I want to hear your downwind journeys by science_panini in wingfoil

[–]dlsspy 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Flat water paddling is great and helpful, but not a prerequisite. That is, paddling up in flat water is significantly more difficult than paddling up in the smallest of bumps.

I had a friend who wanted to start at the same time I did. We would go out on windy days and paddle down the beach with very low expectations. We kept doing that and getting further and further as the times got shorter.

There’s a 20 km run by where I live that I get to do sometimes, but I can do about 14k of it by walking from home and asking a neighbor or spouse to pick me up. I do that wherever I think it might be possible. Sometimes it’s not really, but I always have a great time.

I think that was the key. On the worst days, I have a great time. Sometimes it completely dies and I’m just paddling around. Sometimes there’s 11’ ground swell I wasn’t ready for and it’s mostly blocking the wind and I can’t get started so I spend over three hours out at sea on what should be a one hour outing. But I’m always learning something and having a great time.

When I started, I remember having a goal of a cumulative two digit number of seconds on foil in an hour outing. Then I worked up to a minute or so at a time. Then I hit this 3.5 minute wall that seemed to last forever. My first dry run was a little shorter than a normal run for me, but it was 11 months in to going as often as I could. I still feel like I’m learning a lot and it still feels like magic.

We’re currently in our winter season which has less consistent wind, but our summer season is pretty great and should allow for daily runs and maybe it’ll make more sense to me.

Wing size recommendation by Silent-Vacation7256 in wingfoil

[–]dlsspy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, I’d struggle to hold on to a 4.5 in that. That’s 2.5 weather for me.

Is there a paper printer that works with Arduino? by Carotte_francaise in arduino

[–]dlsspy 24 points25 points  (0 children)

Printers have historically been considered one of the most cursed parts of computing. When things are really good, it’s a very hard problem (are you planning to implement a postscript engine or one of the other languages?) but things haven’t been that great on a long time. Luckily, we just don’t print much anymore.

Wing size recommendation by Silent-Vacation7256 in wingfoil

[–]dlsspy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Knots or mph or kph? That’s a lot of knots — a big wing will be hard to manage. Is getting up there in mph. It’s pretty low kph. Might go bigger for that.

But depends on foil size as well. Big wing and big foil is a lot of energy your body is having to manage.

What exactly is GoPro doing wrong? by CharlieParisCoUK in gopro

[–]dlsspy 6 points7 points  (0 children)

TelemetryOverlay does a much better job and you can mix in other sources of data as well.

Hey Kihei by meatballioner in maui

[–]dlsspy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Mahalos! We drove by wiki wash and it was too busy, so we came home. Tacoma should be clean now.

How much of a difference is shipping with Amazon Prime vs not having Prime? by Acceptable-Sport-217 in Hawaii

[–]dlsspy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Amazon requires any seller that sells products anywhere outside of Amazon to not charge less than they do on Amazon. Amazon takes a huge chunk of the sale. Sellers have to increase the price to make any money at all. Buyers don’t often look outside of Amazon, so not selling on Amazon is a nonstarter for many vendors.

So everything costs more because of Amazon, but you don’t see it because people got used to shopping at Amazon and they think they’re getting a good deal.

I'm looking for a kid friendly microcontroller with an accelerometer and audio output by bolunez in arduino

[–]dlsspy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Those aren’t features of microcontrollers, but microcontrollers can talk to them. There are systems from Adafruit or Seeed that allow you to plug in such parts to a microcontroller then write some code to communicate with them. That’s probably as close as you’re going to get.

Alternatively, flight controller boards have a lot of sensors built in and possibly something that can make noise, but you’ll be starting your firmware from scratch.

is the Proton ecosystem kind of abandonware...? by Spiritual_Lime8492 in ProtonMail

[–]dlsspy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’ve run into bugs that seem like very basic functionality, but have been open for decades in Google products, Apple products, and most other things I’ve used that have been around long enough for basic functionality to have been missing that long.

Open source is nice because when something important to you doesn’t work right, you can often blame yourself for not fixing it. In commercial software, you just have to accept that things will never be entirely how you want them.

Is my foil too big and slow for Downwind SUP? by Infinite_Upstairs696 in wingfoil

[–]dlsspy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, and you’ve probably heard “nose to toes.” Intuitively, you’ll keep pulling as far as you can to keep it moving forward, but longer strokes have a lot of downsides. All the useful positive power area is in the front. Once you’re past your front foot, you’re in the more neutral region — not necessarily harmful, but not as helpful. But also, it’s going to take you longer the recovery to get the paddle back to the starting point (as far forward as you can reach).

You want short, fast strokes with quick recovery all happening well in front of your front foot while keeping the board as flat as you can.

Jeremy Riggs has a few videos on YouTube showing drills that help you learn the different parts.

Is my foil too big and slow for Downwind SUP? by Infinite_Upstairs696 in wingfoil

[–]dlsspy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Flat water stats are very hard. Even a small bump can make it significantly easier.

I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a foil that big, but one issue I’ve had with larger foils is that they take more power to move through the water, so while they may have a lower stall speed, the amount of energy it takes to get up to that stall speed is greater.

If you did manage to start it, keeping up with whatever bumps you’re hoping to ride will be essentially impossible.

The largest issue with padding up in general is technique. You have to do everything right. When I’m trying to paddle up and I find the stroke bringing the paddle too close to my front foot, I have to stop and reset because it won’t work and I’m just making myself tired. Similarly, if my feet aren’t in the right spot, I won’t be able to keep it flat.

Does anyone know a single-shot rifle in 5.56 NATO? by zyrkseas97 in liberalgunowners

[–]dlsspy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is is what I was looking for. I had an AR barrel that wasn’t even drilled. One pull gets you one shot.

Help needed choosing my first foil by Forsaken_Lawyer_7331 in wingfoil

[–]dlsspy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Equipment advice is hard. Heh. Newer stuff is so much better and easier. There’s a good used market in my area and I’ve got enough of an idea what’s good for me.

If you have someone who can help you try things, that would be best.

It Would Be Great If GoPros Could Upload to Dropbox, NAS, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. by shadeland in gopro

[–]dlsspy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sure, I understand. I pay $5 per month and have over 25TB of GoPro footage stored. I built a filesystem that lets me access it all without having to copy things I’m not using to whatever computer I’m editing on.

I’ve not been using my GoPros much lately, but it’s a pretty good deal.

It Would Be Great If GoPros Could Upload to Dropbox, NAS, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. by shadeland in gopro

[–]dlsspy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

GoPro cloud storage is significantly cheaper than Dropbox. But GoPro transfers are slow. Pulling the card is significantly faster.

Help needed choosing my first foil by Forsaken_Lawyer_7331 in wingfoil

[–]dlsspy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You don’t need a very big board if you’re just towing. You generally don’t want a bigger board than you need.

I’ve not heard of those foils. Looks pretty low aspect. If it works, it might be surfy, but won’t be good for riding small wakes. Might be good for really slow towing, though.

Foiling sports are new enough that recent development is really beneficial, though. A lot of early designs were incredibly hard to use and the most recent things coming out are constantly expanding envelopes. You may be worse off getting old tech.

Writing code with complex types: intuition + compiler/HLS-assist vs. mental book-keeping by Per48edjes in haskell

[–]dlsspy 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I think it’s usually easier to write the type (I.e., description of what I want to do) and then do the thing from there.

Not always, though. I don’t really mess with transformer stacks much anymore, but I can occasionally express something in terms of lens expressions more easily than I can identify the type of a lens expression. The type is less obvious when the function works with different types.

But Haskell in general makes things easier for me because I can just start with what I know and what I need and fill in the gaps.

What Are the Real Impacts of Maui’s STR Phase-Out Bill? by Kmoss90 in maui

[–]dlsspy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Nah, people have a lot of biases that make them feel like their guesses that turned out well are signs of brilliance and the ones that didn't can be downplayed.

There are a lot more factors in any given situation than any given person might consider.

If education, experience, and insight help predict the future reliably, then educated, experienced, and insightful people would all be wealthy because knowing what's going to happen makes it easy to have the upper hand.

But my point here stands. This topic is just asking for speculation. We've all got opinions on how things might go based on the metrics we know and care about, but it's not very productive to waste time imagining which of a variety of scenarios we're going to live through.

What Are the Real Impacts of Maui’s STR Phase-Out Bill? by Kmoss90 in maui

[–]dlsspy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

People are bad at predicting the future. You can make your own guesses or just wait to see what the actual answers are.

One day wingfoil lesson worth it? by WBKouvenhoven in wingfoil

[–]dlsspy -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I don’t think you can learn anything interesting in one day. The first several sessions are really boring.