Author: Joe

Misc update

I finally booted my laptop back to Linux, and it’s so much more usable now! I’ve been using Windows Vista since Christmas because I was gaming on my laptop and because I got itunes gift cards and I have itunes installed in windows. The problem I had was that I couldn’t access my file server from windows (it’s a linux server). I figured Samba hadn’t started or something last time I took updates and rebooted the server, so I tried SSHing in from my phone, then realized that I could just use my laptop, so I switched it to Ubuntu. Now Firefox is responsive, I don’t get pop-ups from MS Security Essentials, and the screensaver comes on consistently. In other words: this is a major improvement.

I never did figure out why my server wasn’t showing up on the network list in windows. Before my laptop was finished booting I tried typing in the IP address directly in windows explorer and that worked, but the network browser still won’t find it.

I uploaded the last of the rocket videos:

I ended up trimming off all the extra video of it hanging in the tree. There are a couple spots where you can see my dad and I walking around under it, but it was more long and drawn out than interesting.

The other video I produced this week was in skyrim:

I found a dragon that had a ledge behind it, so I snuck on to the ledge and stabbed it with my daggers for the sneak attack bonus. Unfortunately, I hadn’t improved my offhand dagger with blacksmithing so I didn’t actually one-shot the dragon. I finished it off using my bow when it landed – I haven’t fought many dragons as a melee character but I remember my mage getting bitten and killed when I got close.

It took me probably fifteen minutes to get into position for that attack because every time the dragon detected me it would fly up and breathe frost on me so I’d have to reload a save. Also, to get onto the ledge I had to find a spot to climb the mountain so I could jump down on it. This was the dragon on the mountain south of Riften.

I just realized I didn’t have a category for Games: Skyrim. I guess I really haven’t been blogging much since it came out.

Today I finally sat down and timed a solve of my 7-cube: 30 minuntes 56.77 seconds. That beats my previous time of 63 minutes by far, but I need to do a few more solves for a 3 of 5 average (technically they should all be in one sitting, but at 30 min per solve that’s not happening). I also did a few 3-cube solves and managed a 34.99 second solve, which is my new record for the method I’m using to solve it. I was trying to solve my rubik’s cube while on my exercise bike, but I was both slowing down on the bike and messing up algorithms so I gave up. If I’d had better light maybe it would have been an interesting challenge, perhaps tomorrow.

Sunrise

I got up this morning to see the sunrise. I was rather surprised to discover that it wasn’t really that much earlier than when I’d planned to get up. The only problem being that I never actually went to sleep, so getting up to see the sunrise didn’t actually involve waking up early, just getting out of bed when it started getting light outside.

In somewhat related news, the Millenium Series by Stieg Larsson is really good. I have the entire series as a package on my nook (it shows up as one book), so I don’t have a great feel for how much of book 2 I read last night, but I’m 200 pages from the end of book 3 (1210 of 1431 pages in the series as on my nook) and very likely to just finish it today. I’d already be long done with it but I decided around 10am that I should probably get some sleep. At least I made sure the cats didn’t get too much sleep last night (since they were in reach I kept waking Dash up) so they didn’t bother me.

One other thing I did was trim and upload most of the other decent rocket videos we got. I haven’t decided how much footage I’m going to leave on the last launch (which landed in the top of a tree and took hours to extract), but the rest are in a youtube playlist:

Once I’ve done the last video I’ll add it to the playlist.

Here’s my picture of the camera after the launch where the rubber band holding the nose/parachute came off in flight. We didn’t get video from that launch because the micro-sd card came out of its slot on impact.

This is the tree where the last launch ended up. It took us about two hours to extract it, and involved an extension ladder, tree trimmer, and a bolt tied to a rope. The ladder got us over half way there (couldn’t go higher because there wasn’t something higher to lean the ladder on). From there my dad used his pole-mounted tree trimmer to trim branches out of the way (it wasn’t nearly long enough to reach the branch the rocket was on in a place that was thin enough to cut), then managed to swing the bolt on the end of the rope over the branch and pull the branch off.

Rocket-cam

My dad got a cheap digital video camera that was billed as a “spy cam” a while back. The intent for it was to use the small size of it to capture interesting videos, and the fact that it cost under $20 meant that we weren’t too concerned with destroying it in the process. Over the summer we hung it from a kite and got some interesting footage, but the plan from the start was to launch it on a rocket in the backyard. Unfortunately, it was windy the entire time I was visiting my parents in the summer, so it took us till now to try it.

This was our third launch of the rocket with the camera attached and the first time we got video from it. Thanks to the battery in the launcher being low and not having any replacements it took a while to get it to launch the first time, so by the time it finally launched the battery in the spy cam was dead (did I mention the camera was cheap?). This engine wasn’t expected to be too impressive (the instructions with the rocket suggested the next size up for the first launch), especially with the added weight of the camera on the side, but the video didn’t turn out too poorly.

The sound is consistently out of sync with the video in all of the launches we’ve gotten so far, I’ve never been able to set the time, and the rocket isn’t overly steady (it spins a lot in the higher shots), but the fact that we’re able to do this is awesome. Thankfully, we haven’t hit a cow yet (haven’t decided how I’m going to edit that video, will probably leave the part with the herd of cows in), so we can keep trying it.

For reference:
rocket: Code Red
engine: A8-3
camera: Lighter cam