Some little while ago, I picked up an e-Flite Apprentice, a fairly common foam "trainer" model airplane which is normally sold "ready to fly" with everything but the battery and charger. It was part of a lot of stuff that I picked up for ten dollars, and came without the radio. First I repaired it and mounted a HobbyKing HK-T6A v2 radio, but I quickly decided that it should be more than just a plane.
When I assembled my quadcopter, I always intended it to become a drone, that is to say, with autonomous features. The typical use case for the hobbyist is intelligent failsafe, specifically return-to-home or "RTH" capability. As I've assembled the parts to accomplish this, it's made me consider how to achieve the same thing for my plane.
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.
Right now, there is a massive flap occurring in the blogosphere which is known as "Mobilegeddon". Google is going to increase the relative ranking of pages which are available in both desktop and mobile themes, as opposed to only one or the other. This has got a lot of incompetent amateurs worried about whether their sites will vanish off the search landscape, but any Drupal (or other adequate CMS) user can solve this problem with a few clicks.
Like many others, I've become somewhat dependent on virtualization to reduce the number of computers and windows installs I have in my home. I recently took another stab at using open source virtualization, and I've had some success with WebVirtMgr, a libvirt-based VM management solution for Linux. This made me want to migrate some XP guests from vmware player to KVM, and I'm happy to say that this is relatively simple today once you figure out the precise sequence of events.
I needed a quick version of lspci for looking at some linux systems without pciutils, so I threw this one together in a couple of minutes.
It's very simple, it doesn't tell you what the devices are, but it does tell you what kind of devices they are and what their PCI ID is. Then you can go look that up online to figure out what they are. It wouldn't be a horrible stretch to add support for the pci.ids file, but it wasn't necessary for my purposes.