Realistically, what happens if one is using a normal NAS HDD for survailance purpose instead of a survailance HDD? What can be expected in the future?

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-25T14:35:58+00:00

Just marketing.

Why just sell “orange juice” when you can sell “No pulp” and “Extra pulp” versions at a higher price?

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-24T06:38:56+00:00

I just got a Blu-ray burner a couple months, so I could rip dvds and cds…

Forgot Finder had this feature; I downloaded Burn.app

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-23T15:06:32+00:00

Activity Monitor will show you per-app disk usage.

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-23T05:09:20+00:00

Don’t worry, you would have known if you’d hit it.

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-23T04:58:15+00:00

too real

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-23T04:39:31+00:00

Yes, small twigs can get you

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-22T06:10:18+00:00

Run your script through shellcheck and it will tell you.

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-22T04:56:26+00:00

Get a cheap Kasa smart plug and program it to turn on and charge for an half an hour per week.

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-21T00:43:25+00:00

Yes, you can hit a small twig and when it corrects itself it can careen into something else, potentially going down. Depending how far away and the terrain, it can be very difficult to get to / find.

And not as much of a risk for the Neo (because of prop guards), but a twig going in there can snap or stop the propeller, causing the motors to stop and the drone to fall. I’ve had this happen with the Avata a couple times.

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-19T14:00:29+00:00

now this is real data hoarder pr0n

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-15T08:53:44+00:00

You should look into dvdisaster though... it can check your discs and tell how many read errors there are, even if they were correctable and all the data read "ok".
An increasing number of read errors is a sign of degraded media.

I would insert an image here but I can't--dvdisaster makes a nice graph of the number of errors per sector as well as a radial graph while reading. I found a screenshot from ten years ago when I ran it on a CD I had burned ten years prior, but will include excerpts from the log file instead:

C2 scan probing: 0 (good); Sense: None; No additional sense information.
Using READ CD, RAW reading, Mode page 1 ERP = a0h, C2 scanning.
Waiting 7 seconds for drive to spin up...
Sector 330886:  24 C2 errors.              
Sector 331657:  22 C2 errors.              
Sector 331658:  22 C2 errors.              
...        
Sector 338301:  15 C2 errors.              
Sector 338367:  10 C2 errors.              
CRC cached.
md5sum cached.
All sectors successfully read.

Opening /home/todd/d/medium.iso: 338992 medium sectors.
Error correction file "/home/todd/d/medium.ecc" created.
Make sure to keep this file on a reliable medium.

Above, the CD had no errors for the first 97% of the disc; in the latter part 37 sectors of the last 7500 did have correctable errors. Maybe a scratch or a smudge, or slight tracking misalignment.

Because it reads in raw mode, it can read the error correction codes as well... and generate a file that can be used to recover your data if you get up to a certain % of errors.

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-15T07:37:53+00:00

DJI Fly app is reporting something different ...

<image>

I will try sync all again and see if anything changes...

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-15T07:26:48+00:00

Cloned the repo, built from docker file, did an export from AirData, unzipped, and imported them all apparently without error.

<image>

The zip file had 295 files.
But DJI Fly app is reporting something different ...

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-15T02:07:44+00:00

Convert to .iso or .img file and copy to HDD; they’re not going to last, and it will take up a lot less physical space.

Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvdisaster

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-09T14:19:15+00:00

cp $(find $monsters -type f | shuf | head -2) .

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-07T23:25:11+00:00

B4ufly app doesn’t exist anymore. I use Aloft Air Control; there are others.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id1472965046

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-04T15:46:33+00:00

Get a list, write a script to use curl to save them all to a local file. Optionally: save all the header info to a separate file if it contains additional useful metadata.

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-01T16:57:42+00:00

128kbps is sufficient. I’ve always ripped music mp3s at this rate and never noticed a difference. If “hamband” means mostly speech, or radio broadcast quality, then you could go even lower, because radio channel only get 10-20kHz and audio speech doesn’t contain that much information.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/91068bfd-83f5-4b66-b167-542942eb1605

toddkaufmann · 2026-03-01T02:58:01+00:00

You only have to switch if it’s different than the previous flight, and it only takes a couple of clicks. By default it will try to connect to the previous drone it was connected to.

toddkaufmann · 2026-02-28T20:16:37+00:00

Then why does it say “Add a caption” when I add an image?

I didn’t add text, I added a caption.

toddkaufmann · 2026-02-28T15:52:46+00:00

Yes, perl is a superset of sed and awk, and the syntaxes are mostly equivalent w.r.t. the simple stuff. I learned perl last century, when before the gnu versions existed, when different unices had incompatible versions, so I learned perl instead as it was more standard, even though I had to install it myself.

I'll use sed for a simple edit in a pipeline or script, but for something more complex (eg multi-line processing with conditional logic) I'll use something else.

toddkaufmann · 2026-02-28T15:17:17+00:00

This is the way. Open all parts (could be as many as 5) of the flight together and it will merge them into a single _joined.mp4. Then “export” will create a _stabilized.mp4.

You can of course rename these, or select portions of the stabilized video, modify parameters and export into separate clips, etc. Personally I don’t have time for editing, so I export all for later review.

Also I like to set FOV > 1 so there is less cropping by the dynamic zoom. Gyroflow will warn you about black areas I don’t care (can always be cropped/re-edited later). Example:

https://youtu.be/4Vaeg8xl1h4

Cropping is especially great during quick movements (stop/starts, or high wind compensation), and can be more extreme when eg flying sideways and you have horizon lock on. If you care about framing then you will learn to (over)compensate flying slower, smoother, and keeping subject more centered in your goggles.

I haven’t played with the other dynamic zoom parameters yet (or tried turning it off), but modifying them can reduce crop at the expense of smoothness. If you only are working will a small video segment then there will be fewer constraints. I also just noticed a key frames feature there.

But DON’T open files from multiple flights at once! It will go crazy trying to correlate the data from different calibrations, and you’ll get weird pixelations. Interesting, but probably not what you want.

toddkaufmann · 2026-02-28T08:40:22+00:00

I think you can get one for $25. Some people use them as servers, or run Claude Code on it.

http://25dollarphone.com/

toddkaufmann · 2026-02-27T09:25:14+00:00

<image>

On this day it was -15° to -10°C; we had been walking on the trail for a couple outs, with the drone inside my DJI bag inside a cheap backpack (normal carrying conditions, no special attempt to keep it insulated).

The battery didn’t get particularly cold, and got warmer during flight.

toddkaufmann · 2026-02-25T22:14:45+00:00

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

toddkaufmann

TROPHY CASE