Shallow Thoughts : : misc
Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.
Thu, 03 Feb 2022
Shoveling our long driveways and multiple decks and patios is a lot
of work, still novel and unfamiliar to a couple of refugees from California.
Especially when, like yesterday, the snow keeps coming down
so you have to do it repeatedly.
Read more ...
Tags: snow, nature
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11:30 Feb 03, 2022
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Tue, 11 Jan 2022
On most Sundays, you can find me at Overlook Park where the
Los Alamos Aeromodelers fly radio controlled model airplanes at the
big soccer field. The
Los Alamos Aeromodelers
used to be an official flying club, but now it's just a group of
friends who fly together.
I first got into R/C flying in the 1980s. Back then, model planes were
made of balsa wood. They took forever to build. The planes were heavy
(five or six pounds)
and flew fast, and so when they crashed — which they did a
LOT — you had a lot of fastidious rebuilding to do.
They were powered with internal combustion 2-stroke motors.
They were SO LOUD. You couldn't fly them in local parks;
you had to drive to a remote flying field where the noise wouldn't
disturb anyone.
Plus the motors were finicky and messy: they spewed oil
everywhere, so you had to clean the plane off with paper towels and
a degreaser after every flight. Ick.
Read more ...
Tags: planes, radio control
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15:56 Jan 11, 2022
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Sat, 01 Jan 2022
Happy New Year!
I wrote a few years ago about keeping
lists
of the books I read, first because I was curious how many books I read,
but later because I found the lists quite useful for other purposes.
But I realized this year that I hardly ever write about the good books
I discover each year. That's a shame: how are we to find out about
great new authors if we don't all make a point of sharing them?
So today I'm going to write about the best books I read in 2021.
I'll probably write catch-up articles about some of the best from
earlier years in future articles.
Read more ...
Tags: books
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16:25 Jan 01, 2022
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Mon, 26 Jul 2021
Ever since a friend let us test-ride her electric bike at PEEC's
annual Electric Vehicle Show two years ago,
Dave's been stewing over the idea of getting an e-bike.
Why an e-bike?
One goal was to help us get into the back country. There are several
remote places -- most notably, in Canyonlands' Needles and Maze
districts -- that can only be accessed through trails that are beyond
our Rav4's ability. Or at least beyond our risk tolerance.
Read more ...
Tags: bike, e-bike, MTB
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16:49 Jul 26, 2021
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Tue, 29 Sep 2020
Dave was browsing through satellite imagery and noticed what looked
like an old bridge across the Rio Grande just north of Española,
near the Ohkay Owingeh pueblo.
In the Days of COVID, one cure for the stir-crazies is to get in the
car and go for a drive. So we ventured forth to check out this bridge.
Sure enough, just west of where County Road 56A crosses the Rio,
there's a little stub of a dead-end road called Yunque that leads
to a footbridge.
The name Yunque sounded vaguely familiar, but neither of us could pin
down why.
Read more ...
Tags: history, New Mexico
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12:50 Sep 29, 2020
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Thu, 21 May 2020
Seems like during the lockdown, everyone's taking up new crafts --
sewing, bread baking, or whatever. I was a little ahead of the game.
Last winter I learned to knit. I'd crocheted a little when I was a
teenager, but I'd always seen knitting as much more complicated.
It started because I couldn't find a decent headband. I'm not a big
fan of hats, because migraines, but sometimes my ears get cold on hikes.
I was dissatisfied with the headbands I found in outdoor apparel stores:
they tend to be too narrow to cover my ears, too tight, overpriced,
and don't come in many colors either. I bought one but wasn't happy
with it. I decided I could probably learn to knit my own headband
before I found one I liked.
Los Alamos has a great knitting community, as it turns out.
(I suspect most communities do).
Doris, a friend from Toastmasters, is an avid lifelong knitter
(I knew that from her
Toastmasters talks, of course), and she steered me to some good
beginner books and gave me hints on which size starter needles to buy,
including a set of circular needles since everything I was interested
in making lent itself to knitting "in the round". But Doris also
gave me a list of four different times the local knitters met in
person, including one very convenient weekly meeting at the White Rock
Library just a few miles from home.
Read more ...
Tags: misc
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17:02 May 21, 2020
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Sun, 12 Apr 2020
Last week we hiked Upper Pajarito Canyon, a trail I mostly hadn't seen
before (I'd been on parts of the trail once, years ago, on a hike I
mostly don't remember except as "try not to slide off the slippery
rainy hillside).
It turned out to be a beautiful trail. Early on, there are imposing
stone cliffs that reminded us all of the moai on Easter Island.
The trail wound through a rocky canyon, then up along the hillside
where I was able to indulge my hobby of arboronecrophotography,
eventually climbing out to a viewpoint.
Read more ...
Tags: misc
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14:17 Apr 12, 2020
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Tue, 27 Aug 2019
White Rock has a "glider port", which is just an informal spot along
the edge of the canyon where sometimes people fly R/C sailplanes. On
days when the winds are right, gliders can get some pretty good
lift.
Last Sunday wasn't one of those days. The wind was coming from
every direction but east, so the gliders were having to use
their motors periodically to climb back up to altitude.
I was mostly trying to stay above the canyon rim, but I noticed all
the other pilots were flying down below, so I decided maybe it wasn't
that dangerous to let my plane get a little below the edge for a while
before starting the motor. Wrong! Below the edge of the canyon,
there's a risk of catching some evil rotors off the cliffs. One of
those rotors caught my glider's wing and tossed it into a spiral. I
was able to recover and get the plane flying straight again --
straight toward the cliff. It smacked hard -- I saw parts flying
everywhere.
I didn't expect that the plane itself was salvageable -- it's only
styrofoam, after all -- though it looked surprisingly intact. In
any case, Dave and I hoped to recover the components: battery, motor,
receivers, servos. Hiking to the plane proved difficult: you can get
fairly near there on the Blue Dot trail, but then you need to climb
three levels of cliff to reach the place where the plane sat. Coming
down from above definitely would have required rapelling gear.
But Dave had an idea: let's go fishing!
It took some experimenting to figure out what sort of hook, line and
pole you need to fish for a thirty-ounce plane that's fifty feet down
a sheer cliff out of sight from the cliff above it. Dave did the
fishing and I acted as the caller, sitting some hundred feet away
where I could spot the plane through binoculars and shout out which
direction he needed to move the line. But we got it in the end!
I shot some quick snapshots while I wasn't busy spotting, which
you can see here:
Plane
Fishing (photos).
Amazingly, the plane was almost undamaged. The plastic spinner was
destroyed, but the motor seems fine. The nose of the plane is very
slightly askew but not broken. The battery, after being plugged in to
the receiver for 48 hours, was down to zero volts, but when we charged
it carefully, it took a charge. The canopy went flying off at the
moment of impact and is down there in the rocks somewhere, so I have a
new canopy, spinner and collet on backorder, but in the meantime, the
plane is probably flyable. I'll find out this weekend -- but if we
fly at the gliderport, I'm not letting it get lower than cliff level, ever!
Tags: planes
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16:57 Aug 27, 2019
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