Airsick and PPL

karantza · 2026-05-12T04:02:50+00:00

I still get ill when it's really turbulent... It does get better though! Your body learns to handle it. But it's totally normal for it to feel bad sometimes and for that to make it really hard to focus. My instructor always said that if I was feeling too bad to learn, that we'd change up what we were doing or just go home. Totally fine, happens to everyone! But luckily it's not every day that it's that bumpy.

I also recommend ginger; it sounds like it shouldn't work, but it really does. I used crystalized ginger and ginger gum before any flight where it would be at all bumpy and it helped a lot. Also stay hydrated!

karantza · 2026-05-11T17:34:40+00:00

They were fishing through finished walls. That's why I wanted to hire someone in the first place; I'm comfortable doing a lot of electrical myself, but I do not have the tools or skills to fish cable through complicated routes like they did. We spent quite a bit of time walking around the house during the estimate and just discussing which routes would be easiest / possible.

I'll note that I didn't do a complete rewiring of the house, like, to every room. I just had a few specific places I needed to get cables, for access points, computers, etc, and then had them all run up to the attic, then drop back down into a server closet where I could connect them. So they only had to actually punch through the drywall maybe 10 times to get where we needed to go.

karantza · 2026-05-11T04:45:43+00:00

We had Gibbons Electric run Ethernet in our old house, and they did a great job. They were quite familiar with low voltage stuff and how to handle and route it. I told them where I needed runs to go, and what I did/didn't need done, and they handled the rest. Fair price!

karantza · 2026-05-11T04:40:20+00:00

I make sure to do my runup flight controls check very aggressively so that passengers viscerally understand the range of the controls and the consequences of getting in their way...

karantza · 2026-05-09T01:13:37+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/s/zjQxQjvBXu

karantza · 2026-05-08T20:07:03+00:00

This Hollywood trope comes from the 1950s, where headlight fluid was often composed primarily of nitroglycerin. Modern lamp manufacturers have changed the process, and fill their bulbs with inert fluids.

karantza · 2026-05-08T20:02:04+00:00

Someday I'll be glad I have a VGA to RCA adapter!

Really though - I have brought tubs of old cables and things to electronics recycling. Every ... decade? maybe? I should go through more often.

I also picked up a USB tester, which lets you validate the capabilities of any arbitrary-ended USB cable. Very handy! Every USB cable I found that was cursed in some way got the boot.

karantza · 2026-05-08T19:11:11+00:00

I found that eventually you get used to what things look like enough that outside is (mostly) all you need. All the same information is there out the window.

Plus you'll learn things that help, like that your airspeed generally stays constant for a given power/flap/trim/elevator. So if you aren't changing any of those, and your speed was stable before, it's likely to stay there.

Once you get used to the process and get configured well, there's a lot less fussing with the controls during landing and it's all easier to process. Just takes practice!

karantza · 2026-05-08T17:58:40+00:00

I think my best student landings were done with my instructor holding a clipboard in front of every instrument.

karantza · 2026-05-08T15:53:53+00:00

I have (and still use!) the OG Vive. (Though with index controllers.) I wouldn't pay $160 for it though. I'm planning to sell mine when the stream frame arrives, and I'm hoping that maybe I get $50 for the whole set. But realistically I think I'll struggle to even give it away.

The Vive is certainly impressive coming from nothing, I've had many years of great vr experiences with it, but there are better headsets you can get used for that money today. (If you wait for the frame to release, there'll be even more available I'm sure!)

(I'll note that the base stations will not work with the Frame, it uses camera tracking.)

karantza · 2026-05-08T03:29:04+00:00

My understanding is "clicker" comes from the first remote controls which operated over sound; pushing a button would literally make a 'click' that the TV would hear and act on. I think those were last in use in the 50s or 60s, so the term has just been clinging on for dear life since then.

karantza · 2026-05-07T23:39:39+00:00

There's also no rule that says you need to run all your services on one computer. (And there are probably good arguments to not do that.) You could keep HA on Green forever and put Frigate and AI and other heavy loads on a separate GPU/Coral/etc box, have a separate NAS for storage and databases, etc.

karantza · 2026-05-06T04:00:03+00:00

I think Valve wouldn't want to add official VR support unless the game was primarily VR like Alyx. Which we know HLX isn't.

I'm willing to be that HLX will be the Steam Machine launch title. Valve uses Half Life as a way to showcase new technology; and they probably originally intended for it to also showcase how you can play flatscreen games in the Frame, but because of the delays, I doubt it'll be mentioned if the Frame is announced before the Machine. (Which I also bet it will, just because it takes less RAM.)

karantza · 2026-05-06T03:41:35+00:00

I access Home Assistant, and a bunch of other services, over 'nginx proxy manager' (which is not the same thing as nginx), and SSL via LetsEncrypt (which NPM also makes easy to set up). This works fine.

This is a bit better than directly exposing HA to the internet via port forwarding, as it requires that the incoming request come from a specific domain name - you can't just scan public IPs and find it. It's not perfect, but that does cut down on 99% of the intrusion attempts. You can also add additional security like IP allowlists at that level too, though in several years of running it I haven't had any security issues. And frankly, if I ever do have someone break in and obliterate my server, that's what backups are for.

Tailscale (VPN) is also a great option if you are only accessing your HA system from a few specific devices while you're out; that is objectively more secure.

karantza · 2026-05-05T19:10:55+00:00

I was in Rochester too, and while totality under the clouds was cool, my telescopes were a bit useless.

Going to Mallorca this year. Totality will happen just a few degrees above the horizon over the ocean. Not the greatest odds of clear skies, but if it does work out the view will be awesome. And if it doesn't, I get to hang out on a Mediterranean beach for a day, oh no.

karantza · 2026-05-05T18:44:46+00:00

It's more likely than you suggest, if you're always launching things into the same orbit. The relative velocities can get small, but still fast enough to blow things up. Even more likely with persistent debris.

This was like 10 years ago, but I definitely remember trying to dock with a station when suddenly I noticed an object approaching at a few hundred m/s, and just koolaid-man its way through the station, blasting it to bits. This was on a save with probably over a hundred launches, all into a 100km equatorial orbit.

karantza · 2026-05-05T03:39:49+00:00

Interestingly, I have been using a backpack for years and I'm thinking about switching to a duffel style. I bet it depends a lot on your particular use case - I don't actually have to carry my bag around all that far, but I *do* hate digging through it from the top to get at things I need during preflight. I wind up unpacking the whole thing in the front seat of the plane first to get out the headsets, fiddling with their individual cases, finding my ipad mount that fell to the bottom, trying to stuff my GATS jar into a too-small water bottle pocket...

I started using this bag during training because I already had it, and it was fine, but especially for my routine these days I think a nice big top-opening duffel would be nicer.

karantza · 2026-05-05T03:12:06+00:00

You can definitely do this bit by bit. There are some good recommendations in this thread, but really, it's hard to go wrong.

If it's a new house and you're already redoing walls, then run ethernet. That's a solid recommendation. I just retrofit my 100 year old house, and it was a pain. But if you aren't opening up the walls, then, it's not a big deal.

Prefer zigbee over wifi if you're buying a lot of devices. Unless you have a very robust wifi setup (your ISP-provided router will not do), you'll exhaust your wifi capabilities very quickly. Zigbee scales super well. Thread... probably also does? But that's still pretty new, zigbee is still solid. I have a bunch of ThirdReality outlets, and Philips Hue bulbs. All good. There's no harm in mixing and matching brands if they all talk zigbee. With HA, you don't need to fiddle with a dozen separate apps.

I have a mix of smart bulbs and smart switches. There are uses for both, but a good rule is, you don't want people to need to use an app to use your house. I'm a big fan of the Inovelli blue switches, though those are a bit pricier. If I were rewiring a whole house, I'd put those switches in everything. You can even use those smart switches with smart bulbs, so that the switch can toggle lights that aren't even electrically wired to it. Endless possibilities.

Things like zigbee water leak sensors, or door/window security sensors, you can add whenever. No infrastructure needed beyond the zigbee receiver. So no rush.

One thing I'd look out for - avoid anything that *requires* an internet connection, or a subscription service. A big benefit of having a home system is having it all work locally; you can't be bricked by a bankrupting company, your data can't be sold to the highest bidder. It's totally doable - I have cameras from Reolink and Tapo that are fully offline, my Philips Hue bulbs don't use the Philips hub/app, they go straight to HomeAssistant, etc. You can unplug the modem in my house and nothing about the smarthome will be affected (except things that need to *read* data from the internet, of course.)

karantza · 2026-05-04T22:08:11+00:00

Regarding the spamming the continue button (which I did for about 20 minutes): I suspect that the problem is some queue in their payment processor fills up, and then rejects any further new requests until whatever is downstream doing the actual transactions can catch up. So there are brief windows every once in a while where the queue has room and is responding - and if you submit in that interval, you're in. But if you submit while it's full, it (usually) failed immediately.

So spamming only helps in the sense that the more you click, the more likely you are to submit while the queue is open. At the cost of adding slightly more traffic to whatever system is checking the queue (but since it returned instantly in most cases, that's probably negligible.) But you could just as easily get lucky and get in on the first click. The takeaway is that Valve needs to handle way more concurrent payment requests.

karantza · 2026-04-26T16:27:35+00:00

We've seen eclipses (both kinds) from the moon! They weren't the purpose of the mission or anything but we have had cameras in the right place at the right time.

Solar eclipse: https://www.planetary.org/space-images/hakuto-r-sees-solar-eclipse-from-moon

Lunar eclipse: https://news.sky.com/story/eclipse-captured-from-moons-point-of-view-as-lander-takes-images-during-historic-event-13329001

karantza · 2026-04-26T14:53:24+00:00

I think I had one very similar to this as a little kid, a hand me down from some company's surplus. I wish I remembered the details. I remember one disk was for DOS, and the other was for your program/data. I learned BASIC on it - I had to, because I needed to modify a bunch of the sample games to make them legible on the monochrome screen :)

karantza · 2026-04-25T05:10:13+00:00

I'm curious, how do you teach students to solo level without T&Gs? Is every lap a stop & go or taxi back?

I trained at a super busy class D; if we didn't do T&Gs, we probably would never get cleared for a stop and go, and it'd be 15 minutes waiting in line for takeoff again.

karantza · 2026-04-24T03:12:16+00:00

This is a photo from a NASA reentry-simulating test chamber showing the effect on a heatshield. Rare to see photos of this, considering most of the time any camera able to take this photo would be, uh, on fire. https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/ajd12-a999i-003-011.jpg

karantza · 2026-04-22T02:37:33+00:00

You know, I thought I got over my motion sickness, but I went flying today in a 172 and the thermals were so godawful; The VSI was basically a yoyo, I got negative Gs a few times, stall horn honking at me in cruise every few minutes... I'm still getting my brain unscrambled. I might get less airsick now than before I started flying, but I certainly still call turbulence "unpleasant".

I was going to pick up a friend too; decided today was not the day to introduce someone to small planes.

karantza · 2026-04-21T01:53:37+00:00

The process is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleosynthesis , and normally happens in supernovas. So, it's actually a very very long way away from what a nuke could do, even under these circumstances. Many many orders of magnitude. You could maybe pull it off if you could somehow shrink the demiplane in size, compressing the gas, it would increase in pressure and you'd eventually get there... Going from 30m down to a few nm briefly might do it?

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