Thomil's Random Ramblings

So, next in my series on company-provided gifts that I received earlier this year we have… a notebook. Yep, you read that right, and no, I haven’t lost my mind. Well, not recently anyway, that happened a long time ago. And to be fair, it’s not a regular notebook either. This contraption is called Rocketbook Fusion, and it is an erasable, app-enabled notebook. Apparently, erasable notebooks in general are a thing, something that completely passed me by ever since I started using OneNote for all my notetaking needs. Anyway, when that company gift selection came around back in January 2021, this Rocketbook Fusion looked interesting, so I decided to grab one of those. Hey, wouldn’t want any of my gift points to go to waste now, would I? So, what is this Rocketbook Fusion exactly? Essentially, it is just your regular notebook. However, it sports specially treated pages that you can write on like usual, but that are waterproof. When writing with a special pen, you can just wipe the writing a...

When I came to Ireland all the way back in 2012, one of the first organisations of the state I really had any noteworthy interest in was the Irish meteorological service named , rather creatively, Met Éireann. My first impression was, to put it mildly, underwhelming. The website looked old-fashioned even by the standards of 2012, the app was equally unremarkable. Communications-wise, a closed-up clam would have been more talkative than the Met Éireann of the time, who seemingly didn’t exist outside of the realm of either the RTÉ studio or their own HQ. Both their Facebook and Twitter accounts hadn’t seen any major activity for months by the time I started following them back in 2013. It almost seemed as if the organisation was run by your stereotypical technophobic German bureaucrat, despite being an Irish body. In this way, the meteorological service did not differ majorly from their counterparts in Bus Éireann, Irish Rail, or any other Irish state body back in 2012. Their reputation...

One of the most lasting memories I have of my early childhood is flipping through my parents’ collection of strange, yellow-framed magazines that they kept in the living room. I couldn’t read at the time, and even if I had been able to read, I wouldn’t have understood a word since they were printed in English, but I was completely enthralled by the images and the maps printed in those magazines. I would later learn that the magazine in question was National Geographic, and I’ve been fascinated by it ever since, although I was only an irregular buyer. Still, I see why the magazine has such a stellar reputation. The articles are more often than not thought-provoking and interesting, and the presentation is top-notch. The images are often simply spectacular, as are the illustrations and maps.  However, it was not until around 2016 that I really took an interest in the magazine. It had always been one of the more expensive magazines you could buy, both back in Germany and here in Ir...

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...