Counting down the kilobytes...

Over the weekend I picked up my old RC plane which was in the back of a wardrobe at mums place. It was still damaged from its last flight, half the tail was broken off. I managed to fix that fairly quickly on sunday, and got out for a flight in the afternoon.

The plane was horrible to fly, it continuously pitched up and i couldn't get it flying level. Then about 2 minutes into the flight, the battery starts winding down while I was only 10 metres above the ground. So the plane took a decent dive and hit the ground hard, which broke the battery mount.

I had that glued back together by the evening, and gave the battery a good charge (9.6V 600mAh battery and it took 900mAh!). This morning I was ready to go for another flight, I peaked the battery and headed off.

30 minutes later...

September Fury took another big hit to the ground, this time even worse. I mounted the battery a bit further forward, and that did a great job at correcting the pitching problem. I had probably 8 minutes of flight, after the nerves settled down it was quite fun. It did seem to like rolling right more than left, i think the battery was moving around still.  

Another 30 minutes later...

September Fury will fly again! Soon its going to be made of more glue than foam.

• 1 cup Plain flour
• 1.5 tsp Baking powder
• 1 pinch Salt
• 2 tbsp Sugar
• 1 Egg
• 75 grams Melted butter
• 3/4 cup Milk

Smash all the ingredients together for 30 seconds. Don't worry about any lumps in the mixture, they will cook out. Leave the mixture to sit for 5 minutes.

Cook on a reasonably hot frying pan, the pan is hot enough when a drop of water fizzles and jumps around the pan. Use a little bit of butter if need be.

• 3 parts water
• 1 part vinegar

Works a treat, use warm water, rub it all over. They will go quite dark from the water, but don't worry, just let them dry. They will come up perfect, like new!

I just read an article on Wired, about the potential for disaster in 2012 when a combination of bad circumstances in the solar system are predicted (The Geomagnetic Apocalypse — And How to Stop It). A group of scientists have predicted a big increase in solar flare activity in 2012. Solar flares aren't new, they happen all the time, and the earths magnetic field does a lot to limit their effects. It just so happens there are a couple rather large holes in earths magnetic field, and in 2012 one of them will be our only protection.

The next creepy part involves an ancient civilisation, which have been saying something big is going down in 2012 for thousands of years. The Mayans had a calendar, which was just under 2 million days long, and it ends December 21, 2012. They say that will be the start of a new age.

The problem lies with our electricity networks. There are hundreds of thousands of kilometers of transmission lines throughout the country, which is grounded to the earths surface at the big transmission stations. Somehow that acts like a gigantic antenna for solar flares which emit all kinds of radiation. This new report details how damaging large solar flares could be to our electricity distribution networks.

The proposed solution is massive resistors in the grounding connections between the transmission stations and the earth. Kind of like huge surge protectors, which will hopefully stand up to current surges caused by the solar flare radiation.

I can't really see it happening, but wouldn't life suck without electricy. A 30 minute black out is annoying enough.

I've been having this problem for a while, I have an album in iTunes, and it has the album artwork on display in iTunes. I put the album on my iPhone, but when i tilt sideways and view the albums in cover flow, the albums artwork is missing! Not even the default grey question mark! The name displays at the bottom of the screen with the artist and album name, and just blank above it.

I haven't been able to find any similar story anywhere on the net, nothing at all. I think I have found the cause of the problem. When I'm in iTunes and I select all the songs in the album together, and right click Get Info, the artist and album name are there as expected (because that is common information between these songs), but there is no album artwork! So I'm guessing that at least one of the songs in the album doesn't have the album artwork specified. So when the iPhone wants to display the album artwork, and it sees that not all the songs have the same album artwork specified, it chooses to display nothing. I have no idea if that is the true cause of the problem, but its the best i can come up with.

The Solution

In iTunes, select one of the songs in the ablum, and right click, Get Info. Check that it has the album artwork by selecting the Artwork tab. Right click on the picture (this took a short while the first time, not sure why), and select Copy. Hit OK or Cancel to get out of that. Now select all the songs in the album together, and right click, Get Info. In the bottom right corner where the Artwork display is empty, right click and select Paste. Hit OK.

Sync your iPhone and revel in victory. 

I was reading a funny article the other day which comes to mind now (Wired magazine), feeling a bit guilty my last post was November 2008 lol. I've just given away hecticrss.com cause I haven't touched it for 6 months at least, so I didn't really think it was worth the $4 a month to keep it anymore. Not enough hours in the day for me at the moment. The stats:

Uni: there every day of the week, working on our UAV, first test flight tommorow with our donated CyberBug.

Work: n/a. Nothing going at the moment, between K. Rudd's big package (hmm...), centrelink, and the recent bear market rally I'm doing ok.

Home: awesome, got a mate from Wagga staying for 4 weeks while he's on prac at Royal Brisbane hospital. 

You've probably heard this song before, I heard it again yesterday on triple j and really wanted to figure out who it was. Took me a while on google, found these guys, Empire Of The Sun. They're a new aussie group, the lead singer from The Sleepy Jackson, Luke Steele, and half of PNAU, Nick Littlemore. Awesome song and pretty cool film clip (shot in Shanghai).

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=zmM2RwlxGt0

The albumn is already out, $18 on iTunes. I'm going to JB HiFi today so i'll see if they have it there, sounds worth paying for.

Just trying out doing a blog from my iPhone, it's a little tricky, but I do like how it automatically corrects my spelling and punctuation. I have to write this in html cause the browser doesn't like the normal way. Well I guess if u read this, it all went ok.

New End of Fashion song, Album comes out September some time, good stuff.

End Of Fasion - Fussy