First, at the time of this misadventure, such a camera did not exist at that price, but more importantly, why do all the work to send a camera up just to take poor photos? I surely did not test the rig with an $800 camera to begin with. I only used that camera when it proved to be highly reliable. In any case, it was neither a rig failure nor a kite control error that crashed my kite. The problem was with the improper attachment of the line to the kite (wrong bridle knot for the attachment.
Because you can't make an image like this with one.
Besides, I actually have an X10 camera on there as a spotting camera. The video is total shit but it gets me pointed in the right direction. Even for video cameras those things are horribly sub par.. They have ~200 lines of resolution and fixed focus.
I have repeatedly stated that everyone involved in this hobby has to accept the risk associated with lifting a camera with a kite. You can do two things to help with this conundrum. 1) Buy cheaper hardware (this is the avenue you suggest) or 2) Plan more carefully and plan for more contingencies (This is the method I choose).
My rig has long fiberglass legs extending from the bottom and is designed to fall in such a way that it will orient itself to land on these legs. If it hits something hard the legs will hopefully bend and snap, transferring the energy into the upper aluminum frame of the rig. The camera will smack into the ground sure enough, but hopefully most of the energy from the fall will be dispersed into the less expensive parts making any damage the camera suffers minor in comparison to an unprotected fall. You know what? It worked, too. Probably careful planning saved me $650, even though poor pre-flight checks cost me $150 (I should have caught the bridle knot problem.)
Yes. Actually it wasn't my own camera but a friend's Canon PowerShot G2 (back when that camera was still worth $800). We were both getting into the hobby together.
I had trusted the bridle knot that was already tied on the kite when I bought it and never retied it myself. It gave way and dropped the camera rig about 150 feet, and the kite folded and landed about 1/4 mile away. Luckily it was not a frame kite or I probably never would have seen that again either.
Everyone who does KAP accepts the risk that sending up their equipment entails. Most of us choose to either minimize the risk itself or minimize the cost of the equipment that goes up.
In my case, I was going for option #1. The rig I was using was designed to take the brunt of the impact off of the camera. Despite the fact that the camera fell 150ft onto hard, dry dirt and gravel (construction area), repairs were limited to a thorough cleaning, refit of the lens assembly, and new plastic outer housing. The rig did its job and completely mangled itself in the fall.
This fellow really did neither. He was using the wrong kind of kite (power kites are not designed for lifting), the wrong kind of rig (big unaerodynamic sphere of bubblewrap that tumbles uncontrollably), and the wrong kind of shock absorbsion in the event of a disaster. Bubble wrap cannot take much of an impact at all without a hard outer shell (ie cardboard box). A couple of pounds will easily compress a few layers of bubble wrap as this article clearly indicates. He would have had much better protection with a few inches of closed cell rubber padding instead.
The total bill with shipping came to about $150. For a drop of as many feet, it was a good deal. BTW this was back before the G3 was even out. The G2 was still selling for >$800, and so we had dropped basically a top of the line camera! Canon's support and repair services were absolutely excellent, and I have encouraged the purchase of very little but Canon since.
Canon's new S1 IS is an awesome little camera. My dad just got one. It's not even a 4 megapixel camera, but buying a point and shoot on this ridiculous statistic alone is like buying a computer based on the processor's raw clock speed alone. This is an excellent camera so far at a very good price.
I have an X10 camera on my rig as a spotting camera. I modified it to accept external video input so I can hook it to the A/V output of the digicam and see exactly what picture I'm taking. If I'm using a cheaper camera or a film camera I can use the original X10 cam to see where it is pointing as well. The camera runs on a rechargable 9V battery run through a small 12V DCDC converter. The receiver runs on a 2AH Gel Cell worn in a pack. The video screen is a small 2" LCD with a sun hood that is attached to the R/C controller.
Re:What about an actual Do It Yourself?
on
Build Your Own KiteCam
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A much easier solution is to get one of those so called "disposable digitals" from Ritz camera or Walgreens. They are very cheap and you can hack them to extract the photos, change batteries, etc. They are really quite ideal cameras for KAP. They don't have a screen, but you don't need it!
Not to mention that he's trying to raise the money to replace the camera. The last time I dropped an $800 digital camera from a kite, it only cost $100 to have repaired and it was equally as trashed as this dude's.
On second thought this guy really had it coming. His rig was not adequate for the task he was trying to do. Most people in this type of shoestring setup of taping the camera to the kiteline opt for very cheap ($10) film cameras or disposables with small mechanical shutter releases. Hopefully, this setback won't discourage him from further attempts to do some kite photography, but hopefully at least next time he will use a proper rig with a proper suspension if he wants to send up a couple hundred bucks worth of camera equipment.
BTW any KAP'ers who happen to be on Orkut, there is a group called Kite Aerial Photography I am trying to start up over there.
I crashed my kite rig once too. I think it's kind of a rite of passage in the hobby. Lots of things can go wrong. This crash cost about $1 per foot fallen for the camera repair luckily. The camera was a Canon Powershot G2.
This has been a really fun hobby. I got into it after seeing a very old/. article about it. Unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of time to get out and do it for about a year, but I'm not done by far:)
BTW to the person who submitted about the 360deg aerials, I have made one as well. They are pretty difficult to get right, but they are singlehandedly the most awesome photos I have ever been able to take on a fairly shoestring photography budget.
This is a strange question for you to be asking given that you were obviously resourceful enough to discover and find a place to sell you an appropriate yagi antenna comaptible with your phone and cellular frequencies and resourceful enough to install it. What's more these types of devices are almost always sold by the same people that carry fixed mount high gain cellular antennas, so I find it very hard to believe that you had trouble finding one.
Anyway, since you didn't specify what phone you need it to work with, I don't know if either of these will work for you or not but try these easily-found-on-google solutions:
http://store.voxilla.com/customer/product.php?pr od uctid=16136
Simple, but suffers from the problem of any screen scraper; It is almost guaranteed to break at some point.
Google really needs a simple API into Gmail that allows this sort of limited functionality (new mail notification, address book access, etc.) outside of the browser client. They also need to offer an alternative very simple frontend for mobile devices, etc. so that they can send/receive mail without requiring all this javascript.
In case anyone who is responsible for business decisions in one of these companies is reading this...
The "Credits" system you folks have devised and deployed for purchaing ROMs is completely bogus unless you also have some way of earning credits other than spending money. If credits are equivalent to money, then please publish a price. You have to dig pretty deep and pull out a calculator to find out that a game will (for instance) cost you $7.00 up front or $3.25 if you purchase a monthly subscription instead.
I understand the reasoning behind the credits system, but if it is not easy for someone to equate it to a dollar value, then you are driving away customers. It is not very hard to calculate price tables in this manner. You might consider using wording to this effect:
"100 credits (as low as $1.00)"
In this example, clicking on the "as low as" should bring up a pricing table explaining that it's $5.00 if you buy it outright and can be as low as $1.00 if you buy a package of 2000 credits)
The game was/is called Tokyo Bus Driver. You have to drive a bus around the city and make all your stops on time. You also can't run into people or break any traffic laws.
It sounds really really boring, but it's suprisingly fun.
Still, I wouldn't recommend it for someone learning how to drive. If you want to learn to drive, get a learner's permit, get some insurance, and then get in the car with someone who is willing to teach you how to do it.
You can sell wine on ebay, but you have to clear a lot of things with ebay first, and you have to list it in their wine section. This auction will likely be pulled by ebay due to the wine problem.
Then again, anyone capable of spending 100K on all this stuff will likely either be of age or have the means of buying it anyway.
Another smaller note: He listed it as a 100K opening bid "no reserve" auction so that he did not have to pay a gigantic fee to put a $100K reserve price on it.
Well, sure technically all opengl drawing is orthographic projection, but that is not entirely what GL_ORTHO is. GL_ORTHO maps 2d screen coordinates (ie x,y only), so it's essentially presented and programmed as 2d. Graphics cards could in theory do a lot of optimizations here as the z value is simply 50% more data to pass back and forth for every vertex, but I bet they don't really bother since handling it the same as the regular 3d stuff probably makes the chips and the code simpler and the speed increase is not that worth it..
Well, actually most all of it is done in 2D with OpenGL.
GL does have a couple 2D Drawing modes, GL_ORTHO, for instance, and cards hardware accelerate them. How do you think games draw their pretty little GUI's and menus and whatnot?
Interestingly enough, nobody's ever developed a really good benchmark for cards that can accurately compare card performances drawing to ortho's. Maybe 3DMark should include a test like this. I imagine that raw fill rate has the biggest impact here, but who knows what kind of crazy optimizations card manufacturers might have in there to help/hurt the 2D OpenGL performance in favor of the 3D.
My drive thrashes with bittorrent on just a 10Mbps connection - I really doubt you could sustain 100Mbps speeds with bittorrent accessing random locations across a 1gb file...
Either you need some more RAM or BitTorrent needs a rewrite.
You can follow the same procedure you use for your linux recovery -- put in the install cd or darwin cd, boot to a shell, mount up the disk read only and perform your backup, analysis, and then recover by whatever means you want.
To boot to a shell using the install cd you have to go into open firmware and set OF to pass the -s option to the mach kernel. The darwin CD will give you the option to jump to a shell right off the bat.
I built a dual xeon system today using two boxed intel chips... I took the parts out and put them on the bench then installed them in the machine. I have no idea if I paired the fans or heatsinks or baffles or mounts or whatever correctly with the processors. There were two of everything. Maybe they are around backwards; who knows?!?
I hope if one dies they will honor the warranty even if I send them back the wrong fan!
You have to consider also, that Google is a different word than googol. It's unlikely that anyone searching for information on one would inadvertently stumble upon the other.
There are plenty of other companies that play on words to derive their names -- it's nothing new. But you don't see the decendents of the Earl of Sandwich suing the makers of Manwich claiming they aren't recognizing their true origins!
Well, they have a whole paragraph on it no less than 2 clicks from their homepage. They aren't trying to hide anything, and they recognize the origin of the name quite openly.
Which means this lawsuit was cooked up by a money grubbing crybaby bitch with total disregard to legacy. If she had some kind of decency in her, she probably could have gotten google to sponsor a scholarship or something else actually appropriate (note: it's likely they already *do*), but instead she jumps to a lawsuit.
Slashdot Mirror
First, at the time of this misadventure, such a camera did not exist at that price, but more importantly, why do all the work to send a camera up just to take poor photos? I surely did not test the rig with an $800 camera to begin with. I only used that camera when it proved to be highly reliable. In any case, it was neither a rig failure nor a kite control error that crashed my kite. The problem was with the improper attachment of the line to the kite (wrong bridle knot for the attachment.
For more info see here.
Because you can't make an image like this with one.
Besides, I actually have an X10 camera on there as a spotting camera. The video is total shit but it gets me pointed in the right direction. Even for video cameras those things are horribly sub par.. They have ~200 lines of resolution and fixed focus.
I have repeatedly stated that everyone involved in this hobby has to accept the risk associated with lifting a camera with a kite. You can do two things to help with this conundrum. 1) Buy cheaper hardware (this is the avenue you suggest) or 2) Plan more carefully and plan for more contingencies (This is the method I choose).
My rig has long fiberglass legs extending from the bottom and is designed to fall in such a way that it will orient itself to land on these legs. If it hits something hard the legs will hopefully bend and snap, transferring the energy into the upper aluminum frame of the rig. The camera will smack into the ground sure enough, but hopefully most of the energy from the fall will be dispersed into the less expensive parts making any damage the camera suffers minor in comparison to an unprotected fall. You know what? It worked, too. Probably careful planning saved me $650, even though poor pre-flight checks cost me $150 (I should have caught the bridle knot problem.)
Yes. Actually it wasn't my own camera but a friend's Canon PowerShot G2 (back when that camera was still worth $800). We were both getting into the hobby together.
I had trusted the bridle knot that was already tied on the kite when I bought it and never retied it myself. It gave way and dropped the camera rig about 150 feet, and the kite folded and landed about 1/4 mile away. Luckily it was not a frame kite or I probably never would have seen that again either.
Everyone who does KAP accepts the risk that sending up their equipment entails. Most of us choose to either minimize the risk itself or minimize the cost of the equipment that goes up.
In my case, I was going for option #1. The rig I was using was designed to take the brunt of the impact off of the camera. Despite the fact that the camera fell 150ft onto hard, dry dirt and gravel (construction area), repairs were limited to a thorough cleaning, refit of the lens assembly, and new plastic outer housing. The rig did its job and completely mangled itself in the fall.
This fellow really did neither. He was using the wrong kind of kite (power kites are not designed for lifting), the wrong kind of rig (big unaerodynamic sphere of bubblewrap that tumbles uncontrollably), and the wrong kind of shock absorbsion in the event of a disaster. Bubble wrap cannot take much of an impact at all without a hard outer shell (ie cardboard box). A couple of pounds will easily compress a few layers of bubble wrap as this article clearly indicates. He would have had much better protection with a few inches of closed cell rubber padding instead.
The total bill with shipping came to about $150. For a drop of as many feet, it was a good deal. BTW this was back before the G3 was even out. The G2 was still selling for >$800, and so we had dropped basically a top of the line camera! Canon's support and repair services were absolutely excellent, and I have encouraged the purchase of very little but Canon since.
Canon's new S1 IS is an awesome little camera. My dad just got one. It's not even a 4 megapixel camera, but buying a point and shoot on this ridiculous statistic alone is like buying a computer based on the processor's raw clock speed alone. This is an excellent camera so far at a very good price.
I have an X10 camera on my rig as a spotting camera. I modified it to accept external video input so I can hook it to the A/V output of the digicam and see exactly what picture I'm taking. If I'm using a cheaper camera or a film camera I can use the original X10 cam to see where it is pointing as well. The camera runs on a rechargable 9V battery run through a small 12V DCDC converter. The receiver runs on a 2AH Gel Cell worn in a pack. The video screen is a small 2" LCD with a sun hood that is attached to the R/C controller.
A much easier solution is to get one of those so called "disposable digitals" from Ritz camera or Walgreens. They are very cheap and you can hack them to extract the photos, change batteries, etc. They are really quite ideal cameras for KAP. They don't have a screen, but you don't need it!
Not to mention that he's trying to raise the money to replace the camera. The last time I dropped an $800 digital camera from a kite, it only cost $100 to have repaired and it was equally as trashed as this dude's.
On second thought this guy really had it coming. His rig was not adequate for the task he was trying to do. Most people in this type of shoestring setup of taping the camera to the kiteline opt for very cheap ($10) film cameras or disposables with small mechanical shutter releases. Hopefully, this setback won't discourage him from further attempts to do some kite photography, but hopefully at least next time he will use a proper rig with a proper suspension if he wants to send up a couple hundred bucks worth of camera equipment.
BTW any KAP'ers who happen to be on Orkut, there is a group called Kite Aerial Photography I am trying to start up over there.
I crashed my kite rig once too. I think it's kind of a rite of passage in the hobby. Lots of things can go wrong. This crash cost about $1 per foot fallen for the camera repair luckily. The camera was a Canon Powershot G2.
/. article about it. Unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of time to get out and do it for about a year, but I'm not done by far :)
This has been a really fun hobby. I got into it after seeing a very old
BTW to the person who submitted about the 360deg aerials, I have made one as well. They are pretty difficult to get right, but they are singlehandedly the most awesome photos I have ever been able to take on a fairly shoestring photography budget.
More of my KAP stuff here for those curious.
This is a strange question for you to be asking given that you were obviously resourceful enough to discover and find a place to sell you an appropriate yagi antenna comaptible with your phone and cellular frequencies and resourceful enough to install it. What's more these types of devices are almost always sold by the same people that carry fixed mount high gain cellular antennas, so I find it very hard to believe that you had trouble finding one.
r od uctid=16136
Anyway, since you didn't specify what phone you need it to work with, I don't know if either of these will work for you or not but try these easily-found-on-google solutions:
http://store.voxilla.com/customer/product.php?p
http://cellsocket.com/
Simple, but suffers from the problem of any screen scraper; It is almost guaranteed to break at some point.
Google really needs a simple API into Gmail that allows this sort of limited functionality (new mail notification, address book access, etc.) outside of the browser client. They also need to offer an alternative very simple frontend for mobile devices, etc. so that they can send/receive mail without requiring all this javascript.
Finally! A macintosh that people can actually afford!
Dear StarRoms and Commodoreworld,
In case anyone who is responsible for business decisions in one of these companies is reading this...
The "Credits" system you folks have devised and deployed for purchaing ROMs is completely bogus unless you also have some way of earning credits other than spending money. If credits are equivalent to money, then please publish a price. You have to dig pretty deep and pull out a calculator to find out that a game will (for instance) cost you $7.00 up front or $3.25 if you purchase a monthly subscription instead.
I understand the reasoning behind the credits system, but if it is not easy for someone to equate it to a dollar value, then you are driving away customers. It is not very hard to calculate price tables in this manner. You might consider using wording to this effect:
"100 credits (as low as $1.00)"
In this example, clicking on the "as low as" should bring up a pricing table explaining that it's $5.00 if you buy it outright and can be as low as $1.00 if you buy a package of 2000 credits)
~GoRK
The game was/is called Tokyo Bus Driver. You have to drive a bus around the city and make all your stops on time. You also can't run into people or break any traffic laws.
It sounds really really boring, but it's suprisingly fun.
Still, I wouldn't recommend it for someone learning how to drive. If you want to learn to drive, get a learner's permit, get some insurance, and then get in the car with someone who is willing to teach you how to do it.
You can sell wine on ebay, but you have to clear a lot of things with ebay first, and you have to list it in their wine section. This auction will likely be pulled by ebay due to the wine problem.
Then again, anyone capable of spending 100K on all this stuff will likely either be of age or have the means of buying it anyway.
Another smaller note: He listed it as a 100K opening bid "no reserve" auction so that he did not have to pay a gigantic fee to put a $100K reserve price on it.
~GoRK
Well, sure technically all opengl drawing is orthographic projection, but that is not entirely what GL_ORTHO is. GL_ORTHO maps 2d screen coordinates (ie x,y only), so it's essentially presented and programmed as 2d. Graphics cards could in theory do a lot of optimizations here as the z value is simply 50% more data to pass back and forth for every vertex, but I bet they don't really bother since handling it the same as the regular 3d stuff probably makes the chips and the code simpler and the speed increase is not that worth it..
Well, actually most all of it is done in 2D with OpenGL.
GL does have a couple 2D Drawing modes, GL_ORTHO, for instance, and cards hardware accelerate them. How do you think games draw their pretty little GUI's and menus and whatnot?
Interestingly enough, nobody's ever developed a really good benchmark for cards that can accurately compare card performances drawing to ortho's. Maybe 3DMark should include a test like this. I imagine that raw fill rate has the biggest impact here, but who knows what kind of crazy optimizations card manufacturers might have in there to help/hurt the 2D OpenGL performance in favor of the 3D.
Haha Microsoft got the SAP virus!
Now they must give SAP 2 Billion dollars to fix it!
At least Microsoft ran away in time and were smart enough to realize that even they could not integrate with SAP.
This is in sharp contrast to most companies who deal with SAP that end up spending up to 2 billion dollars for a product that doesn't even work.
My drive thrashes with bittorrent on just a 10Mbps connection - I really doubt you could sustain 100Mbps speeds with bittorrent accessing random locations across a 1gb file...
Either you need some more RAM or BitTorrent needs a rewrite.
You can follow the same procedure you use for your linux recovery -- put in the install cd or darwin cd, boot to a shell, mount up the disk read only and perform your backup, analysis, and then recover by whatever means you want.
To boot to a shell using the install cd you have to go into open firmware and set OF to pass the -s option to the mach kernel. The darwin CD will give you the option to jump to a shell right off the bat.
Build youself a hugeass induction coil and suck the power right out of the air! Free electricity for your servers!
This kind of makes me wonder...
I built a dual xeon system today using two boxed intel chips... I took the parts out and put them on the bench then installed them in the machine. I have no idea if I paired the fans or heatsinks or baffles or mounts or whatever correctly with the processors. There were two of everything. Maybe they are around backwards; who knows?!?
I hope if one dies they will honor the warranty even if I send them back the wrong fan!
You have to consider also, that Google is a different word than googol. It's unlikely that anyone searching for information on one would inadvertently stumble upon the other.
There are plenty of other companies that play on words to derive their names -- it's nothing new. But you don't see the decendents of the Earl of Sandwich suing the makers of Manwich claiming they aren't recognizing their true origins!
Well, they have a whole paragraph on it no less than 2 clicks from their homepage. They aren't trying to hide anything, and they recognize the origin of the name quite openly.
Which means this lawsuit was cooked up by a money grubbing crybaby bitch with total disregard to legacy. If she had some kind of decency in her, she probably could have gotten google to sponsor a scholarship or something else actually appropriate (note: it's likely they already *do*), but instead she jumps to a lawsuit.
Her great uncle is probably rolling in his grave.