Robin's home on the web

Aquarium

robin — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:04:05 +0000

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.

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!

Local RPMs update

robin — Wed, 09 May 2012 07:48:59 +0000

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.

colortail

daemontools

djbdns

haproxy

isync

keepalived

netatalk

ucspi-tcp

wakeonlan

SVN to (BitBucket) Git migration

robin — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:56:37 +0000

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

Blade 120SR SOLD

robin — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 11:11:55 +0000

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!

Miles M.12 Mohawk

robin — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:41:26 +0000

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.

Using a non supported Timemachine volume

robin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:19:11 +0000

Always forget this bit:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Speficially needed if you are using a Linux box, shared by Apple Talk.

From here in this instance, although there are loads of howtos.

Flying notes 2011-12-30

robin — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:17:53 +0000

Flew the merlin for the first time on the 1000mah lipo. Had a 13 min flight on half power and less, all great. Then a second of 10 mins on mostly half to full power, still plenty of life left. When I got a chance to charge it, a reported 513mAh went back in. So that probably means I could get a good 35-40 minute flight out of it, very happy with that! Also had a try of inverted flight with some success, at altitude mind! It was a bit gusty but she appears to be happy inverted, will try some more the next time out.

Wind was 5-6 mph max, tried the Weasel but there just wasn’t enough lift. Thankfully only a short walk to get it

DB Mini Tyro

robin — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:30:46 +0000

This was my autumn build for 2011, a pretty little aircraft which will hopefully be a delight to guide around the sky on a summers evening. I’ve put some details of the build up on a dedicated page here.

Keil Kraft Piper RIP

robin — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:28:19 +0000

So I finally got round to flying this, it was a short and eventful flight! I knew it was a little tail heavy but , but only 1/4″ or so behind the indicated CoG on the plan. I figured it might be a bit of a handful but with the large elevator I thought I would be able to manage it. How wrong I was, quite an exciting minute or so followed after a hand launch eventually ending her coming in hard from about 20′ up.

Amazingly the damage was slight, the planked cowl I took so long over was smashed, the prop had gone and the motor mount had sheered off the firewall. One wing had a chunk out of the LE and a couple of the fuselage longerons had suffered. In all honesty I could have repaired it, perhaps I should have repaired it, but I decided to rip out the electronics and bin the airframe.

It had annoyed me ever since I noticed I’d built a banana of a fuselage and then to compound it my dodgy wire bending left it with a wonky undercarriage. She was a wrong ‘un from the word go! The poor thing sat around my office getting bumped around whenever it was in the way; very much un-loved, so now its gone. Onto the next thing!

Wot 4

robin — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 21:12:41 +0000

So its maiden flight wasn’t without drama, however it has survived and has been aloft four times now. Loving flying it, I’ve pretty much got my box circuits down, and I’ve done a couple of take offs and landings. Need to practice the figure of eights a bit more though!

I’ve made a page for it here.

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