About this site

This is my little site on the web, it is part blog and part traditional website. The blog posts can be found down below here, using the tag cloud to the right or the search box up above. The majority of the non blog style pages are relating to my main hobby of flying model aircraft, you can find these using the list of pages over on the right, or the menu bar tabs up above. The main homepage for model related stuff can be found here. I occassionally Geocache, a map of found caches can be found here. A few other bits can be found from the menu bar above too.

Aquarium

May 16th, 2012
by robin.
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A little while ago we noticed that our toddler was showing an interest in the fish tank at a local library, I’ve always fancied an aquarium so it was decided we should get a little one for home.

Couple of days later

After speaking to a couple of friends who are very seriously into keeping fish and chatting to a local fish specialist I decided to buy a 48 litre starter tank. I was advised that much smaller could be an upkeep nightmare and anything much bigger started to push the budget!  The model we went for was a Interpet Fish Pod 48l which we bought from the local supplier.

It came with a heater, pump, lights and a little thermometer. All we needed was some gravel, plants and of course fish!

The picture over there is of the finished tank all setup and filled with water. I was advised to leave it like this, without fish for a couple of weeks before going to get some ‘hardy’ fish at first.  So now we wait for a little while before we go and get some fishes!

Posted in: Update.
Tagged: ·

Local RPMs update

May 9th, 2012
by robin.
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This is an update to the earlier post where I linked to some RPMs which I maintain for my own purposes. If you find these useful, please feel free to download them.

In the filenames, el6 is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (Centos), el5 is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (Centos), fc7 is Fedora Core 7.

If a link is broken, feel free to have a click around the SVN repository, the root of where I keep all the RPM stuff is here. Or please email me.

Posted in: usefulthings.
Tagged: · · · ·

SVN to (BitBucket) Git migration

Apr 10th, 2012
by robin.
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Notes from the migration of my personal SVN repo to Git and also onto the hosted Git platform Bitbucket.org.

First step was to tell my local git install who I was:

$ git config --global user.name "Robin Kearney"
$ git config --global user.email "robin@kearney.co.uk"

I always set the following too:

$ git config --global color.diff auto
$ git config --global color.status auto
$ git config --global color.branch auto

Then to import a section of my SVN repo:

$ git svn clone --authors-file=path/to/authors_file SVN_REPO_URL LOCAL_DIR
$ cd LOCAL_DIR
$ git svn show-ignore > .gitignore
$ git remote add origin git@bitbucket.org:rk295/GIT_REPO.git
$ git push origin master

Some people advise using -s on the ‘git svn’ command, which tells git to expect trunk/ tags/ etc. But I dont use those in my repo, so I omitted it.

SVN_REPO_URL is the full http://…. URL to the SVN repo to import, or in my case a sub-section of it.

The --authors-file tells git the location of a text file which maps SVN users to Git users, mine looked like this:

robin = Robin Kearney <robin@kearney.co.uk>

Posted in: usefulthings.
Tagged: ·

Blade 120SR SOLD

Jan 14th, 2012
by robin.
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We are having a bit of a de-clutter here at home so I decided that the 120SR could go, I’m not flying it much recently and in reality it just sits around collecting dust, so on eBay it went. I’ve updated its own page here. Roll on the full CP and possibly Flybarless version!

Posted in: models.
Tagged: ·

Miles M.12 Mohawk

Jan 12th, 2012
by robin.
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I’ve been pondering designing my own RC plane for a while, not completely from scratch mind, but a scale job. Sports-scale probably better defines my intentions, I’ve neither the time nor patience to spend hundreds of hours on reproducing a scale model in minute detail. There have been a couple of free plans in the mags recently (Tims Airspeed Courier springs to mind) of about 60″ span with electric power, which have got me thinking.

Over the Christmas period I took my son to the RAF Museum at Hendon, while wandering around one of the halls a little aircraft from the thirties caught my eye, a Miles M.12 Mohawk. I thought this was a pretty little plane, looking nice in the orange and black colour scheme. Looking it over for a while I started to think this might make a nice scale candidate. There was nothing too awkward about the shape, nice tapered (but not too sharply) wings, a reasonable length nose. Hmm, maybe this would be the one chose.

On returning home I did some digging and found a bit more information on Wikipedia, and a little 3 view here. That’ll do to get me started, I also wanted to practice using CAD, so it was decided then. First step I wanted to do was trace the 3 view into CAD, from there I could scale it to whatever size felt appropriate and then start to work on the internal structure.

The specs of the original are as follows:

Length 25.5 feet
Span 35 feet
Wing Area 183 sq feet

 

Having done a bit of maths, 1/8 scale would give me a span of 53 inches with a wing area of 412 sq. inches. That feels about right for the same power plant that Timused in the Courier. 1/7 scale gives 58 inch span with an area of 508 sq inches, I might end up going for that, I want to chat to some people first, to see what they think.

So anyway, to cut a long story short, in a few spare moments over the last week, I’ve traced the 3 view. Its pretty complete, a few of the curves need a little work if you zoom right in, which I’ll try and tidy up to the point I’m completely happy with. There is a png of the cad file below if you are interested.

You can click on any of the images on this page bigger versions, if you want the full size of the 3 view below, click here.

 Thats all for now, I want to do a little tidying up and then start thinking about the internal structure.

Posted in: models, Update.
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