User Blogs

Well, I finally built me a drone so's I could fit in with all the cool kids. What follows is a short description of my experience with helpful links for someone else who would like to build a substantially similar quad. I built basically the cheapest quadcopter you could use for anything more than just crashing into stuff, a SK450 whose parts were primarily sourced from eBay — and usually with the very cheapest parts.

I'm a big fan of the Fallout franchise, so when I discovered Fallout Shelter, I was happy to see a new member of the family. It's actually a pretty engaging little game, but it has some ugly flaws that I find frustrating, so I'm going to complain about them.

I wanted to keep some programs running, which is to say restart them if they crashed, but I also wanted them to be able to exit normally. The platform is Linux, the problem is compiz, the solution is a very small shell script. Surely the internets will let me know if there is something grossly wrong with it. This script is not meant for long-running daemons, there are plenty of tools for that already.

For all my life, most of my computers have been hand-me-downs or upgrades. I've built a handful of PCs from scratch, but even most of the ones I built with new processors and motherboards had some hand-me-down parts. But it seems like recently a threshold was crossed where the computers available to just anyone (and not someone who knows "someone") for basically nothing began to be pretty good.

When you're putting together a so-called "Car PC", by which we usually mean a contemporary ATX-derivative computer installed into an automobile, you have a few hurdles to cross. The enclosure, interface, storage devices, and even the power management all become special problems. The power problems can largely be solved through the use of a Wide Input picoPSU, but what about systems outside of a 120W envelope, or systems where you need to switch more than the PC power? The answer is just one typical automotive relay.