by ezs | Nov 12, 2016 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I saw a super idea for the boy’s birthday that combined two of his passions. Aeronautics and Lego.
Flybrix promised a relatively low cost entry to mini-drone design and flight – with some interesting possibilities around the Arduino platform. Automation!
I placed the order pretty early – and eventually the kit arrived.
Unboxing was fun. An anti-static bag with a mini control board, a bag of lego bits, a bag of motors and a bag of props.
We built the first Lego drone using the online instructions. Meh. No fun. Having the battery above the plane of the props meant this turned into an inverted pendulum – with inherent instability for the drone. We had many crashes and a particularly disappointed boy.
Lots of video showing a five second flight and then a massive crash.
Also we found that the Lego design was not particularly strong. Every flight, every crash – and rebuilt.
Back to the drawing board – with two goals.
- stronger Lego model – less rebuilding
- place the battery under the plane of the props to give more stability.
After several tries – here’s what we ended up with. It flies, it hovers, it’s actually fun.
The boy is now learning to hover an inch off the ground like a hovercraft and maneuver in three dimensions.
by ezs | Oct 10, 2016 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
To Azure PaaS.
by ezs | Mar 12, 2016 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Just over eight years ago I left Novell, I have been at Microsoft for eight years – that means longer than my time at Novell.
It is a different world from then.
by ezs | Mar 5, 2016 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I recently switched from the stock ASUS firmware for the home wireless infrastructure to the ASUSWRT-MERLIN builds.
Stable and fast – and I like it. http://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/
by ezs | Feb 16, 2016 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I just upgraded a SLES 11 SP4 VM running in Azure from an A2 to a D2v2 – it’s resized and settling. Now sitting on newer hardware with 7GB RAM and dual proc.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/#Linux
Resize and restart was super fast.
by ezs | Feb 7, 2016 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I keep having to remember the fiscal year formulae for Excel – fiscal year starts July 1, ends June 30.
Here’s my note so I can remember:
Fiscal year: =IF(MONTH([cell])>6,YEAR([cell])+1,YEAR([cell]))
Fiscal month: ==IF(MONTH([cell])>6,MONTH([cell])-6,MONTH([cell])+6)
by ezs | Jan 8, 2016 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Old but still functional – here’s my placeholder for updating from Acrobat Pro 9.0.0 to 9.5.5.
http://www.serveradventures.com/the-adventures/installing-adobe-acrobat-9-v955-pro-fully-updated-deploying-with-gpo-or-mdt-2012
by ezs | Dec 20, 2015 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I was really happy to see Live Writer transition from a Microsoft product to the Open Source World.
Live Writer is my go-to blog composing app. Still works beautifully after all these years.
You can download Open Live Writer at http://openlivewriter.org/
by ezs | Nov 22, 2015 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Something changed in SLES 11 SP4 (or one of the very recent updates).
The default mysql.sock moved to /var/run/mysql/mysql.sock rather than the previous location in /var/lib
For some reason this meant that the defaults for PHP5 were looking for the wrong location for the socket.
A quick cleanup of /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini to include mysql.default_socket = /var/run/mysql/mysql.sock and everything is back functioning.
by ezs | Nov 14, 2015 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
SLES 11 SP4 has been out for a few months now. Finally found the maintenance window to do the updates.
Great post here on how to do the magic with zypper.
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