After a bit of coding and a weekend away, I’ve got round to spending a bit of time with the Beaver. Next step is to add some colour, I didn’t take any snaps of it in its plain white state, but the shot below shows the wings masked up and the blue applied.

I have since removed the masking tape and left it to dry, tomorrow night hopefully I can get the blue onto the fuselage.

[]({{ “/uploads/2013/09/photo-1-1.jpg” | prepend: site.baseurl }})So about 8 weeks ago while we were down here in Wiltshire, I flew the Dynamic-S up at the White Horse and made a bit of a dumb error in reading the wind. I thought it was coming along the slope and hitting the bowel, but I learnt the hard way that actually it was coming from slightly behind the hill causing some horrible turbulence  around my normal take off and landing spot.  Well, to cut a long story short the DS had a bit of a rough landing, the nose snapping clean off, but otherwise causing no damage.  I had a good ponder about how to get her back in the air, eventually deciding that a new fuselage at £20 or so was the easiest and probably safest route.

[]({{ “/uploads/2013/09/Screen-Shot-2013-09-29-at-21.40.04.png” | prepend: site.baseurl }})HobbyKing UK didn’t have them in stock in August, but they came in a week or so ago, just in time for me to transplant the gubbins and get her ready for this weekend which was our next planned trip out west.  Friday say a nice day, but with no wind, so I flew her from the flat field at the top of the hill, about an 8 minute flight with no unpleasant surprises.

Today the wind was blowing about 15mph from the North East,  swinging round to ENE at times. That meant I had to use the eastern edge of the slope, of which I have less experience. I need’nt have worried however, she was up in the air for a good 30 minutes, with still a few minutes of battery left when I landed so she could have easily flown for longer. Brilliant flight, lovely aircraft on a surprise sunny September afternoon.

I’m becoming more confident with her, rolls are nice and axial and I’m practising slow rolls with rudder fed in to keep altitude. I even managed a inverted circuit, it was a little rough, but I made it all the way round 🙂

I’ve included a little pic below so you can see the view I have while I’m up on the hill.

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The editor of the magazine I take, posted on the accompanying forum a little while ago explaining that some time back there was a free plan published for a model called the Foam Fing, to celebrate this they had a few of the foam boards printed up with their logo and the name of the model. A few of these had recently been found and an offer was made of a free board in return for the recipient designing a model for it.

One of the other guys on the forum has dug out the original plans and posted them to the thread, they can bee seen here.

This wasn’t an opportunity to miss so I signed up without giving it much thought. Things began to feel real last week however, when the foam board turned up in the post!

[]({{ “/uploads/2013/09/P1160576.jpg” | prepend: site.baseurl }})Its 6mm foam with card on each side, the sort of stuff Hobby Craft sell in quite large A3/A2 sheets for a few pounds.

I started to sketch some aircraft on paper and sort of started to be drawn to a canard. I sketched a few canards before coming up with what looked like a pretty little thing and with proportions that might work.   Figuring that a chuckie glider might at least make me feel more confident, I set about cutting balsa. The result can be seen here, which with a little nose weight seems to happily fly the length of the garden in a nice gentle glide path.

So there we are then, I have a board from RCM&E and three A2 boards I picked up from Hobby Craft at the weekend, and a chuckie glider which sees to fly ok.I want to crack on with the Beaver first, but a plan is forming in my head 🙂

Well a little under 2 weeks after I started, I’ve finished the construction of the Beaver.  Last night I spent a good while giving it a thorough sanding to ensure there were no rough edges that would stick through the tissue, now she is ready for covering.

I’ve yet to decide what scheme to paint her in, I’ll possibly use the decals provided in the kit, but there are so many Beavers in nice colour schemes that is seems a shame not to try and emulate something a bit more colourful than the blue and white of the kit. I expect it’ll take me a while to get her covered up nicely so there is a bit of time to ponder! The picture below is her pinned together before the covering starts, I’m pretty pleased with how the build has turned out, lets hope I don’t make a mess of the covering!

For the last couple of years I’ve been making an effort to get to as many of the shows run by Model Air at Old Warden as possible, although what with moving house and the family, this year I only managed to get along to the last one of the year, the Festival of Flight in September.

Its always a bit of a gamble with the weather in September, but despite the 5 day forecast earlier in the week predicting thunder and lightning, the weekend turned out pretty nice. Saturday was a little windy - maybe 15mph, gusting to 20+ but the rain held off and the sun shone all day.   Sunday looks to have been the better day judging by the video below.

We visited on the Saturday, again taking my 3 year old with me who seems to enjoy wandering around and looking at planes, particularly enjoying all the stalls. Only the very bravest of the free flight brigade were out, but the RC and CL boys made up for it with pretty constant flying. Sunday looks to have been far better attended, thanks I imagine to the much calmer air. I shot a few pics while wandering around, they can be seen on the gallery page here.

Video thanks to wondefulcat:

A while ago I stopped using either Aperture or iPhoto to manage my photos and switched to Lightroom. Pretty much the only downside of switching was the lack of PhotoStream import. This lead to me having a bit of a poke around on the filesystem and see where the Apple products were getting the photos from.

It turns out that once you have installed either Aperture or iPhoto the iCloud system preference lets you enable PhotoStream support. What this actually happens in the background is some system service is enabled which downloads the photos into a directory under ~/Library.  I intended to keep Aperture installed, so I figured I could just write a short bit of code to walk this directory, pulling out photos and putting them into a directory of my choosing.

I’ve put the script up on git hub, which you can find here. Feel free to copy it and use it, drop me a line if you have any issues.

We are down in Wiltshire at the moment and as ever we brought the boat I built for Edward last year. He loves to take it down to the pond in the pleasure gardens. This time I brought my 808 camera and attached it into the cabin in the boat. The little video we shot is below.

Using the excellent Google maps, I’ve been trying to collate a list of places I’ve flown, both good and bad and the ones I revisit regularly. They can be seen on the map below, you can zoom in and if you click on the icons I’ve tried to add more detail for some of the sites.

View Flying sites in a larger map

I’m moving away from feedburner, so my RSS feed location has changed. The new url is http://riviera.org.uk/feed/ please update your RSS reader!

A new project I’ve just deployed onto live uses the fast and lightweight beanstalkd work queue.  As part of putting it into live I wanted to get at least some basic monitoring on the beanstalkd daemon.  All my servers run monit for keeping an eye on processes I care about, so that seemed a good place to start.

I had a bit of a look around the interwebs but couldn’t find any examples, so I set about putting something together myself. As it turns out beanstalkd has a nice simple text protocol, detailed in protocol.txt which is included in the source, and monit has the ability to send and expect arbitrary strings to a given port.  For starters I’ve set it up to issue a stats command and check for the expected response which is: