Marc's Public Blog

The first day, we went to dive in a Cenote (underground river system), which was a bit colder (24C), mostly devoid of aquatic life (it was fresh water, not salt water), but the cave formations were interesting to dive.
A few pictures from the Cenotes:

We then took a ferry to Cozumel, where we did a combination of boat dives (2 every morning, some in the afternoon), and shore dives which actually were quite good considering, especially if you enjoy fishies in training like Jennifer likes to say:

fish like to hunt in pair with rays

so many lobsters, everywhere...

The wreck dive was interesting:

My heart will go on... :)

Nice fishies in training by the jetty for a dusk/night dive:

those baby rays were being 'friendly' :)

More boat diving:

they had very nice sea horses

The night dive we did from the boat was particularly good. Octopus coming out to hunt, giant crabs, lobster, and more:

The next morning, I got up at 05:00 to do a night/sunrise dive by the jetty and it wasn't half bad either :)

this shrimp was suicidal in my opinon :)

We then had time for 2 more boat dives before being done for the day:

A few vidoes I got by the Jetty: An octopus hunting at night:

Eel/snake feeding:

Octopus feeding by the jetty at night:

Baby ray, those things are so cute:

Now a few videos from the boat dives. We saw many turtles, including this turtle eating:

They also had those shrimp crabs everywhere. This one was busy eating:

There were lobsters everywhere. We saw those two lobsters 'talking':

This lobster was out hunting at night:

A big crab out hunting:

And a big octopus hunting:

And that was it for diving in Cozumel. The water was super nice, great vis, temps in the 29-30C range, not too much current, and actually pretty good critters to see. Thanks to Arturo for getting us there :)

where we spent our first night, noisy due to partying and music on the beach

Arturo and Peter, waiting for us to arrive

The main street had a bit of 'everything':

no prescription? no problem :)

very classy T-shirts.

The next morning, we took a guided tour to a Cenote (underground river system) to go diving there:

Diving can be found on this page.

After our 2 dives, we took the ferry to Cozumel:

One evening, we had a mexican party, including a pinata:

Jennifer had a shot

Lots of cruise ships:

One afternoon, since we didn't have any dives, we went to the nearby dolphinaris:

At the end, they had a dolphin tow us across the pool. I hope it didn't mind too much:

you do get water in your nose though :)

Nice sunsets:

after sunset, it was a good time to night dives by the peer

After our last dives, we went back to the mainland for a private tour to Chichen Itza:

Grr! :)

Many street vendors:

Also got to see some iguanas:

On the way out, we went to see a couple of Cenotes:

A big thank you to Arturo for organizing everything.

Like previous time, this private track day had great cars, pictures are worth a thousand words:

Hi Attila, nice plate!

So, my coach Greg did a great job of quickly figuring out that I was overworking the brakes by just being on maximal brake pressure for too long. I know about releasing brakes and finishing with a light trail braking to reach the apex (add steering while releasing brakes), but in a straight line, for maximum braking, I was using maximum pressure for 3 seconds or more if need be.
He pointed out that I should get off maximum pressure as soon as start braking, and taper off pressure as the car slows down, even if I might still be doing over 100mph at the time.

For now, I'm slower on laptimes doing this because it's harder to keep optimal pressure and just braking a different way from the easy "full on brakes" I've been done for many years, but I believe him if he tells me that the car can stop as fast or faster, if I modulate pressure from the beginning and start easying off the brakes right away, not later just before I'm about to turn.

In the morning, we drove way below normal speed so that I could try and practise the braking, but I found it hard to odd because the speeds were not realistic and I just couldn't force myself to brake well when I was going too slowly.
He then got off the car to let me try on my own but I only got 2 laps before the track was shut down before lunch. Still, I got a 3:33:85, which was 8 seconds faster than his lap, because I kind of quickly reverted to the full force braking I've done for so long (thunderhill 5 mile track with cyclone). Sad thing is that I got that best time of the day without having a great line everywhere because I don't know the west track well (that was my 3rd time on it).

He then confirmed that I obviously had gone hard in braking and the corners, and I had lunch to try and drill in my head to try harder to apply what he had been telling me.
The next session, I slowly did better trying to apply what he was saying and trying to ease off the brakes. I was a lot slower, but that was expected.

While reviewing the video and data recording, Greg pointed a few places where I wasn't braking right, some minor line suggestions, some were definitely better, and others were maybe about the same, but worth trying.
My 2nd and last session on my own, I started with a wet track and worked my way up slowly as it dried, and got back up to a 3:35. That was with better lines and not doing some mistakes on the west track that I did in the morning on my faster lap.

So, clearly I haven't yet matched my speed driving the aggressive (but strangely controlled, because I've been doing it for too many years) way, but hopefully I can work my way back up to it without being as hard on the car.
I'm not really disappointed there, I have 15 years of practise driving the way I do, so I didn't expect to match my times driving a new way in just 2 sessions at speed.

What this all means is that I will have do try this a few more times to see how I do, and measure resulting brake wear and see if Dan tells me "eh, I've never seen that color on metal before, and we've just ordered another set of wear sensors because the other ones were nowhere to be found" :)

I'll now have to go back to see how I do with more practise. Also, because this was the 5 mile track, I have no idea how fast 3:33:85 is, or how much faster I could have gone with more laps at full speed with maximal braking. So, I'll know more next time(s).

The flight home was somewhat interesting, rain in the surroundings, low clouds, but I was still able to sneak below the cloud lawyer and get in to Palo Alto:

So after many hours of making a very custom 7 channel config for my Multiplex Cularis FPV Glider, with differential flaps, crow flaps, aileron washout for tip stall avoidance, and switches to control my FPV camera and talk to APM::Plane, the autopilot running on my pixhawk, I've published my setup with explanations so that others can use it.

Again, here's a link if yould like to read about my Multiplex Cularis FPV Glider Build.

You will need sounds to install on your Taranis in SOUNDS/ subdirectory on the sdcard:

Here is my EEPE config file for companion to load the config into OpenTX:

Last, but not least, you will want to read this document that explains how it all works:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bGKjyvOksHBhD8gT3Q20ZmDu1TUsDn15BvGPHw-doVg/edit
You can also download (a maybe slightly out of date) PDF:

But the rest was still worth seeing, and I enjoyed it. Big stuff outdoors:

backyard roller coaster, very nice

Indoors:

very cool, you can now draw circuits with a silver pen

food 3D printing, brilliant!

very very nice hack

big and small robots :)

the drawings were made with balls run with a magnet underneath

One worthwhile talk was a status update on arduino, from its creator:

another talk from Atmel on arduino debugwire was very interesting too

Google was showing off its original VTOL package delivery plane:

RC plane used for city imaging

robot wielding a knife between a hand's fingers

Anyway, I was mostly done by saturday evening. I went back sunday to see a few things I could have seen if I hadn't gone to some talks Saturday, and then called it a day.

Summary: how to use docker in ways it was never meant to be used, namely to containerize already installed applications on your host system without needing a separate server image just for the container, and a new install of your app in that container.

Full talk description: Container solutions like docker were designed to let you run an application on a vanilla OS image. This is great if you want to totally decouple a new application from the underlying OS. This is not great if you don't want to have to maintain 2 operating systems (the host one and the container one) if you already have well customized OS, and if you simply want to run some existing applications in a container. This gives you the security benefit from resource/disk/network separation between untrusted applications and the rest of your operating system without having to start from scratch with a base OS and lots duplicate packages between the container and the host OS. More importantly this lets you switch existing working applications to a state where half their functionality (like the web facing portion with untrusted php code) runs in a read only container, while the backend that needs access to local disk and network resources, run outside the container, and post the data to a filesystem that is only read only in the container but sufficient for serving results.

You also benefit from completely controlling the container image and not relying on an image retrieved from the internet that may not be trustworthy by reusing the exact same OS image inside and outside the container, also minimizing upgrade time and cost.

My talk will show how to use docker to achieve those goals and get a chance to containerize applications that you probably wouldn't get around to run in containers otherwise.

Video:

Slides which you can read:

A few pictures from the event:

use of linux at Facebook by Chris Mason

The new aria android phone with swappable modules

nice snacks for attendee reception

and just like this, it was over, and time go depart until next time.

Thanks all, see you next year hopefully.