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All posts for the month March, 2009

Me and my Super Cub

I’ve had a small dream since I was a little kid. I always wanted my own RC plane. Not something overly expensive, but something that looked decent and was fun to fly. Cost was always fairly out of touch, but that would never stop my dream. It was something I honestly forgot about for a fairly long time.

Some guys on IRC started talking about planes again, and after doing some Google work, I was once again hooked. We stumbled upon HobbyZone‘s website and starting clicking. After quite a bit of searching, reading, and forum browsing, we (Eric and I) decided to give their Super Cub kit a try. It is a Ready-To-Fly (RTF) kit, so it has everything you need to get started. Just open the box, assemble a few things, and find an open field. Best of all, is that I got it on sale for $154.99, which really isn’t a bank buster. This kit even comes with 6 different radio channels, so you and your friends can all fly together.

Either years and years and years of video games has really helped, or these beginner plane kits are a snap to fly, because we really didn’t seem to have that many problems keeping them in the air. Landing was a bit different, but by the end of the day, I had improved greatly. On my second flight, however, I attempted a landing. Notice I said attempting… A small gust of wind took over and made the plane cartwheel, which actually broke the rear of the fuselage near the rear wing support. I was a bit dejected, but after one small slice of 3M Extreme Packing Tape later, I was back in action.

You can find some first flight pictures in my gallery, and believe me, there will certainly be more to come.

Well, I finally picked up an Asus Eee PC 1000HA 10″ laptop. It ships with Windows XP Home, which is really fine with me, but you know I need Linux on it.

With another user’s recommendation, I decided to give Arch Linux a try. I know, you KNOW I wanted to use Gentoo, but frankly, I didn’t feel like compiling all that on a1.66GHz Intel Atom processor.

So far I like Arch, it’s easy to use and their wiki is really well done. With only a few hours of messing around, I have a 95% functional system working just about the way I want it.

However, I noticed that for some reason, I had problems getting bash-completion to work with my ssh known_hosts files. After opening it up, I noticed that the IP addresses and host names were all hashed. That kind of sucks. I don’t like performing any unnecessary typing! If this happens to you, check out /etc/ssh/ssh_config:

HashKnownHosts yes

Seems that was set for me. I hate that. Do yourself a favor and (#) comment that out, or set it to no. That way you can bash-complete any and all hosts that you use on a daily basis.

More on the Eee PC later…

Just what I need. The Buffalo Bills just signed the recently cut Terell Owens to a one year deal for $6.5 million.

I have to put up with TO AGAIN? At least it wasn’t the Eagles…