Thomil's Random Ramblings

So, you've got your new drone. It's set up, you've done all the firmware updates, and you're ready to fly. But where do you fly, and when? You don't want to stray into closed airspace, and you certainly don't want your drone to be blown into the next available tree, or drowned in some torrential rain. And you absolutely want to avoid flying your drone into the engine or cockpit of a manned aircraft. Thankfully, you don't need to be superhuman to manage all of that. There's a ton of resources out there, both for neophyte drone pilots and for the more seasoned remote aviators, from web pages (like my weather blog for example ;) ), to a plethora of apps. There's literally more stuff out there than you can shake a stick at, but personally, I only use a handful at this stage. Weather Pretty much all consumer drones these days are fair-weather UAVs, no matter how you twist or turn it. Some drones can take more punishment than others, but in e

I've just gone through the recently opened files here in Word, and to my own shock, I found an overabundance of weather forecasts and warnings, with precious little of the blog articles I so love to write. Now granted, the last few days have been extraordinary from a weather perspective, but when did that become the dominant factor in my writing ambitions? That's not how it's supposed to work. But, at least it gave me a good opener for this post, after staring at a blank page for hours. Anyways, as the Stellaris theme is playing in the background, I'm sitting here reflecting on two rather interesting TED talks I watched today. Both were from a TED playlist called "For the love of introverts", which is kinda fitting, since I am very much one of those. The first one was held by author Susan Cain. Cain, who holds degrees from both Princeton and Harvard, laid out how our society and education systems, even to some degree our own family upbringing, are tooled t