"The Ultimate Paper Airplane: With Step-by Step Instructions for Seven Different Models" by Richard Kline and Floyd Fogleman are my goto book to show people.
Unfortunately needs a bit of tape usually for most of the models. But great book.
A friend of mine his uncle bought him a copy. We proceeded to make all of them. Came across a funny thing if you clip a clothspin on the tip of the one the cover it goes wildly further than it should. Even without it goes pretty far.
That paperclip might have more mass than the actual paper. You can stuff a lot more energy into that throw while adding negligible drag. And you are moving the center of mass to a position which favours more stable flight as well.
thats what we were thinking. we tried paperclips and it didnt really work and just nose dive. My theory is the clothspin turned it more into a dart than a airplane. Usually that particular plane would have a habit of nosing up and stalling. that could have played into it too.
This is nearly the exact reason most 'smart home' systems fail eventually. They become very brittle after the hardware gets 'old'. Where as the dumb tech from the 1950s still 'just works' and costs 1/20th of the smart switch.
In that system you can tell what is going on by looking at in a glance and works with no power. Sometimes simple is a great answer.
However, I can think of one reason the 'no power' argument fails. They do a lot by radio. That needs power. Also you would need to retrain everyone. Oh and you probably would get locked into one company that wants to control the whole software stack and sell tons of support.
I have a friend who is a real estate agent for the wealthy. He laughs at the people who automate their homes. The automation inevitably fails, the vendor has disappeared, and the owner is faced with ripping all the wiring out of the walls and replacing it. Usually it gets replaced with conventional wiring.
When my home was built in 1999, I poured over all the home automation systems. I opted for conventional wiring. But I did wire every room (myself) with cat5 cable and RG6 coax, in a star configuration. It has served me very well, no problems at all.
I don't use the RG6 anymore, as my TV service comes over the intertoobs now. The cat5 isn't supposed to work with gigabit equipment, but it works fine. Wifi has improved by leaps and bounds, but I still rely on hardwired ethernet, as it is stupid reliable.
> I did wire every room (myself) with cat5 cable and RG6 coax
I think the best idea is to install conduit as the house is built, so that outdated wires can be replaced with newer wires by just tying the end of the old wire to the end of the new wire and pulling.
Just be sure to inspect the house as it is being built, because I think one user on HN wrote that conduit was required by law, but when he went to swap the wires, he couldn't pull them - he discovered there was only pipe in the visible terminations, not the whole route.
Conduit is indeed a better idea, but it would have been too much work for me. I figured the bases were covered well enough with 4 cables to each destination - 2 cat5 and 2 rg6. The duality was in case one of the cables failed, or got a nail driven through it.
One place I applied to 'hmm think we toss it onto sourcesafe once and awhile'. It was their main product. They had about 15 people working on it. Plus one big ol folder on that one machine that was 'the builds'.
Some slight rigor shows you are not just doing whatever. I found most projects once you scale past 2 or 3 people and your 3rd release you basically are forced into some sort source control. Or it is a game of 'what file did they break today and I have to spend 3 hours fixing before I can add my feature'. Then you end up with merge meetings and very weird things happening.
Usually missing source control in an older org means there is a large swath of tech debt. Watch for the weeds. You will find other things very quickly.
Yeah at the time. You would get the whole range of good/bad disks. Sometimes even between computers. May work just fine on one computer and not the next. It was not common but it wasnt totally rare either. Just sometimes would catch out out at silly times.
That they are still used in a critical infra item is a bit surprising. Getting new stock would be a major hassle.
honestly the naming on all of them from all companies is weird unless you 'know where to look'. I get having a cool code name for each one. But give me a clear way to look at it and see why should I use one model over another? like 'low/medium/high' something?! please!
Yeah, it would be nice if there was some standardized naming. You'd think these AI companies would benefit if users actually knew which models were the fast ones and which models were the more capable ones. It's easy for the layman to get bad output and come to the wrong conclusion, writing off an entire brand.
Maybe it's because I'm more in the Anthropic ecosystem, but I find their naming convention pretty straight forward. I've given up trying to follow OpenAI, but they have a version number that goes up and sometimes they call one of them "cyber" so you know it's I guess extra good at red teaming?
Google is just beyond me I have no idea what they're doing, and no interest in figuring it out. I use a free gemini flash model in one of my personal apps, but that's it
how i have been using it 'at home'. its ok conversationally. It honestly is a very 'mid' search engine. Sometimes it can zoom right onto what I want. Other times it gets very fixated on the 'wrong thing' and you have to club it into expanding its view. It just randomly gets 'lost' and you have to nudge it along to actually dig in. even then even if you explicitly tell it to review its sources it will just kinda ignore the request and keep going.
typically in that case the boomerang is they come back but as a consultant. just doing the same thing they were doing before but at a different rate. usually higher to cover health ins plus a bit of a bonus.
Honest question how many of that 2k are just the same webpages but just different days?
I personally am a close the whole browser out at the end of the day guy. With bookmarks for things I just have not got to yet. With a every few months cleanup of the 'to do' folder. Just today I have probably opened 20 tabs and closed 15 so far. At the end of the day they should all be gone.
Unfortunately needs a bit of tape usually for most of the models. But great book.
A friend of mine his uncle bought him a copy. We proceeded to make all of them. Came across a funny thing if you clip a clothspin on the tip of the one the cover it goes wildly further than it should. Even without it goes pretty far.
reply