I'm very surprised to see the rapid advancement in robotics these days. After all the fancy demos of Boston Dynamics and others from 10 years ago, and no real advancement beyond them, we kinda learned to treat robotics as "fancy toys".
Now, this feels to me very much like a Deep Blue moment in chess, when to everyone's surprise it won over Garry Kasparov 3.5 to 2.5. 20 years in, and no one even considers competing with chess engines.
This Ace robot won over table tennis professionals in 3 matches and lost in 2. Even the score is similar. I wonder what it'll all look like in 20 years from now.
I'm very much into niche hobbies: they usually have nice tight & friendly communities.
Below are some of my favorite I'd love to share:
- FPV drone flying: once you've spent 5-10 hours to get initial reflexes for the controls in the simulator, the first flight on a real machine outside feels magical.
- Electric unicycles: the "mind-controlled" PEV, and arguably the best way to get around in San Francisco.
- Foiling: the closest feeling to riding a hoverboard. You can kite-foil, pump-foil, sup-foil etc, but wing foiling is the easiest to get started.
- Knots: tying laces properly just makes life easier, and tying tucker's / voodoo hitches for the first few times feels like a magic trick.
- Cardistry: learning to do a proper riffle shuffle and a few artistic cuts adds some fun to the most boring part of any card game.
- Any FPV controller that connects to laptop. 2 solid choices are TBS Tango 2 or DJI FPV Remote Controller [3]
I spent ~20 hours in the sim before advancing to real drones; a few of my friends followed this path and successfully passed an improvised exam on real drone after just ~10 hours in the sim.
As for the drone itself, the easiest setup is probably DJI Avata [4], but it's less of the proper "FPV feel". I personally fly Flywoo Explorer [5] with DJI system: it's a small & nibmle long range drone, easy to travel with, and powerful enough to chase kiteboarders even in a strong wind.
P.S. Don't be discouraged with sim flying: it's actually very fun, feels similar to TrackMania Nations.
That's the fun part: most of the stuff currently on the market is quite good. The quads, the gear — if a few people recommend it on Reddit, it's likely totally fine for a beginner and it will fly well.
A few pointers:
The guy we all watch on YouTube is called Joshua Bardwell.
Regarding radio, the protocol you're looking for is ELRS. Everything has converged on ELRS, it's open source and crazy good. ELRS at 250mW will survive more than your video feed, and many ELRS transmitters go to 1W.
Transmitter (the controller): There are options, but you can't go wrong with anything from RadioMaster. FPV quads don't need many inputs, so honestly a RadioMaster Pocket is completely fine. I have both the Pocket and the TX16S (their flagship transmitter, I also fly fixed wings), and it makes zero difference for quads. This is completely up to your budget, just get something with ELRS.
The video situation is a bit more interesting, but generally: analog is alive and kicking with brutal power and range, but shitty video. In digital, DJI is king, although a bit expensive. They sell entire drones, even some (very meh) FPV, but they also sell cameras, video transmitters and goggles for "proper" FPV builds, and these kick ass. If you don't like DJI, there are alternatives (WalkSnail, HDZero), but nothing as open and as compatible as analog.
First you spend some time on a sim. They're all good nowadays, I personally fly Uncrashed the most, but I also have Liftoff and Tryp FPV, it's all good fun. The flight models feel slightly different, but so do real-life quads, so unless you're trying to match your real-life quad down to the last atom, you won't notice any issues.
You either build a quad from scratch (not hard at all, but it takes time and there's some soldering) or you buy a finished one (we call these BNF — bind and fly), or you get something in between and add your own parts (e.g. a camera + VTX (video transmitter) to match your goggles).
You choose the size and type of the quad according to where and how you want to fly. A "tiny whoop" for your apartment, a "cinewhoop" for high-quality video indoors and outdoors, a 3inch freestyle quad for a big garden or a park, a 5inch (the golden standard) for racing and seriously whipping it around, a 7inch for huge environments and longer cruising, and anything bigger for serious long-range missions.
I wouldn't go larger than 5 inches for a first quad, you'll likely crash it a few [dozens of] times and larger quads are both more fragile and more expensive to fix if you do break something.
Crashing a quad is a completely normal thing and they're built to withstand it. Usually you'll just ding or bend a prop, you bend it back and replace it (<1€/$) when it's really bad.
The standard advice is always to buy a transmitter and get started with the simulator. Then buy / build your custom racing drone that suits your flying style and area. Anything from 20 gram whoops that fly indoors to 5" racing quads that need a lot of open space.
But with dji neo 2 / avata you get a fairly beginner friendly set up. Once you're used to it, you can upgrade to a good racing drone by building one yourself.
This is awesome! I enjoyed typing out the 20 words available, and would love to type more! Why are the majority of the words in the word list [1] commented out?
Also, I would appreciate if the word & its description is automatically pronounced (or maybe there's a setting to do so). This way I would be able to train audio perception, which is oftentimes challenging with French.
Right now, clicking the "speaker" icon speaks out the word, not definition, and also steals focus from the input field.
I learned handstands at a circus school and this tutorial indeed looks very similar to what we where doing.
The article also suggests a belly-to-wall handstands at some point, which (according to my teachers) is a much better exercise for a proper handstand then a back-to-wall handstands.
Two things that help me practice these days:
- voice-controlled timer to keep track of handstand time: https://timeless.aslushnikov.com/ (I didn’t find any readily available so hacked my own)
This reminds me about Stanislav Kurilov [1], who successfully escaped USSR by jumping off the cruise ship with a snorkeling mask and swimming for the following 2.5 days towards Philippines.
He wrote an interesting book called "Alone In The Ocean" [2] where he described his endeavor.
Not mentioned in that link though is that the doctors who examined him believed his resistance to cold came from him eating a traditional diet that included seal meat in his youth, and that his body fat had accumulated a not inconsiderable amount of seal blubber.
The most important aspect of this is he was wearing a 5mil wetsuit. All of the rest of the things they mentioned are much smaller factors in him staying warm. The wetsuit also makes him slightly more buoyant. I kayak in the winter and have a dry suit, and a 5mil wetsuit when the water gets a bit warmer. In the winter my survival time would be minutes unprotected. The most dangerous time of year is May and June as unprotected kayakers come out in response to the warm air temperature. But the water is still very cold.
In that water he would have succumb to hypothermia in hours. I spent 2 hours wading in water with no protection in the same temperature that he was in. My body temp was 95 degrees, lower than his after 72.
It's one thing to sit neutrally bouyant in a Scuba suit, or in a flotation device, with nothing but shivering to keep warm. Asleep, you can get hypothermia in water that is nearly at body temperature.
However, endurance athletes (like this 2.5-day-swimmer apparently decided he was) can keep warm by exertion. Competitive swimmers will keep warm, and actually sweat a great deal, in a very cold pool throughout an hour or two of practice in nothing but a speedo.
The problem only comes when one discovers, like the protagonist of Jack London's "To Build A Fire", that you lack the endurance.
Did anybody read the article?? One of the most important factors was staying in the fetal position- he even lost consciousness at times and was saved by a floatation device that kept his head above water.
heat production by effort is large, probably way more efficient than shivering so your chances are probably better if you can reach a destination by swimming.
Hypothermia starts at relatively high temperature (naked, below 25°c if I remember well)
There are records of people dying after hours of being exposed to 14°c without proper clothing (actually in the Philippine, if memory serves me well)
Our body (without technology like clothing or homes) are really just adapted to live around the equator at constant 27°c :-)
The Ph. are just off the equator. I’ve been in the water in northern Australia and the water was 30c and on the verge of being too warm. Definitely not refreshing, felt like a salty bath tub.
Due to water being a way better conductor of heat than air you lose heat up to 75% faster than in air. Even 30°C warm water can therefore quickly lead to hypothermia if unprotected. Ever seen scuba instructors in warm countries? While their customers would often submerge in nothing but a swimsuit the instructors would often wear 6mm full body wetsuits due to longer exposure. And yet a lot of them are shivering in the evenings.
I've been shivering in the water at 27 degrees Celcius in Australia (diving, no wetsuit, sitting on the bottom). Admittedly I have a very slender build, but clearly 27 degrees is below my equilibrium temperature when not in activity.
There are a few adaptions to colder conditions like Brown Fat and shivering which directly converts calories into heat and work fairly well.
Body Size and insulating fat at can also make a huge difference. People in warmer climates are simply less adapted to cold conditions and therefore at greater risk for a given temperature.
PS: Some people can actually walk around without clothing or becoming cold in 40f weather and be perfectly comfortable. It's sleeping that's the greatest risk as you reduce metabolic activity while having a large surface area in contact with the ground.
There is wide variety in human resistance to cold, including cold water. It isn't surprising that someone who had lived in Russia could spend a great deal of time in the tropical ocean. Some people who live in the tropics can do that!
Incidentally, this variation seems not to be genetic, or maybe it is epigenetic. When visiting India during the "winter" with a friend who was born there but had lived in USA for decades, his family was shocked at how both of us were comfortable in short sleeves while they shivered in heavy coats.
There's a "Coverage Support" experiment in Chrome DevTools which does css + js coverage in a way you describe it. The CSS part was shown on Chrome DevSummit 2016 [1]
Now, this feels to me very much like a Deep Blue moment in chess, when to everyone's surprise it won over Garry Kasparov 3.5 to 2.5. 20 years in, and no one even considers competing with chess engines.
This Ace robot won over table tennis professionals in 3 matches and lost in 2. Even the score is similar. I wonder what it'll all look like in 20 years from now.
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