It’s not that hard to use ham radio equipment to screw with things like aviation com/nav radios and the like.

Anytime I had a problem, I threw a molotov cocktail, and BOOM! Now I have a different problem. 😀

I kind of want a show where Al is the main character but that’s just The New Yankee Workshop.

My parents wanted me to design a dining room hutch for them, and looking around at examples led me into a study of basic bitchery. Stacks of carefully arranged Rae Dunn pottery around the word “gather” in jigsaw cut cursive, a ceramic pig and one of those calendars made of two blocks of wood with just enough numbers on them to be able to be 1-31 on them that you’d have to manually change each day, usually accompanied by fake plants and a rusty flour sifter or something else “farmhousey” are all signs she’s in the late stages of the disease.

Sometimes I wonder what architects are thinking designing bathrooms.

I guess architects are all romcom characters who live in a world that isn’t quite like ours, where big loud creepiness works with women and you can walk into a bar and order “a beer.”

Lego instructions > IKEA instructions. While I think both are excellent at language free building instructions, Lego are the true masters. IKEA targets adults with their instructions and are seen by a lot of people as tedious and confusing, Lego targets children and they make universally beloved building toys.

I haven’t seen the show in years but I remember it having a slightly ironic/subversive undercurrent? I always read Tim Taylor as a bit of a caricature, that his whole grunting macho overdo everything attitude almost always backfired on him and he’d be better off calming the fuck down.

Exhibit A: The character of Al Boreland, who is…well basically he’s Norm Abram. While still outwardly traditionally masculine, wearing a full beard, a flannel shirt a tool belt to his contractor’s job, he’s very secure in his manhood, confident without being macho, soft spoken and even gentle. A perfect foil to Tim Taylor, who finds kindred spirits in Clark Griswold and Jeremy “POWAAA” Clarkson. If you’re really on board with the MAGA alpha male bullshit, do you write a character like Al Boreland?

I think, like a lot of folks on the right, Tim Allen followed the Republican party as they sprinted toward fascism. I think Allen was in on the joke in the 1990s and became the joke in the 2010s.

Cardboard is wood with extra steps.

@daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com is citing a mathematical proof that basically states if you have a table whose feet form 4 points on a flat rectangle, that table can find a stable resting spot anywhere on an uneven surface only by rotating the table, you do not have to translate the table, only rotate it.

Your example, while practical, breaks that model because it only works if the continuous surface is uneven and the four independent points are coplaner. If you make the reverse true, with a table that has 4 even legs and put it on a floor that can be described as two triangles (what you would get if you connected 3 even length legs and one shorter) you could rotate the table to find somewhere all four legs touch.

This is why it is very important for us woodworkers to make table and chair legs the same length, or failing that, add adjustable feet, becasue us carpenters don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.

There is a trend of home decorating which prominently involves plastering one’s home with signage written in cursive fonts, with a prominent one reading “Live, Laugh, Love.” Other common ones are “Gather” or “Coffee” etc. It’s a symptom of stage IV basic bitchery and/or karenism.

See also Rae Dunn ceramics, distressed chalk paint, and beige.

They should have sent a poet.

I do kind of like that they call messages “toots.” That’s my kind of stupid.

Light Sport has proven safer than previous “not actually an ultralight but enforcement is lax” or EAB operations. Having a robust training culture including the creation of a new instructor certificate I think is a major contributor to that safety.

A significant portion of the expansion will be allowing S-LSA airplanes to be used for aerial work such as pipeline patrol or aerial photography. I see no reason whatsoever a Flight Design CT can’t be used for a job a Cessna 152 can do. With a much more modern and efficient engine burning unleaded gasoline.

“evtols” are going to BE General Aviation aircraft, just like helicopters are today. The thing I saw in that article would be certified under the currently very empty Powered Lift category. I would be extremely wary, as in “nail his skull to the pavement just in case” wary, of anyone trying to say these machines are anything different than that and should thus be exempt from any FARs. That’s the attitude Stockton Rush had. Break out the Ouija board and ask his passengers how that shook out.

100 miles in 30 minutes from any random point to any random point is indeed kind of tricky, A Bell Jetranger can do 150 mph if you really push it. A significantly cheaper Robinson R-44 Raven set a record for piston helicopters at 144mph, more typical cruise speed is 130. Still twice what you’ll do in a limousine going down the highway. They still occasionally pound helicopters full of expensive people into hillsides. Break out the Ouija board again and ask Kobe Bryant about his opinions on rotorcraft operations. We’ve got ~75 years of experience flying civilian rotorcraft. I don’t even know how you’d go about getting a powered lift rating on a pilot’s license right now; studying for my ground instructor certificate there wasn’t even a chapter about them. I had to study hot air balloons and gyrocopters but not powered lift tiltrotors.

You’re absolutely right, the rules are meant to serve us. Minimum fuel requirements are one of those rules that keep planes out of neighborhoods when the headwinds are stronger than forecast. I would say they should actually be INCREASED for powered lift or VTOL aircraft because descent and landing is more power intensive than cruise flight as it has to come to a hover under thrust, rather than the gliding flight of a landing airplane. Again, when someone says “These things are full of lots of trendy buzzwords so they shouldn’t be held to basic operational safety standards” I say “I’ll get the nails, you hold his head to the ground.” This is how we end up with a fire in a neighborhood that can’t be put out.

For air taxi or other for-hire operations it’s going to have to be certified under a standard airworthiness certificate and I don’t even know if we have a category for that. I’ll also eat my AOPA hat if you can find me an insurance company that will underwrite the fucking thing.

Let me also ask you this, just…try this sniff test: There’s a lot of steps between the gas/diesel/turbine airplanes and helicopters we have today, and a battery electric tiltrotor VTOL. Where’s the electric helicopter? Where’s the electric airplane? Where’s the fuel burning VTOL? Surely if there’s a market for a machine that can go 100 miles in half an hour with no runway, there’s a market for a machine that can go 500 miles in 2.5 hours with no runway. Why aren’t they building any of that first as a stepping stone?

Because it’s a fucking scam.

No, what I’m talking about isn’t steaming bullshit fresh from the bovine’s ass.

What is the major complaint people have about electric cars? Range, right? Because lithium ion or lithium polymer batteries do not have the energy density per unit volume or unit weight of gasoline. Electric cars are often heavier than their ICE counterparts because they’re crammed with so many batteries to make up for the relative lack of energy density, and they benefit from things like regenerative braking. Electric motorcycles often don’t have regenerative braking, which is why Kawasaki is right now advertising a $7000 sport bike with a 55mph top speed (65 if you push the boost button) and a range of 41 miles (if you don’t push the boost button). The Ninja 250 I bought in 2007 could do 120mph and I routinely went 300 miles between fill-ups with it’s ~5 gallon tank.

Meanwhile these folks have a hexacopter that will out-carry and out-run a Robinson R-44 piston-powered helicopter, on Lithium batteries.

Actually just right there, they say a 200 mph cruise speed and a 100 mile range. So that’s a 30 minute endurance. To legally fly cross country in the United States, you need to have enough endurance to make it to your first intended point of landing PLUS 30 minutes, and that’s day VFR minimum fuel when operating under Part 91. Are you telling me it has an hour of battery life but half of that will be in reserve? In something like a Cessna Skyhawk a half hour of fuel is something like 4 gallons of gasoline, or about 24 pounds. How much lithium battery do you need to make ~100 horsepower for half an hour? And mind you, that’s cruise power, NOT takeoff power. Which will be a LOT greater than cruise power especially in a VTOL aircraft. I get that it’s a tiltrotor and would have airplane-like performance in cruise, but it’ll still be more of a bitch to get airborne than a conventional plane.

Anybody want to see me plan a 100 mile flight in a Cessna Skyhawk, figure up how much gas the trip would take, convert that amount of gas to kilowatt-hours and then look up the weight of a Li-Ion battery with that capacity?

I’d also be real interested to know what the secret sauce is to make those propellers that quiet. Yes, electric motors are quieter than gas engines, but the noise from something like an airplane or helicopter is mostly made by the propeller/rotor blades, especially at the tips. By what physics are you going to make something with 6 propellers quieter than something that has one? I bet that thing is going to be louder - and shriller - than an equivalent helicopter. Stand next to a toy drone in flight and explain to me by what magic they’re going to make one that seats four make “a barely perceptible sound.”

If you’re going to tell obvious lies, just say I’m pretty.

Remember the gloss black fixtures that were very trendy for a brief time in the 80’s?

A pretty huge proposal to expand the Light Sport rule is in the works.

For those unaware, in 2004 the United States made some pretty sweeping additions to the Federal Aviation Regulations, essentially adding what the rest of the world calls “ultralight aviation.” What Americans had been previously calling “ultralights” were more like the rest of the world’s “microlights.” The Light Sport Rule added the Sport Pilot certificate (lesser privileges than a Private pilot), the Sport Pilot Instructor certificate, two kinds of aircraft repairmen, and two categories of aircraft, Special and Experimental Light Sport.

The rule has been a resounding success, so they’re talking about greatly widening what sport pilots can fly and what can be built and certified as a Light Sport aircraft. They’re talking about adding night flight, allowing controllable pitch propellers, retractable landing gear, 4 seats, higher stall speeds, higher takeoff weights, higher cruise speeds, possibly even eliminating the language that requires single engines or reciprocating engines.

It’s possible there’s a boom time coming for General Aviation.

There’s a game by Devolver Digital called Heave Ho which is pretty fun. And has a free demo.

The Langoliers eat it.

That format was pretty good for “Come see us live at the Sodbury Theatre in Glurpfortshire, Feb 32nd @9PM!”

I remember an instance where a Cracked.com article pointed out something like “5 creepy places on the internet” one of which was a dicussion forum in which one account was posting over and over, many times a day, about public appearances and such of the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and readers showed up en masse to harass this person. Turns out she was off-label using a forum engine as her own little microtwitter to publish alerts to a fan club. But when the Cracked author rejected that context and substituted his own, it smelled a lot like Humanbeing151.

But yes in general I find discussion boards to be more useful; I think it’s why they were invented first; Reddit and Lemmy are basically just different approaches to implementing Usenet.