone.
Anyone who has ever built an RC model knows what comes next. Doesn’t matter that this thing you’ve dreamed about sorta looks like what you imagined, you have a long road between “Looks done” and “it’s in the air”. The first trick was wiring the power harness so all of the ESC’s would have power to drive the motors. Some drones use a Power Distribution Board (or PDB), but this particular configuration didn’t have one, so I needed to wire up my own. Lots of soldering later, I realized the power connectors on my batteries didn’t match anything I had, nor did they match the charger I was using. Arrrgh. I suppose this is what happens when you build something from scratch, on a platform that really hasn’t solidified.
Somewhere around here I joined up with the MakeIt Labs folks up in Nashua, NH. They have a pretty rabid drone group there, and these guys were unbelieveably helpful in guiding me up this steep learning curve. I learned that most folks use XT60 power connectors, so I ordered up a handful of those.
My drone with a 3000mAh battery
So, ready to go, right? Yeah, not so much. My FC (Flight Controller – a CC3D from the OpenPilot) needed to be programmed and calibrated with my motors and ESC’s. This is not a trivial process, and I was getting frustrated that my motors were not spinning up appropriately. Turns out, I had a blown ESC. ANOTHER BLOCKER. After much hand-wringing about ‘can you mix different kinds of ESC’s on a single quadcopter’, I took the plunge, ordered 4 more ESC’s, and after they came in, installed one onto the drone. More calibration, and… okay, now the motors are spinning under test, but are not responding to radio control at all. On the other hand, it LOOKED like a drone, smelled like a drone, it just… wouldn’t fly like one. (BTW, after sharing this picture, the folks at the lab were like “That’s a STUPIDLY large battery. You know most folks fly with a 1300mAh battery, right? You’ll save weight and space using a more appropriately sized battery). So, 2 new batteries ordered.
Here I have to give a bit of a shout out to the OpenPilot peeps. I understand there’s a little back and forth in the community about who owns the software, who owns the boards, and the like, but the OpenPilot GCS (ground control station) software is outstanding – running flawlessly on my Mac and giving me enormous control and detailed information about my flight controller. The CC3D controller itself can be had for around $25, and, as a geek who has seen some pretty complex little controller boards, what this thing can do is nothing short of amazing, for such a low cost. Very fast signal processing, control, and durned good communication / feedback to the groundstation software. The CC3D flight controller is being slowly replaced by the Revolution board, but that’ll be an upgrade for the future. Right now, I love my little flight controller, and am so grateful to the developers and community that made it possible.
Eventually I got all the factors aligned, and my drone took to the air. Flying Line Of Sight (or “LOS”) is the normal way people expect RC planes to fly. Watch the craft in the air, learn the controls, and fly around. My first few flights were just this… zipping around, feeling what it could do. I quickly learned what most pilots learn – it’s easy to fly your craft when it’s oriented directly away from you. Where left is left, right is right, forward is forward, etc. But once that vehicle turns and is coming toward you, all the controls are reversed. Thing flying toward you too fast? You pull back on the pitch stick (pull it toward you) to slow it down and pitch up. That’s not intuitive! I still have not worked this out – and in talking with other new pilots, I’m not alone here.
Eventually though it was time for the next step. First Person View, or FPV flying. In a nutshell, my drone has a small digital camera mounted on the front, and that is in turn wired to what amounts to a television transmitter. This signal can be sent back to a ‘groundstation’, or a set of goggles with a receiver and antenna. After some back and forth determining how to use goggles with my glasses (I ended up removing my glasses and wearing the goggles in a way that puts the screens a half inch further away from my eyes than normal. This works) – I was ready to fly.
This video is pretty much what happened. Did I fly? Yep. Was I able to be ‘on board’ and see what the drone sees? Sure enough. Was it the leaping, “Lo, I have slipped the bonds of earth” experience I was hoping for? Not even remotely. Next big lesson: Flying FPV is REALLY REALLY HARD. A drone doesn’t fly like an airplane – it doesn’t bank and swoop. In a wind, it behaves erratically and unintuitively. So naturally I crashed. A lot. Dozens of times. And each time, something would come off, something would break, things needed to be tuned… it was… exhausting.
That video was made around 6 weeks ago. Since then I’ve replaced all my motors, rebuilt the camera mount,installed a new camera and video transmitter, heck I’ve remounted virtually every component on the frame.
The result? I’m… starting to enjoy it! Flight times are up, crashes are down, maneuverability is comfortable – we’re not yet ready to go tearing through concrete tunnels, but I can make loops around the field and mostly not crash into trees now. My drone is still tuned to a very basic level of responsiveness. I’m not doing crazy flips and the like – and frankly, ain’t gonna do that anytime soon. But… well, take a look at how I’m flying now. This was in the same field as the first video. Check it:
Am I super-pilot? Not even remotely. Am I starting to feel like this is fun, and lets me experience, in a weird way, what it means to fly? It comes close… and I’ll keep trying.
Experts now say you should start standing up at work for at least two hours a day — and work your way toward four.
That’s a long-awaited answer for a growing number of workers who may have heard of the terrible health effects of prolonged sitting and been wondering whether they should buy standing desks or treadmill desks.
Today, the average office worker sits for about 10 hours, first all those hours in front of the computer, plowing through e-mails, making calls or writing proposals — and eating lunch. And then all those hours of sitting in front of the TV or surfing the Web at home.
My normal schedule has me standing 4-5 hours a day, interspersed with meetings, lunch, things like that. But I’ll try and get an hour, maybe 2 hours of sit down time in the late afternoon.
I’m a rabid user of Evernote and it’s associated screen capture tool, Skitch. I use it for just about everything, and regularly snap screenshots to share what I’m seeing with coworkers.
I’m aware that my screenshots are stored in my Evernote account, and there’s a disk space limit there. I’m okay with that, free services have to put limits on things. If I start running low on space, I go into my notebooks and start deleting things.
Yesterday though, I was suddenly stopped from being able to share screenshots via an alert from Evernote that I was over my monthly upload limit, which would reset in 9 days. There is absolutely nothing to do to fix this except wait, or pay money to release it.
This smacks of ransomware. My service has been interrupted unless I pay up, a service that up until now has been free. I have no way of ‘getting out of jail’ unless I cough up some dough, or wait over a week – and if I just wait, it may happen again next month. In addition, everytime Evernote tries to sync now, I get a modal dialog box that says “Cannot sync [Learn More]” – you can’t dismiss this box, you must click on Learn More, and get their little ad asking for money. Thanks guys.
I’ve been considering paying for my Evernote Pro license, because I find the service quite valuable, but this… come on guys, this was a bad decision. You’re already limiting how much data I can store with the free version. Now you’re limiting how many I can upload, even though I have plenty of storage space? Ung.
You know that scene in movies where people go running out into the field and dance in the rain after a long drought? “Our crops are SAVED!”. Or the scene at the end of Dune (yeah, if you don’t know this spoiler by now….)
I feel like that today.
The 2 storm fronts that came through Berlin over the last few weeks completely missed us. We’ve been doing some watering to keep the apple trees and strawberries and garden materials going, but the lawns and fields have been suffering.
Now? A steady, not deluge-rain, cool temperatures, and ahhhhhhhh.!
It’s become sadly apparent that Google Plus, the service we had all hoped would dethrone Facebook and become a more open, useable, and at least mildly privacy aware environment, is rotting on the vine. Features are being spun off into standalone products, and long hoped for features have never materialized.
So I’m falling back to the old standby. A year or two ago I completed rebooting Planet-geek and have been enjoying using it as my primary platform, so I’m going to take the final jump and make the blog my primary posting platform, while letting the fairly awesome SNAP tool from NextScripts repost / share things out to various social networks.
Right now I’m echoing posts to Facebook, Twitter, and Livejournal, but may add other sites going forward (NextScripts supports dozens of different systems). Any requests?
While the FriendsPlus.Me tool I was using was ‘Okay’, I wasn’t happy with the several levels of redirects and “you must source your post from G+” setup. This way, my blog is the authoritative source of my ramblings, just as I want it to be. But I understand if you don’t want to subscribe to my RSS feed or are more comfortable on other platforms, well that’s fine, you’ll still see my happy chatter.
It started innocently enough. A video linked on youtube showing some “pilots” gathered in the woods. An obviously well organized group, with safety crews, a well marked course, and referees. The pilots were several guys sitting in camping chairs, with goofy looking goggles on, or staring intently into small video screens.
Then the racing started, and the viewpoint shifted to the nose of the craft zipping in and out of the trees. It immediately evoked memories of the speeder bikes from Return of the Jedi, tearing in and out and around trees in the forest. The craft in the video were lit up with LEDs that made them glow brightly… even as your competitor passed above you on a fast straight, or swung wide on a turn.
Quickly, other videos started appearing up showing similar craft and activities. People were getting together to race small remote controlled ‘drones’. I was intrigued. These were custom built, complicated radio control models, but I felt they were within my skill set to construct and fly.
I had to do this.
First though, I had to figure out what the heck I was looking at! I was no stranger to radio control aircraft. People have been building planes with cameras attached to them for ages. I knew that in the last year or three, some Makers have build ‘quadcopters’. Small, maneuverable aircraft that could move up, down, sideways, and spin in place either autonomously or via remote control. As I saw these being demontrated, I thought the idea was interesting, but the limited flight time, carrying capacity, and expense were just not worth getting involved in.
Then several things changed.
First, the wide availability of Lithium Polymer, or LiPO batteries. In the Radio Control world, LiPO’s had been gaining ground, and in 2013 they’d reached a density and weight where they made sense on very small, light craft.
Second, small portable HD cameras were becoming more available. By far, the best known are the GoPro Hero Cameras, but more recently, the Mobius camera has become the unit of choice. It’s small, well built, has excellent resolution, and fits well on small flying vehicles.
Last but not least is the availability of relatively inexpensive First Person View, or FPV equipment. FPV had been possible in the past, but the equipment was bulky and expensive. Modern gear can be extremely small and light, and easily installed by a new model builder.
All these things came together to produce what can only be described as a skyrocketing interest in building small, highly maneuverable ‘drones’, getting ‘behind the wheel’ of one (via goggles or video link), and going flying. Or, even more fascinating… going RACING.
I had to do it.
I watched tons of videos on Youtube. This sport is still relatively new. Most races and groups have only been flying for 6-8 months. The equipment design and processes for building and flying are still being worked out, but the basics are pretty well set. I spent my first 2-3 weeks just understanding all the parts of a drone, what was needed, how they worked, and how things came together.
What is commonly known as a “Racing Drone” is a 250mm (that’s corner to corner) lightweight frame with 4 brushless motors on the limbs. The motors are told what to do starting with a Flight Controller, an on board computer that provides stability to the drone, as well as takes commands from the radio receiver, and tells the motors what to do. The Flight Controller (or “FC”) communicates with Electronic Speed Controllers (or “ESC”) – one per motor – that varies the speed of the motor based on commands from the flight controller. Powering all this is a LiPO battery that’s usually set up to provide 5-7 minutes of flight time per charge. The drone receives it’s commands via radio link using a radio receiver, which is paired to a handheld radio transmitter the pilot carries.
That describes the drone platform itself, but if you want to do FPV, you’ll also need a camera (FPV cameras are small and relatively low resolution), a video transmitter and antenna, and a video receiver and display setup.
That, in a nutshell, describes an 250mm FPV Mini Racing Drone. From this basic design, many things can be added or enhanced. Adding an HD camera is very common (the HD camera records the flying sessions for viewing later. The pilot flies just via the FPV camera) – this is where the cool videos come from. Adding other features such as a GPS receiver, a system that can interface the flight controller data with the FPV display (called an On Screen Display, or OSD) can let the pilot see realtime data from the drone as it’s flying (Altitude, speed, position, battery level, distance from pilot, even an indicator showing the pilot how to get the drone back to them). These are fun additions, but aren’t required for racing (some pilots will argue having all that junk on the OSD can just distract you from the racing).
In addition to the parts needed to build a drone, every pilot has a whole infrastructure of materials to make the flying possible. A LiPO battery charger is required. Because LiPO batteries are pretty complex, the chargers tend to be fairly involved pieces of equipment, and pilots need to understand how a LiPO works, how it’s rated, what configuration it’s in, how to charge it, etc.
Spare parts are also a requirement. It’s common to break props many times a day, so keeping spares is a necessity. Zip ties, velcro straps, spare motors, ESC’s, these are all tools in the arsenal.
But enough about that, how’d I get from “What a cool thing!” to being out and flying?
So a week ago I traded in my Jeep Wrangler for a Chevy Volt. It was a hard decision, but made sense on so many levels. I have a long commute (70 miles round trip), do other road trips, etc. And while I’ll miss being able to bang around in the woods and romp through the mud, the Volt has been… all things are considered… pretty damned awesome!
My 2015 Chevy Volt plugged in at the office
Lets start with the run down. In the last week, I’ve driven about 450 miles. In that time, I’ve burned a grand total of 2 gallons of gas. And lets be clear, this isn’t because I drive carefully or anything – this thing is fun as heck to drive, and tearing along an on-ramp or powering around someone in traffic is a ton of fun. This is just using basic energy management. At night, I plug the Volt into an normal 110v outlet in my garage, which, by morning, means I have a full charge – a battery range of between 40 and 45 miles. When I get to work, weather permitting and no one is in the parking spot near the outlet, I plug in there as well. 6 hours at work is enough to top off the battery and get me home again.
If I don’t get a chance to plug it in? That’s okay… when the battery runs out, the Volt functions like a ‘normal’ car and runs on the engine, giving a respectable 40mpg.
That’s the basics. Now lets get into the cool geeky stuff.
The car doesn’t look like an EV. It’s not a Prius, it’s not a Leaf, it’s not an Insight, and it’s sure as heck not a Tesla. On the outside, it just looks like your standard smallish sedan. On the inside it’s modern as heck, with 2 color displays, schwoopie internal lines, and comfortable details. I’m 6’6″ tall, and my son is 6’2. We fit just fine, though if we’re hauling tall kids in the back seats, things can get cramped. Having said that, even the tall kids find they have enough headroom in the back – it’s usually footspace gets a little tricky. The trunk is certainly smaller than the Jeep (duh), but the car is a hatchback, and while I wouldn’t want to haul furniture with it, I can carry whatever project I’m working on in the back without much trouble.
Something I hear from other EV car drivers, I’ll pass on here. If you’ve never driven an EV car, find a friend who has one, and ask to take their car for a quick drive. There is nothing in my experience that compares with driving a modern, comfortable automobile under electric power. It is almost silent, the acceleration is smooth and clean (and strong!!). It’s almost impossible not to smile when pulling this car out of the garage and heading off down the road. It feels space-age. We may not have flying cars yet, but this sure feels like we’re getting there.
Too many people think of the Chevy Volt like a Prius or similar. An extremely practical, un-fun car. Let me tell you folks, this car is seriously fun to drive. The acceleration is phenomenal when you ‘drop the hammer’ as they used to say. According to the interwebz, the 0-60 time is 8.7 seconds, (compared with the plugin Prius at 10.5 seconds. The Leaf zips at 7.4 seconds – it’s a much lighter car with no engine). My Wrangler would have done that in 10.4 seconds, and burned half a gallon of gas doing it.
This brings up another point. When I drive the Volt aggressively, I don’t feel like I’m doing damage to it, or to the environment, or anything. I’m using more battery power, sure, but unlike a gas engine (which runs less efficiently when heavily loaded, ie burning more hydrocarbons), the Volt just runs the battery down a little more. You can wildly vary the efficiency of an internal combustion engine based on driving style, and by efficiency I mean “how much crap you blow out your tailpipe”, but the Volt? The only efficiency you’ll hurt is how long your battery will last until it needs a recharge.
Lets talk about some more geeky things.
The OnStar app on my Android phone showing the status of the Volt
The Volt is an EV car. I spend 95% of my time driving it on batteries only. As such, I’m always looking for ways to not use the gas engine. I’ve signed up on the ChargePoint network, which gives me a little RFID card, a mobile app, and a network of Level 2 charging stations where I can top off my battery while having some coffee. A full Level 2 charge of the Volt takes a few hours (An hour on a level 2 charger adds about 10 miles of range to the battery). So while electric ‘refueling’ is still a ways off, it’s nice to know I can stop off for lunch somewhere and plug in the Volt for a while while I grab a burger.
The other win is the OnStar mobile app. While I’m skeptical of any of the ‘big manufacturer’ tools, GM’s Onstar stuff is pretty good, and their mobile app is super-handy. From my phone I can check the status of the car – how the battery is doing, when it’ll be charged, how much gas is in it, heck, even what the tire pressures are. More excitedly, I can remote start it. In nasty weather, I can tell the Volt to power up and start warming the cabin. It’ll do this purely on ‘shore power’ (drawing from the power connector, not the engine), so it’ll be nice and toasty when I’m ready to leave, without sacrificing range.
Conclusions
While I went into this change for purely practical reasons, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much I’m enjoying the car. It’s performance is great, it’s comfortable, and I can’t argue with the cost of operation. One interesting side effect… I get bothered when I’m running on gasoline. 95%of the time I’m emitting zero pollutants. No CO2, no hydrocarbons, not even making a lot of noise. But when that engine starts (which is nearly silent, I notice it mostly because my dashboard changes configuration), I start feeling dirty. I’m BURNING OIL!!! I picture a bucket of gas on fire. Ewwww. Then I look around at all the other cars on the road and go “They’re all doing this right now. Why?”
Maybe it’s the shiny… maybe people are afraid of EV cars, or just don’t understand them, but for me, I wonder why there isn’t a while hogged march toward everyone using cars like this. There are a lot of hybrid cars on the market right now, but they’re in the ‘we use an electric motor to make the gas motor use less gas’ category. Why isn’t this sort of design more prevalent?
8 months ago my venerable VW Passat became unmaintainable. It required a new oil pump, which was going to run around $2000. It had been good for me for 4 years, but with 140,000 miles on it, I was concerned about shoveling more cash into it.
I’d always wanted a Jeep. Heck, what kid didn’t? So I shopped around and eventually bought a 2012 Jeep Sahara Unlimited. It had all the bells and whistles, and I had a blast with it. Romping in the woods, plowing through snow in the winter, it was a big Tonka toy.
Eventually though, that Tonka toy, while still fun, was getting impractical. I drive 70 miles a day for work, on a highway, with longer trips up to NH, RI, and out to the Cape. A big off road vehicle that gets 18mpg is not a commuter car. I was spending too much on gas, too much on the car, and it became apparent it wasn’t the right type of vehicle for my day to day ride. With a heavy heart, I realized it was time to switch.
It’s no secret. I’ve been a rabid IMAP user for ages and ages and ages. To the point where I’ll keep shifting mail clients around to stay ‘current’.
Thunderbird was supposed to be more efficient than the bloated Outlook. Alas
My preferred poison for almost 10 years had been Thunderbird. The tool that started out as a potential replacement for Outlook, but in the end never quite had the integration of calendaring and contact management required to take on the 600lb gorilla. I made the hard choice a year ago to switch from Thunderbird to Mail.app on my Macbook, because Thunderbird performance had gotten so bad, and had blown up to such a huge memory hog, it just didn’t make sense anymore.
I’ve been working with Jekyll on the US Drone Racing Association site. It seemed like a nice idea. Check all your content into Github, then, when ready to do work with it, check it out, make your edits, run a local test site (that part is really nice), and when finished, check it back in. One update on the master site, and you’re done. Woo.
Yeah, see, that’s where they getcha.
Jekyll is great for very fast setups for static sites. If you never want to really change the site, such as changing themes or regularly adding blog posts quickly and efficiently, you’re probably good.
But I found the blogging process enormously painful.
Check the site out of github
Go into the _posts directory, pick an old entry, copy it to a new filename. The new filename must be yyyy-mm-dd-uniquename.markdown. This date is important because it’s used as a sort order.
Edit the newly created file with whatever editor you like, but the YAML Front Matter must be correct. Using YAML for structured data is already problematic, but this is supposed to be a markdown document. But, no, it’s sort of a hybrid of YAML and Markdown and HTML.
If you get the YAML Front Matter right, you get to write your post. Markdown is nice, but it has it’s limitations
Save the file, make sure you go back to your root (god knows how many times I’ve failed at this one), and do ‘jekyll serve’. Test your site locally. Swear and curse as it doesn’t work right. Repeat previous steps until right. (Credit here. The live preview is really nice, and it updates automatically when a file change is noticed. I can’t fault that.)
git add -r
git commit
git push origin master
Log into your blog host
cd to your working directory
git pull origin master
cd sitename
jekyll build –destination=/var/www/yoursitename
Now, this really isn’t that horrific. Irritating, sure, but you can automate pieces of this and add some nice wrappers around it.
I wanted to theme my site. Here’s where things go sideways. In short, you can theme a Jekyll site.
But you can only do it once.
Why? Because you don’t apply a theme to a site. You apply a site to a theme.
Sound crazy? Lemme splain. To theme a site, you download the theme, build it (and in Ruby land, this can be a nightmare experience. Ruby dependencies are horrific. Don’t believe me? Check out the conversation I had with a theme developer. We couldn’t get it running at all.) But even if you do get it running, after you build a theme, you copy your existing content into the new theme directory, and commit the whole thing up to git. That’s your new site. Want to change themes? HAHHAHAHAH. You have to do this process all over again, extricating your content from your old themed site and copying it into the new theme directory structure.
Around mid-November of this year, my boss pulled me aside and said “Son… I’m kickin you outta here.” Okay, he really didn’t say that, but he did let me know if I didn’t take some vacation time by the end of the year, he was going to be cranky. Since my company only rolls over 2 weeks of time each year to the next, and I had something like 4 weeks stored up, I needed to skedaddle.
But what to do? I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, but I also REALLY wanted to get away and have some time to myself.
The end result was a week on my own in the White Mountains in New Hampshire…
On September 1st, I started what I was calling “my great experiment“. Altering my diet in a significant way to make me more aware of what I was eating, how I was eating, and where my food came from was a huge step for me. So now it’s a week and a half later, how has it worked out?
6-8 months ago I participated in a kickstarter for Soylent – an artificial food mix that is compact, nutritionally complete and storeable. I received my 2 weeks of food on Friday. The cup in this picture contains an entire meal – all the nutrients a body needs to function well.
There are people who have switched to 100% soylent meals, 3 times a day. I probably won’t go that route, at least initially, but this morning’s breakfast consisted of blending the mix, pouring it over ice, and sitting down to write this post. The rest of the blend (I made half a batch) is in the fridge for lunch.
I’m attracted to a bunch of aspects of Soylent. I like that an entire weeks worth of food is $65. I like that it doesn’t go bad (2 year shelf life). I like that prep and cleanup time is almost non existent.
On a social scale, it’s making me look at the food and food delivery industry very closely. Thousands of gallons of fuel burned so I can have a head of lettuce in january? Huge resources burned so I can enjoy a cheeseburger? This seems silly. Is it possible to feed humanity without burning the planet in the process?
Lets find out.
Some notes:
The website for Soylent is http://soylent.me – note that the ‘recipe’ for soylent is open and documented, and there are hordes of people who have made their own soylent mix (DIY). (Best name I’ve heard – People Chow).
What does it taste like? Slightly gritty milk shake. Has a muffin-y smell to it.
Aren’t you going to miss the social / enjoyable experience of eating meals? Dunno. I like gaining another hour or three a day.
Are you going to stop eating ‘normal’ food? Not at all, I’ll enjoy grillings, dinners out, common meals, whatever. But that dosn’t mean I need to do that every day.
Not too long ago an acquaintance of mine asked if I would do them a favor and come photograph their event. No problem, I enjoy shooting, and any chance to work is an opportunity to improve my skill. I went to the event, spent a few hours taking pictures, and had a great interaction with everyone. Later on I sat down and did all my post processing, tuning, and polishing – a process that can take hours, depending on the size of the shoot and the complexity of the imagery. Zach at ArisiaThis particular event wasn’t that difficult, and I ended up with several dozen shots I was pretty happy with. I published the pictures and sent the link out. Over the next day or two, I got good feedback from the event coordinator and several attendees.
One message I got was simply this…
“These pictures are beautiful! That sure is a great camera!”
Needless to say, this pushed my buttons.
If you’re a photographer, and understand why this statement could be irritating, feel free to skip the following rant.
In the modern age of high pixel count cell phones, cheap high resolution point and shoot cameras, and “entry level” DSLRs, even the simplest, auto-everything, “shoot and post” pictures can come out looking great. But whether you get a good picture or not with these tools alone is, frankly, luck. Sure, you could get a great picture – but that’s mostly the result of chance. Please don’t assume that’s what I do.
I am a photographer (among other things). I spend a lot of time thinking about framing, light, setting, angles, subjects, and timing. When I take pictures, sure, I take zillions (a typical hour or two shoot can result in 500+ exposures). But to me a photographers’ art consists of an end to end process that may take days. The camera is one of the tools in that process, but saying things like “that sure is a great camera!” while it may be true, really diminishes the work that goes into creating really good imagery.
So folks, next time you see a picture by someone you know is a photographer, compliment them on the picture, or better yet, on their skill, not on the camera.
