K.C.'s Garage

mcwolles made an amazing 3d working representation of M.C. Escher's "Waterfall" : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v2xnl6LwJE It is nothing short of awesome. Below is my quick & dirty guess as to how it works:

Kim, Willbob, and I headed up to Muir Woods to see the giant redwood trees.

I went out Saturday to scope out Palo Alto airport (KPAO) and see about securing a tie-down spot for my Cessna.  The airport is busy but charming, with somewhere around 400 aircraft based there.  It's situated between the town of Palo Alto and the San Francisco Bay, right next to Palo Alto Baylands Park & Nature Preserve.  So, naturally, I decided to check out the park after visiting the airport.

Many of you saw my recent tweets complaining about the Sony PlayStation 3 firmware update version 3.21 that cripples the second operating system "OtherOS" feature of the PS3. Since then, I've received several questions as to why I thought Sony would remove such a feature, and why I cared so much. The answers to both questions require more than 140 characters. Here, I will try to explain. The PlayStation 3 as a Computing Platform Briefly, the PS3 is an amazing computing platform. It boasts a 7-core 3.2GHz IBM PowerPC cell processor architecture unlike pretty much anything available at even twice the price. It works with USB and Bluetooth Wireless input devices (mouse, keyboard, gamepads, &etc), has HDMI, Composite, and Component video outputs, digital audio output, an internal SATA hard drive, 802.11b/g wireless, and a Blu-ray DVD-ROM drive. Sony has, from the start, marketed the fact that this amazing "game console" also supports the ability to run Linu...

The video of my DEFCON 17 talk has been uploaded to VIMEO, in case you want to see it: Old Skool Brought Back: A 1964 Modem Demo on Vimeo . Thanks to Jason Scott of Textfiles.com .

So, as I am writing this, the FAA's Air Traffic Control system is down. More specifically, it has been reported that the computer systems responsible for automated processing of flight plans is down. As such, Air Traffic Controllers are having to enter flight plans one at a time manually for each flight before departure. This is having predictably catastrophic effects on the flow of traffic out of busy airports like ATL. Interestingly, four months ago a presenter at DEFCON 17 named Righter Kunkel gave a presentation on how antiquated and potentially insecure the FAA's system - specifically the system for processing flight plans - was.   He pointed out that anyone with very little information could easily flood the system with thousands of bogus flight plans and cause chaos. That talk was published on the web, publicly, a few days ago. So, is this what happened?   Naturally, we'll probably never know.  It might be that, it might be an unrelated failure, it might be that t...

I created an Excel worksheet for easily computing, charting, and printing the weight & balance for my aircraft, based on an older version that I had found on the net somewhere. The values are specific to my aircraft, but the spreadsheet should be really easy to modify for other similar model Cessna 172 aircraft. The spreadsheet includes a simple macro to make printing the worksheet portion easy. If you get the "Macros Enabled" warning, that is why. To download, click the image: Enjoy!