Dave Smith

How about a hit upside the head with a history lesson in telecommunications?

You’re still here?

Okay, buckle up. In the late 1800’s, a paranoid undertaker from Kansas worried that human operators were routing phone calls to his competitors. You see, back in the day an operator (usually female) would manually connect your phone calls for you. No dialing. If you’ve ever watched an episode of “Lassie” where Timmy falls in the well, you’ve seen this in action. So you would pick up the phone and ask the operator lady to connect you to a certain person or business. If you asked for an undertaker, for example, she was free to route your call to whichever undertaker she liked the best. This really torqued off our heroic undertaker, Almon Brown Strowger, who, rather than just blogging about it, set out to solve the problem.

Strowger invented a relay (which is EE speak for a fancy switch) that could be operated remotely by sending it electrical pulses. The relay could connect a number of phone calls automatically based on what you dialed on your rotary phone. By hooking a bunch of Strowger relays together, you could route calls to any other phone, without the need for a human in the loop.

You’ve probably seen these old phones with rotary dials. That’s why we have ‘em. All because a disgruntled undertaker saw a problem and decided to fix it.

What torques you off? Why don’t you go out and invent something to fix it?

A couple weeks ago I sent my Spektrum AR6000 receiver to Horizon Hobby’s service department because it was losing bind on the ground (especially in cold weather). Oddly, I could never reproduce the problem on the bench. It only happened at the flying field, and only on hand launches. Very weird. I was nervous that I would destroy my plane if it ever lost bind in the air, so I finally decided to send it in for service. I didn’t have much hope that Horizon would be able to see the problem since I could never make it happen on the bench, but they graciously took my word for it and replaced it free of charge. All I paid was the $5 to ship the receiver to them, and they replaced it and shipped the new one back to me free of charge. This was after they failed to reproduce the problem after 15 attempts. Way to go Horizon! I’m now a loyal customer for life.

P.S. Larry Weddle did the service, and decided to send me the new AR6000. Good work Larry!

For the first time in my life, I installed Linux on a laptop and every feature worked out of the box: video, sound, wireless network, mouse, keyboard, desktop effects, everything! I am blown away. I’m running Hardy on a Dell D630, and I followed the upgrade path after installing Kubuntu originally with Gutsy (and then got rid of the KDE garbage). Tomorrow I’ll test out docking station and dual monitor support.

It may be time for me to start recommending Ubuntu to family and friends.

Recently I pulled my FICO score after not having checked it for five years. For those that don’t know, banks use your FICO score to decide how credit worthy you are. Seeing my score gave me a great sense for just how broken our banking industry is!

Five years ago, my wife and I bid a fond adieu to our alma mater with barely a penny to our name. The last five years have been very good to us: my salary has increased, we’re saving for retirement, and our house is half paid for. You wouldn’t know that from my FICO score, though: Today it is 50 points lower than it was five years ago. That’s right, the average bank would rather lend money to me as a starving student. Thanks to the FICO algorithm, which apparently has Kool-Aid for brains, I’m a credit risk.

Of course I was curious. Why was it lower?

A little detective work revealed that my score sunk mostly because of a $150 clerical error. Amazing! One hundred fifty measly bucks, and even though I’ve never missed a house or credit card payment, and even though I make much more money than I used to, I’m less credit worthy.

After I pay off this house, I hope to never borrow money again. Fair Issac and Company: you can keep your credit score. With any luck I won’t be needing it!

Finally a successful maiden flight! Here are some post-maiden photos of my T-28 Trojan from ParkZone.

This tiny dots to the right and left of the cockpit mark the Parkzone recommended center-of-gravity (2.5″ back from leading edge, measured 1″ out from the fuselage). I moved it forward by about 0.5″ and it flew better.

On my first flight, the elevator was trimmed way too far up, leading to a near-death experience. I landed it, fixed the elevator sub-trim, moved the CG forward 0.5″ and it flew beautifully. In your pre-flight checklist, be sure to verify that the elevator is totally level (co-planer, to use geometry terms) with the horizontal stabilizer forward of it.

This shows my battery compartment and where I positioned my 2200mah battery pack to balance properly. I used velcro to secure the battery to the floor of the battery compartment.

To fit my battery as far aft as I did, I needed to remove some foam from the bottom of the cockpit:

This is where I mounted the ParkBEC as an insurance policy against the included speed controller’s crappy BEC. Since this is a switching BEC, it produces a lot of electromagnetic interference, so you want to put it as far away as possible from your receiver and antennae. Even though it creates lots of EMI, it creates virtually no heat, since it is very efficient at stepping voltages down.

My last landing was gorgeous. I even held a 10 degree flare during final approach that really greased it in for a smooth touch down and roll out. However, the left wing must have caught something hard (a particularly hardy blade of grass perhaps) that pulled the left landing gear right off. Nothing a bit of epoxy won’t fix:

What a great flyer. This is truly a bank-and-yank plane and is very easy to fly. The motor provides adequate lift to climb out at 45 degrees all the while showing no sign of slowing. The vertical is limited to about 30 or 40 feet from flat flight, and the roll rate is very very slow and non-axial. It flies just slightly better than a brushless HobbyZone Super Cub with ailerons. I think I need to increase my aileron servo travel to get some really good rolls. I will probably also mix in some differential to make the rolls more axial and pattern-like.

Oh, and I’m fairly certain that in a few months, it’ll be time to upgrade the motor for insane speed and unlimited vertical.

Well, I upgraded my L-39 jet’s motor and re-maidened it. I don’t want to give away the ending but it wasn’t pretty. The new motor was fantastic. It bolted in with no modifications to the plane, and provided lots of thrust over the stock motor. It was great.

The added thrust helped control the plane. Without it, I would have been toast out of the gates (like last time). The take off was uneventful other than the 90 degree right roll on launch and the first turn which almost crash landed the plane right into the adjacent road. Yikes! Here’s the video:

Everything was going okay, but it was extremely twitchy and stall happy. I think it’s too heavy, cause I was fighting to keep it aloft the whole time. I held my own for a few minutes, and then the low-voltage cut off kicked in. The motor must have been pulling more juice than I realized. I was up wind, which was a problem because the wind was blowing at about 10-15mph. Nevertheless, I managed to bring it in for a nice soft landing. Well, “soft” is relative. The plane touched down at the same spot where the only obstacle in the whole park was sitting: a sideways metal pole. Oops. Here’s the video and crash site photo:

You can’t tell very well from the pic but both the wing and horizontal stabilizer are bent, because they went under the poll while the rest of the plane went over it. Not pretty.

Oh well. Live and learn. My battery was badly puffed (due to the low voltage and high amp draw I’m sure), but it subsided back to normal. Not sure if I trust it for another flight yet, but I will definitely be keeping it in an ammo box and carefully monitoring its voltage before I use it again.

Thanks Cliff for filming!

After nearly one year and hundreds of flights, it’s finally time to retire the F27C Stryker R/C plane. This wasn’t necessitated by the plane or a crash, but rather my stupid attempt at modifying the airfoil to get it to roll faster. I learned the hard way that I am not an aeronautical engineer. The Stryker has been a great plane. It outlived two motors and at least 4 devastating crashes. Until I modified the wing, it flew like new. Here are some pictures to commemorate its service:

Elliot loves this plane, especially now that he can toss it around and see it flip and flop:

This is one beat-up airplane. The motor mount area of the foam got ripped out several times, and repaired very easily. The roughed up underside is due to all the concrete landings it endured behind my office building:

Here’s Elliot giving it one last throw to the ground:

I noticed that the wing tips are very rubbery and soft after all the flexing I must have put it through flying it at 70mph. What a great plane.

A moment of silence please.

That is all.

Lots of the spam I get uses the Cyrillic alphabet. I believe it’s Russian. I don’t correspond with anyone using the Cyrillic alphabet, so I’ve come up with a procmail recipe to filter this email out. But first some background.

It seems that the subject lines of many (all?) Cyrillic emails look something like this:

Subject: =?koi8-r?B?7e/06ffh4+nxIPTy9eTh?=

Which appears like this in your email reader:

МОТИВАЦИЯ ТРУДА

The “KOI8-R” you see in the above Subject line refers to a popular Cyrillic encoding and indicates to the mail client that the rest of the text is thusly encoded. For more info, Wikipedia has a nice article on KOI8-R. There is another encoding, called windows-1251 that is also used to encode Cyrillic, albeit less commonly than KOI8-R.

To filter out these messages, I added two super simple procmail recipes to my .procmailrc file:

:0:
* Subject:.*koi8-r
$HOME/Maildir/.crap/

:0:
* Subject:.*windows-1251
$HOME/Maildir/.crap/

Keep in mind that for these recipes to work, the Cyrillic stuff has to appear in the email subject, which most of my spam seems to do. I haven’t done extensive testing, but will let this run for the coming weeks and report how it worked.

One word: crash.

I put a heavy battery in my new L-39 jet, knowing that I would eventually upgrade to a beefier motor that could make the thrust I’d need to move the heavier battery around. I was confident that it would fly stock, even with the heavier battery, because I had seen this video of it flying with my same battery on the stock motor.

I launched it three times, and the first two times it hit the deck about 20 feet out. You’d think I’d be smart enough to quit then, but I figured I just wasn’t throwing it hard enough. So I got a running start, and gave it a good solid chuck. I got my fingers to the elevator stick just in time to pull it up and out. It flew great. Did some big long circuits on low rates. Then I went for the gusto, flipped to high rates, and pumped out a wicked fast roll. This thing rolls fast! Very nice! However, coming out of the roll, a wing dipped. I think I must have been dangerously close to the stall speed. I couldn’t recover in time and it went full throttle into the ground. Elevator was ineffective, and it was all I could do to keep the wings level as it went in. Thinking back, I should have lowered the nose to gain some air speed. These jets are very different animals since there’s no prop wash over the control surfaces to help direct the plane. I mean, there really is no prop wash at all. All control authority comes from air speed.

Damage Report:

The left wing broke and fuselage broke. But never fear. I’ve already repaired it, and I have my new motor on order.

This time I’ll wait until the new motor arrives before I try any hot shot stuff.

Here’s the flight video. Please forgive all my “dang it”s after the crash. I was a little upset, needlessly so, of course. I was fine afterwards. The whole plane only cost $99 (including fan and motor), so hey, it’s easy and cheap to repair.

My good friend Cliff (a.k.a., Darth Elevator), strapped a digital video camera to his Slow Stick airplane this week and filmed me flying Randy’s Stryker around. The video captures both the Stryker take off and landing, and lots of crazy stunts. After seeing myself fly it from this angle, I’m surprised Randy lets me fly it at all. The video has been edited down to only include the shots where the Stryker is visible on camera. Here’s the video: