Those pro-level drone races are something else. The ones where they move all through a multi-level abandoned warehouse / factory in all three dimensions are astounding.



In other news, I love Tesla. I'll probably never own one of their vehicles, but I love their panache.

Like how they just gave a liiiitle extra bit of the finger to Porsche by unveiling a new SuperCharger at the Nürburgring just after beating their best all-electric laptime by :20.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EEw-yqcW...pg&name=medium

WHAT ROLLERCOASTER is this?? I want in!

Came across this photo today while searching for something unrelated.

https://scontent-dfw5-1.xx.fbcdn.net...3d&oe=5E09CDF9


To this day, I think that's probably my favorite control room build of all time. I asked the manufacturer (Wheatstone) "can you make a 52 fader E6 control surface and mix engine for me?" and they said "no."

So I built one anyway, by hacking two of their largest E6s together both mechanically and electrically and softwareically. The mechanical part of joining them was especially interesting.

A hell of a Frankenconsole, but it works. (Different colors, because the right-half is two years older than the left-half, and they changed the cosmetics in that time.)

This guy:

https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...76136a785f.png


He bothers me.

Why? Other than he is up and around early?

I just want to mention, if they are being remotely controlled, they're not technically "drones". I'm sure it's a colloquialism now, but the Air Force would consider these as sUAS, small Unmanned Aircraft Systems. Something the size of an MQ-1 Predator (roughly the wingspan of a Cessna 172) would be considered an RPA, Remotely Piloted Aircraft.

They trained here:

available on Steam...

this game was somehow harder, and you didnt even have to control the machine.

Aaah, Descent. I loved that game.

Back in college, we ran 10b2 coax ethernet through the dorm to about a half-dozen rooms, and used to do late-night multiplayer binges over NetBEUI. Descent was one of the regulars in our rotation, along with Command & Conquer, Doom 2, Rise of the Triad, etc.

I was the friggin' master of Command & Conquer. Build ALL the helicopters.


This, of course, was at a time when one of these little fellas would set you back about $200, which was a not insignificant amount of money for a college student in the 90s.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/a6cAA...wLp/s-l640.jpg

we used arcnet... coax running everywhere.

Also good stuff. And that's actually how we got internet access in the dorm rooms, in 1995.

There was a campus-wide arcnet ring, which is how they distributed access to the VAX 11/780s in the main computing center to VT220s all across campus. Turns out that even though there was no terminals in our dorm, the arcnet passed through the basement, and there WAS a termserver node there for some reason, with a bunch of 4800 bps RS-232 ports.

Well, that was a no-brainer. Ran some serial cables up to Mauricio's room on the 3rd floor, since he had a Linux machine, plugged 'em all in, used TIA running on the VAX to bond them into a single connection (I think we used SLIP?), and used his PC as an ISP.


In retrospect, I'm a bit surprised that nobody ever noticed any of the exploits of the Fletcher Hall Midnight Wiring Society.

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...31b801d807.png

Its hard to describe how challenging it is to fly one of those little quadcopters (I still refuse to say "drone")

Can you remotely lock him in, or take the inside door knob home with you or something?

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...892af5f58e.jpg

We simply had ethernet in the dorms. I forget if my first dorm had it but definitely my second year. Right around 93-94. We were super exicted to have that and windows 3.11. Sorry trumpet winsock.

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...c4ee175fc6.png
Courtesy of a flat earth website

For serious? Man, UF didn't get dorm ethernet until the late 90s, by which time three of us had an apartment off-campus.

Which sucked in a way, because we couldn't get DSL or cable modem service.

So we did what any three nerds would do. Had four telephone lines installed, hooked them to four modems, found a bank of "nobody even remembers that these are still here" 28.8 modems in one of the data centers, wrote a little script to keep our modems dialed into those 24/7, and did the TIA thing again to bond them.

I wish I'd have taken some pictures in that apartment. It was two stories, and downstairs next to the kitchen there was a little area that looks like it should have been fitted with built-in bookshelves. That was our data center. Had the line printer there, the Linux machine, piles of (very old) hard drives that were made into a primitive RAID, etc.


But alas, I did not own a camera then.

For serious. You knew I met my wife back then on IRC, didn't you? Of course I didn't marry her until 15 years later... but I swear I was never a nerd, I was just interoperable with them.

I do not recall knowing that.


Gotta say, I miss the days of remotely logging into the Big Iron machines. Granted, they were often cumbersome, and by the mid 90s there wasn't much they could do that my PC couldn't. It's just that there was a sense of occasion knowing that you were logged into one of them, controlling in some small way a computer that cost more than the house you grew up in and used disk drives that could kill a man if one of them tipped over onto you.



http://users.tpg.com.au/baseaman38/s...ics/vax-12.jpg