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Musings & Meta

Drone – FPV

Posted on August 24, 2016

I haven’t written about the drone recently, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been flying. I’ve been learning how to fly “line of sight” all summer, and it’s fun but it’s very difficult. You have to get it in your head that if your front lights are facing you, that your controls are entirely reversed. That could be possible, but what hasn’t been possible is all of the combinations in between!

Russ picked up some FPV goggles and I gave them a whirl and was instantly sold that this was the thing to do.

First, a cat in a box.

As with all drone things, we had to pull it all apart again. Added to the list of gubbins that had been in there before was a PWM->PPM converter (I don’t truly understand why), a camera and a video transmitter. The last two allow the drone to transmit video signals, to be picked up by my goggles.

A photo of the whole mess put together. We didn’t get to fly that day because it took too long to assemble. Thankfully, assembly is fun too!

The goggles.

A photo of the goggle screen displaying something from the camera.

A couple days later we went to a nearby Burnaby park and flew around a bit. Here’s a side photo of my drone. The yellow thing on the left (at the bottom) is a camera mount that Russ 3D printed for me. It allows me to change the angle of my camera (and also holds the camera in the frame).

The yellow thing at the top is my GoPro mount, which is likely not going to see too much use. My new FPV camera can take SD cards to record to, so I’ll likely do that. Not to mention I busted the GoPro and the GoPro mount. >.>

On the far left in blue is my video transmitter antenna. I now know more about antennas than I ever thought I would. 5.8ghz, circularly polarized cloverleaf antenna with a simple plastic cover to prevent it from getting mangled from the (repeated) falls.

This is a photo of Russ’ drone in a tree. 😀

This hobby just got so much more amazing. It has all of the fun of playing a cool little video game/flight simulator, but with the immediacy of real life. To nerd out a little, it’s like the difference between Diablo and Diablo on Hardcore mode. The latter makes you really sit up and pay attention, and flying this thing is very much the same!

I’ll try to get some video recording, but unfortunately I left all my SD cards at home for the flying this time. But there will be more!

CAKE!!!

Posted on August 21, 2016

Not a new hobby of mine, but a relatively new hobby of my wife’s that I helped her out with. The daughter of a couple of friends of ours turned 2 this weekend, and my wife has been amping up her cake making skills for a few years. (Note: my birthday cakes are amazing!)

She was making a Minion cake, and I got drafted into a very small part of it – making the goggles.

We started with fondant. I’ve never experienced fondant before my wife, but it seems like everyone else who hears the word has experienced it before. It’s vaguely reminiscent of our green stuff, but edible. I’m told “barely edible”, but I actually don’t mind the taste of it. I mashed together some black and white until we got a grey colour, then rolled it out about 3/4″ thickness and then used a cookie cutter to make a circle. A smaller cookie cutter went into the center of that and I carefully pulled the remainder away. I rolled up a cylinder and made 8 rivets, and 2 more smaller cylinders to make hinges.

This next photo should look familiar to us all — just replace the fondant lumps with 6 paint pots each, and it’s pretty much the same desk. 😛

While I did this, my wife continued with her hobby. It took her 3 nights to make this cake, and these photos are from night 2! She’d made 5 small cakes and layered them with butter cream icing between each layer. Then she smoothed a yellow sheet of fondant down, and started adding pieces to make it look like a Minion! There’s a lot of detail in this, from little “stitching” in the coveralls, to spaces left open to make it look more layered, to the incredible specular reflection in the eye!

The final result!

And a couple photos from the reveal!

(funny story: the reveal for the young one was actually about a half hour earlier when she opened the fridge door. Apparently her parents have repeatedly asked her not to open the fridge door, but this time my friend walked into the kitchen to see his daughter standing shocked and gaping into the fridge, staring at this Minion that was staring back at her. She was sad to have it all ripped away so quickly, but my friend distracted her with presents :D)

My friend is a good teacher, the young one learns well. 😀

Musings & Meta

New GW Case

Posted on July 10, 2016

Ok, so I haven’t posted for a month because I haven’t painted for a month. I’ve also been sick for a month. Which is the excuse I’m going to use, rather than the true reason which is that when my illness was at the “can’t sit up” phase, I started watching Prison Break and by the time I got to the “fuck this fucking cough I’m so done with coughing” phase I was addicted and had to watch all of it rather than painting.

But we finished it last night and our Blood Bowl league is ramping up again so look forward to some models!

In the meantime, I have a mini review of the new mini GW case.

Size

I bought this guy in my search for the perfect sized case. A case that is super easy to carry, and can fit in my backpack so when I go to the club I’m carrying as little as possible. I hate wearing a backpack and carrying a case while I’m on the bus, particularly if I know that I only need 14 models in it!

I bought a Chessex small figure case the week before to carry my Blood Bowl, but it had two problems. First, it wouldn’t comfortably fit my Undead team. There are to many models and some of the models being bigger meant that the case was tight inside, possibly rubbing models together, and that it wouldn’t close without squishing.

The second problem was that I want to carry Blood Bowl and Gates of Antares to the club for game days so I can play both. The smallest of the GW cases comfortably fits both things. I could even see replacing Gates with some Malifaux in the future. I do not know if I could fit Warmahordes, as there are enough larger models in my Skorne that it may not be big enough.

Foam

I don’t know about this new style of foam, but I’m not against it. I’m fairly certain that it will hold my models nicely, I’m not worried about that even though it’s a lot looser than other foams and if you have a lot of metal models I wonder if it will move around?

I think my biggest worry (as someone with primarily resin and plastic in it right now) is that it’s not efficient. My KR cases are amazingly efficient – because you can buy exactly the size of tray you need, you can fit a lot more models into a smaller case than I’ve found you can with a GW case. Efficiency is important because of my goal — most models, in an easily bused format.

The really nice thing of the “wave” style foam is the flexibility of what you can put in it. I always feel a little awkward when I have to cut apart a four-section from a square-only foam tray. It locks that section into forever being for that-sized model. With this stuff, you can move it around to fit your larger items pretty easily. In the photo above, you can see my dice and measuring tape and some templates at the back.

Case

I do prefer the exo-skeleton plan, rather than what Battlefoam does. The plastic case here is certainly tough enough. But the connection points don’t feel great — the hinge joints and the clasps. It feels like if you were needing to check this case for a flight, that it might not leave me feeling confident that it wouldn’t collapse under the weight of someone’s flying wine collection.

Price/Availability

A bonus paragraph, I realized I’d skipped over after I wrote this. It cost $60CAD from my local store. There’s a few nice things here.

It’s funny that GW is actually the value option in this area. I won’t rave about this case the same way I do about my KRs, but it’s about $30 cheaper (or a little more) than a similarly sized KR aluminum.

My local stores tend to stock Battlefoam. I don’t like BF — I don’t like their politics and I don’t like their product. I sold my BF case because the foam was much to hard, and the case much to soft. KR make amazing cases, but they are harder to get and their web site is pretty garbage (although I heard a rumour they updated their website…I haven’t looked). Because it’s a GW case, you’re much more likely to be able to buy it without paying shipping!

Summary

I do really like this case, I think it fits all of my criteria really well and the negatives aren’t that bad.

Musings & Meta

Happy 6th Blogoversary!

Posted on May 27, 2016

On May 22nd I realized I’d forgotten my blogoversary, which I enjoy marking! I decided to write a “whoops, I missed it” post, and then realized I hadn’t yet missed 2016 because the date is on May 27th!

But in researching for 2016…I noticed I missed 2015. >.< My last celebration was in 2014, shortly after Adepticon 2014 when I was blogging out a storm because of the display board Patrick and I were making!

Post Count and Excuses

May 2013-2014 I wrote 139 posts.

May 2015-2016 I wrote 91 posts. 50 fewer is a lot! I have a few reasons, but no excuses. In November I went to a 4-day posting schedule instead of the 3 I’d been doing because during and after the wedding I was so busy with wedding stuff that I had to stretch out what I had.

In February of 2016, I stopped painting almost entirely. I assembled my Mek Guns and posted a photo of something I was about to throw away. The problem here, was that the universe ended because I had nothing to paint! I had recently decided that I didn’t want to play Hordes and I had nothing left to paint.

It picked up again in March with 40k, starting my naut (which is unfinished…) and writing 40k T&T. April I started doing more mini-posts with the naut just to show small progress, and then I picked up my Blood Bowl Undead team and Beyond the Gates of Antares (as regular readers will know)

Google Analytics

I still have no real idea of how to use Google Analytics. I mainly read it to see how many people are coming to the site, and how they are getting there. It also only shows monthly by default. But I just found the calendar range on it, so here’s some cool yearly numbers!

From May 27th 2015 to May 28th 2016:

2,943 users.
6,823 page views
Average session duration was 1 minute 10 seconds. That’s how long you all spend looking at a page. 😛
GA counts “session”, which I don’t understand, but the number is 3,776. Looks like it’s different from “users” and wildly different from “page views”. But of importance with this number, is that 77.2% of 2,915 of those sessions were new.
Which means I think I have about 860 regular readers this year!
1,787 of you are in en-US, 384 en-GB, 319 fr, and 238 de.
en-CA is not represented in the language list, which means most of you Canadians need to set your region in your browser/OS. Go on, do that now so you’re properly represented.
Age ranges! 1,012 between 25-34, 617 between 35-44 and 12 65+!
I had 156 female readers!
55.75% of you use Chrome, great job! Then Firefox, Safari then IE (version unstated)
76.62% of you are reading through the desktop, which is good, because I don’t know how good the site looks right now through mobile phones or tablets. I did a review of that a year or more ago, but I think my work was undone by a plugin or theme update at some point.

Notable Posts

Sharing the hobby with Miranda’s little cousin.
The end of Warhammer Fantasy Battle
Got married!
I got interested in phone batteries and wrote two posts on their care.
Fire-kit making!
I wrote this Year in Review post a few months ago, because I wanted to write. 🙂

The Future

I can see a lot of Blood Bowl in my continued future. It’s the only miniatures game that is both tactical, random and makes your heart race because every roll of the dice can screw you over!

Beyond the Gates of Antares is a fun game, and I’m really enjoying painting the models because they are pretty easy. We’ve been playing 500 point games, and I’m looking forward to larger point values to get some more variety in tactical options.

Folks in my club are pretty excited about Warmachine/Hordes mkIII, and given what they’re saying I think I might be able to be excited about it too. It sounds like they’re fixing some of my personal concerns – making it simpler (but not too simple) and less complex, adding pre-measuring. I like the ideas I’m hearing, and it could make it a game that I’d play again!

Here’s to a miniature future!

Musings & Meta Work-in-progress

Antares – Buddy Drone PSA

Posted on May 26, 2016

After buying the two buddy drone packs, I’m glad I bought both. The PSA is that you should buy both, if you want to create the drones exactly as shown in the Warlord promotional photos.

The top photo has Batter, Gun and Comptactor drones in it, but you’ll see that the Batter and Compactor drones have the same “main body”. The bottom photo has Shield, Camo and Medi drones in it, and again you’ll see that the right two have the same “main body”.

Here’s a photo of the sprues as shipped to me, with some helpful boxes around them.

The first thing is, that if you want to create exactly what is shown in the promo photos, you can’t do it because each pack comes with 3 different bodies but you need 2 of the same body as shown in the photos.

The second thing is…I don’t know if the bodies are super important. It feels like the arms are what define a drones job. So…who cares? I dunno.

In my photo, I’ve colour coded the boxes around what I think are matching sets from the promo photos. So if you’re staring at your sprue wondering how to put these together to get the same look, this should be how.

Musings & Meta

Emergency Preparedness – Fire Making Kit

Posted on April 9, 2016

Russ and I have recently turned emergency preparedness into a small hobby. I like the sound of “emergency preparedness” better than “survivalist”, because the latter brings to mind images of bunkers and guns and hunting camo.

Sunday we basically had a day of arts and crafts, making fire stuff!

Paraffin Wax Cooking Candle

We started with small aluminum cans, cat food in this case. We rolled corrugated cardboard in strips just as tall as the cans, and shoved the rolled strip into the cans. Then we melted paraffin wax and poured it until it filled the can. This stuff takes a little bit to start (ie, a match may go out before it lights), but will apparently get hot enough to cook food and boil water!

Vaseline and Cotton Ball Starters

This stuff lights on fire super easy. Take cotton balls, and knead vaseline into it until it’s a gooey mess. This is really dirty and gross. 🙂 After we were happy with how much vaseline was in it, we dipped it in more paraffin to try to keep it sealed against water.

These light on fire super easy, and provide sustained heat. We placed one on the candle from above, lit it and it lit the candle. We imagine you could do the same with wood tinder if you needed.

Fire-Making Kit

Lastly we put it all together. Russ bought some fire-steel, which you strike one piece against the other to provide sparks, and we stuffed it into a small kit along with the cotton balls and some cinder cloth he’d made earlier. (no idea how to make cinder cloth…something about a smaller space and a tiny hole). The sparks from the fire-steel are enough to light the cotton balls, so we have a complete kit!

Then we dropped all of this into Miranda and mine’s emergency kit!

Musings & Meta

WAAAGH – 40k Triumph and Treachery

Posted on March 11, 2016

I bought Triumph and Treachery from Mr. A. Andrew. It’s a supplement from Warhammer Fantasy Battles, but while reading it I realized there was very little in the rules that were specific to Fantasy. So I wrote some rules for translating it.

This link also includes the rules Duke and I have been using for 40k. They’re super restrictive, because we wanted to play a certain type of game. I feel like there’s some room for loosening the restrictions up a bit, but then I read my gaming club 40k chat and think that maybe there isn’t. 🙂

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByaAQGMZC_bHVjlkRWhKR0JGRFU

A couple things I need to focus on next time — making sure that “enemy players” are selected in each of the 4 phases. Fantasy has 4 distinct phases that you do things to other people in, but 40k in some cases only has 2 — shooting and assault — there is nothing* you do to your opponent in the movement phase, and not every army has a psychic phase**.

*You can tank shock. That’s nearly nothing.

** Everyone but Tau can have one, but psychers just aren’t as popular in 40k as wizards are necessary in Fantasy.

I also want to allow people to buy new Maelstrom Mission cards with Victory Tokens, because I think they would be pretty fun to sacrifice your win-currency to get more win-currency.

Musings & Meta

Drone – Breaking Stuff

Posted on March 7, 2016

Russ and I have been having a small contest about who can break the most stuff while flying. The other day I broke one of my wings, in addition to 4 legs and 4 props. My frame is not a common one, so I had to get 4 new arms custom made. to keep it balanced right. The up side is that when I break the next leg, the guys who made these arms can make me 4 new ones and I’ll only need to replace one leg!

It’s getting to be nicer out, and I look forward to learning how to fly this thing without flying it into the ground repeatedly! Right now our problem is that we fly in tennis courts because the grass is so wet and our electronics are so exposed.

Featured Images Musings & Meta

Santa’s Workshop

Posted on February 14, 2016

As part of the CHOP! Game Sales and Trade day on February 21st this month I’m cleaning and organizing some old hobby stuff.

I found this item, that really shouldn’t be taking up space in my house anymore. It’s an old diorama I made for one of the Park Royal Games Workshops contests. I love it, but it’s not useful and won’t ever be useful so I’m going to rip the grots off it and throw the rest away.

However, I need something to show of it, so here it is to fill my blog with 2 month old holiday cheer!

Musings & Meta

Addendum to phone/tablet battery stuff

Posted on January 17, 2016

I had some good conversations with people coming out of my PSA on your phone/tablet battery and wanted to write some more.

Compromises

I wrote that your best bet is to keep your phone between 48%-58% at all times. At that rate, you’ll get 12 years of life from your phone. (not proven by experimentation, just statistics). This is stupid though, who has time for that?

There’s a parabolic graph that goes with the peak voltage numbers. It has 100% as the worst voltage you can keep your phone at*, and gets better the further away from 100% you get. But the curve is parabolic, so the further away from 100% you get, the less “health per percent” you get. Someone determined that 58% was the sweet spot, whereby you got the most use along with the most battery health. But 58% may not be the best spot for you. I know some people who wouldn’t get a full day use out of 58%!

I looked at my own usage and determined that for me, 80% would be best. On any given day I my phone would be used to ~45% and wouldn’t be stressed up to 100% every day. So that’s where I’d charge to, if I had the ability to choose. You would have to make your own choices.

*Actually, the article writes that 110% is the worst you can get. Did you know that your battery could contain more power than it current does? This is a corollary to what I said — manufacturers have made battery life decisions for you, and they’ve determined that your current “100%” is the sweet spot! You could charge more, and get more daily life from your battery, at the cost of increasingly poor lifespan! (Also, Li-Ion batteries explode when overcharged. >.>)

Games Suck

I touched briefly on games and how horrible they are for your battery. I mentioned that they put out a ton of heat, which is bad for your battery.

But there’s something else you may have noticed while playing — your battery is used at a much faster rate. You’ll remember that we were measuring battery lifespan in discharge cycles. If you play Hearthstone for 15 minutes and use 5% of your battery, you’ve discharged it a lot faster than if you were just playing Sudoku for 15 minutes and only use 2%. I mentioned the “really good CPUs” — Hearthstone has more graphics going on, so it spins those up and uses more power more quickly. Which means you’re running through your discharge cycle much quicker!

If you only get 300 discharge cycles, and you use those cycles over 300 days with Sudoku (because you just love Sudoku so much you have to run from 100%-0% every day), you’ll get far fewer days playing Hearthstone, because you’ll have to charge your phone in the middle of the day.

Unfortunately, if you want to play games on your mobile device your best bet is to buy a device that’s cheap to replace, or one with a replaceable battery. Because your game playing will destroy your battery and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Battery Meters

This was all new to me, I did the research. There was some fun stuff. Battery Meters are fucky.

Some of them will lie to you, first thing in the morning. I’ve never seen it, but apparently sometimes your meter will drop to 95% in the first 3 minutes of use! I mentioned last time that chargers stop charging at 100%. But if your phone is on, it will still use power. Rather than keep the charge at 100% (bad for battery), your phone will stop charging. And then lie to you, claiming it’s at 100% even though it’s at 95%. This is a good thing! (from a battery health point of view).

This next bit is totally messed up. A co-worker asked why her old phone from went from 30% to 10% to shutting off over the course of a couple minutes. I had to buy an ACM article on the topic to find the complete answer, but I did it for you and I’d do it again.

At our present level of technology, your battery meter uses the current voltage level of your battery to determine how much capacity it has remaining. (Remember I didn’t define peak voltage in the last article? This is what I meant). There are a set of look-up tables built during development of your phone that equate certain voltages to certain remaining percent. There are different look-up tables for different points in your batteries life, and it chooses which table to use based on what the software finds while it is charging. Was the charge faster than the month before without getting more current? The software may decide to use a table that titled “getting on in life”.

With the 30-10-off scenario, what’s happened is that the software/look-up table set isn’t good enough. It thinks your battery is “pretty ok”, but it’s actually “not super great”. So it uses the wrong look-up table and the voltage drops faster than that table is expecting and whoops now your phone is suddenly off.

Given this, how can we re-calibrate the meter? You can’t. If you were able to, you’d also be able to set all sorts of other things about your battery meter, and you just aren’t smart enough to have that kind of power in your hands. Worse, I researched how to get this power…if you thought you were smart enough to use it right…and no one has looked into it. Lots of smart people on the XDA Developers forums (a place for phone developers), and this is a topic that no one is interested in.

Lastly – why does your phone shut off? You’d think it’s because it’s out of power, but that isn’t it. It’s because if it were to use any more power, the battery may not be usable anymore. If you run a Li-Ion battery to it’s actual 0%, it can’t be recharged! So again, the meter lies to us to save us – this one I have no problem with though!

TL;DR: If your battery meter is acting weird, you probably need a new battery.

The End?

Maybe. My articles on glue certainly went on longer than I expected. 🙂 But the take home message is that your battery will die, eventually, no matter what you do. Using your phone kills your battery.

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