Rachel Brindle

Closed on our new house today! We’re Californians again!

Just had a thought of the most useful thing about gas/electric hybrid aircraft motors: if (for piston aircraft: when) the gas engine dies, you at least have partial power until you run out of battery. Potentially enough to get you to a safe(r) landing spot.

That changes the calculus more in favor of hybrid-electric. Probably still not worth the weight, complexity, and financial penalties you’ll be taking on with that. Like, I still wouldn’t do this for my rv-9.

#ElectricAviation

Modding disc-based console to let you play games stored on solid state memory:

Pros:
- Much faster loading times.
- Can carry your entire library with you.
- Built-in backup of your game library in case of disc rot or something.
- Overall much better experience

Cons:
- There's a certain... feeling to knowing that the console is actually physically reading a disc to let you play. Like you're playing the game the way it was "meant" to be played. e.g., on the psp, I still think UMD is really cool despite the fact that severely hampered the experience of the PSP compared to the cartridge-based DS. It's kind cool hearing the UMD drive spin & move the laser while playing. However, I do not play UMD games on it. Instead, I dump the disc to the sd card and then play from there.

@b@cloudyday.club literally same.

Bullied my reps again. Which I really don’t do nearly as often as I should be. At the very least, this should be a weekly thing instead of just sporadically.

Really quickly this morning, I pulled out some swift async helpers I've been using in some personal apps into a separate repo, mostly to make it easier to keep them all in sync. I published it at https://forge.younata.com/you/AsyncExtensions

Probably the most interesting thing there is AsyncMultiChannel. Which is like https://github.com/apple/swift-async-algorithms/blob/main/Sources/AsyncAlgorithms/AsyncAlgorithms.docc/Guides/Channel.md, but it supports multiple subscribers. I should rename it, because it's intended to be used in more of a pub-sub architecture than as 1-1 communication.

#SwiftLang #SwiftConcurrency

I've only been running iocaine for a week, and I'm already at over 4 million markov-chain pages served to bots.

Drink up slop bots, drink deeply from my poisoned well.

New #tdov, new #selfie! #TransDayOfVisibility

This year marks 14 years living my absolute best life.

Submitting an offer on a home today, and, frankly, it’s transphobic if our offer doesn’t get accepted. #tdov

@b@cloudyday.club liveatc.net has live feeds of most transmissions. When I’m in an airliner on the ground, I frequently pull up the feed for ground & tower at that airport.

SwiftUI still doesn’t have an equivalent for UITableView/CollectionViewDataSourcePrefetching? Really?

Not to mention the lack of a flow layout - literally, the default collection view layout.

#SwiftUI #UIKit

lol. Starlink is very popular for general aviation. Today, they announced they were lowering the max speeds for their “roam” plans to 100 mph/87 kts/161 km/h, and added a new $250/mo “aviation” plan that caps you at 20gb/mo. (There’s also a second aviation plan meant for those in jets, for $1000/mo). The current “roam” plan is $50/mo for a 100gb/mo limit, or $165/mo for unlimited data.

This will affect basically everyone flying anything faster than a piper cub (cruise speed 75 mph/65 kts/121 km/h). And even then, with a strong-enough tailwind, it’ll affect people in cubs.

So, obviously, the general aviation influencers are pissed about this. I have a few friends who will balk at this because this is a 5x price increase, for 1/5 the data cap.

I’m team “fuck starlink” because I like looking at and taking photos of the stars. Also the whole “Elon is a nazi” thing, but even if Elon wasn’t in the picture, I’d still be anti-starlink.

Still, this is pretty funny because it’ll basically kill the starlink-for-aviation market.

Edit: The folks at avbrief have covered this a bit better. There was a "local priority" tier that offered 50GB for $65/mo, making this new plan only ~9.6x lower value instead 25x lower value, but most people could still get away with the previous "roam" plan. https://avbrief.com/starlinks-restructured-pricing-disappoints/

#aviation #avgeek #starlink