brainwagon

Early on Sunday I was out at Home Depot and acquired some additional raw materials for my RC plane construction projects. I got a 4×8 foot sheet of 0.5″ pink foam, a 36″ chunk of 2″ angle iron, and a new 4 foot steel ruler (I know I had one somewhere, but darned if I could find it.) Anyway, after my experiment with making a square box fuselage, I thought I would try making a wing with an “Armin” wing, as shown in the YouTube videos of Experimental Airlines.

It took me about 10 minutes to put together this 30″ wing, with a 6″ chord.

This is the simplified version of the wing, which has a trailing edge which is two thickness of foam board, and does not include an integrated elevator. The construction followed these directions almost entirely:

I didn’t get the tape down as smoothly as might have been hoped, but it still looks pretty good. I’ll next try the improved version with the tapered trailing edge, and maybe a carbon arrowshaft stiffener (although this wing seems plenty strong.)

I was feeling pretty lazy today, but I still wanted to do something working toward an eventual new scratchbuilt RC plane project. I’ve been watching a lot of stuff on YouTube, most notably the videos by the Joshes at flitetest and the great YouTube channel of Experimental Airlines. Experimental Airlines seems especially great: he makes some very interesting planes using a variety of neat techniques, made mostly from Dollar Tree foamboard and clear packing tape.

So, I decided to try to make a section of this fuselage, just as a test. I had some clear packing tape lying around, so I layed down about a foot of it on one side, not nearly as carefully as he does, but I was doing this in my living room while watching TV, and the light wasn’t really as good as it should be. I then followed his directions, although again with perhaps a bit more haste than I should have. I had some difficulty getting the final glue joint to really lay down flat, I think if I had some angle iron and some clamps, it would have helped. Still, another layer of packing tape laid along the bottom made an entirely serviceable, sturdy tube.

A finished twenty inch section of tubing.

The end view, with the reinforcing inner gusset.

I have a piece of iron angle iron which would have worked nice as an interior clamp, but it was dirty and rather oily, so until I can clean it and wipe it down, this will have to do. I doubt I’ll use this directly in a plane, but it was good practice (and cheap, since Dollar Tree foam costs a dollar). I suspect next time I’ll get the final joint better. He also has another method, which uses Gorilla Glue, which for this application might be easier to manage. I might try that out soon.

Stay tuned for an actual airplane construction project.

Mark H. over at Eastbay RC and I finally got together to test out my first attempt at scratch building a radio controlled aircraft: an F-22 inspired “foamie”, which an aircraft constructed entirely from EPP foam, hot glue, a couple of short carbon fiber rods to stiffen, and hot glue. Did I mention the hot glue?

Last Friday, we tried to get out to Cesar Chavez park near the Berkeley Marina and fly, but unlike the great weather early in the week, Friday had strong winds and a bit of rain. Mark got his F-22 up in the air for a couple of flights, but mine suffered a glue failure on one of the control horns, and it did not make it into the sky.

But this Wednesday, we did manage to get some better weather. While overcast, it was nice and still. It should be said at this point that I’ve never flown an RC aircraft before, and for my first construction project, I could have chosen a better plane (although I think it looks cool, and that’s what counts!). Thus, I let Mark and his experience man the controls, hoping that even if the plane was poorly balanced or constructed, he’d be able to get a couple of flights from it before it fell apart and its organs harvested for a future aircraft. I was thus mostly a spectator, and shot some video with my iPhone. Due to poor planning, I didn’t have a lot of space left on the iPhone, so I only got the first part of its maiden flight. We actually sent it up several times, and included a couple of flights where we taped my $8 keychain video camera to the nose. I stitched this video together from both the iPhone footage, as well as the nose cam footage. Not too bad for my very first foray into RC construction.

Mark wasn’t about to let me get away without at least giving a try at flying. He felt (and I agreed) that perhaps my airplane wouldn’t be the best plane to start with. In a fit of generosity, he let me take the controls of his own EzFly, a much more forgiving slow trainer type aircraft. It’s a great little plane, which has a KFM style wing, some dihedral to keep it level, and a nose consisting of three layers of foam for maximum energy absorbing capability. My first flight was good evidence that perhaps this trainer was a good idea. After a relatively smooth takeoff, I cartwheeled it into the ground, causing it some injury. But with some quick repairs (blue masking tape) it was ready to fly again. I did a few more flights, and quickly improved. For my last flight, we taped on the nose camera again, and I sent it into a high soaring flight.

Sadly, the video during the ascent when the motor was under full power exhibited an odd distortion caused by the vibration beating against the rolling shutter of the cheap camera. But when I cut the motor and started coasting down, the video was pretty cool. I have a rough unedited version below, sorry for the 40 seconds of mark setting up his iPhone to record me flying. (Warning: there is audio on this one, be prepared for motor whining!)

Not bad for a first outing. I think that the F-22 will remain until I get a little more experience in flying. Mark’s EzFly impressed me so much, I think I’ll have to construct one of my own (Mark has already muttered about splitting an order of some more sheet foam, I’m in!). We might try to figure out why the vibration on the EzFly seemed so much stronger than the vibration on the F-22. The high soaring flight of the EzFly was really nice, and once I got the hang of being gentle on the rudder and ignoring the elevators entirely (use throttle to go up and down) it was almost relaxing to fly.

If you’ve ever wanted to get into RC, it seems like this kind of construction and all the great online resources have never made it easier (and it doesn’t hurt to have a patient and more experienced friend to help you.) I’m hooked. Expect some future planes and flights (perhaps better documented than this build).

Here are a couple of links:

• Plans for the EzFly
• Plans for the F-22, along with cool vids for much better construction.

Addendum: While investigating the vibration issue, I found a number of other vids which demonstrate the effect, although none perhaps as severe as the one I saw. Someone suggested that we might have been running with an unbalanced prop: given that I had mashed this thing into the ground, it’s entirely possible that I bent it up. But during my investigation, I found this extremely nice video of a wing mounted camera on a gorgeous looking P-51. For your viewing pleasure:

I received my second email inquiry yesterday (yes, two whole emails) asking me why I hadn’t been posting to brainwagon lately. It’s gratifying that both of my readers would each send me a note asking if things were all right, so I thought rather than addressing you each separately, I could double my efficiency by creating a post.

There are many reasons for my apparent slowdown in posting. My new project at work is taking up more time. I haven’t done much amateur radio lately, mostly because I need to rework my antennas (I want a more permanent way to route coax inside, rather than just “opening a window”), and the programming muse has seemingly left me: I can’t seem to muster a lot of enthusiasm for it at the moment.

These would by themselves normally be enough to slow me down, and perhaps bring a temporary halt to blog posts. But there is another reason: the unavoidable drone of the election season.

You see, I’m a person of fairly strong political convictions, and the election season always presents enough fodder that daily I find myself yelling at the television. My temptation in moments of weakess is to turn these diatribes (well founded as I believe them to be) into blog posts, but I don’t think that my readers (both of you) come to brainwagon to read my political positions. If I invited you to my house for a barbecue, I’d be a terrible host if I simultaneously subjected you to rants on the subject of politics or religion. I view brainwagon as a place where I can talk about interesting things of little consequence. I’m going to try to keep it that way.

On the brighter side: some cool projects are underway. The F-22 RC airplane I began several weeks ago is mostly completed. With the help of Mark Harrison of Eastbay RC, I had the thing entirely assembled, and we were set for a trial flight on Friday, but sadly after a week of beautiful weather, Friday dawned cold, with a light drizzle and strong gusty winds. We might have braved it, but I noticed at the last minute an issue with a loose control horn on the elevon, and it would not have been controllable. It needed a return to the workbench for a fix.

When I got back home, I pondered another problem that I had with my assembly, if you check out the following video, note the placement of the servos:

Did you see the issue? the servos are mounted very near the slot where the propeller will be mounted. In fact, when the elevons are in the down position, the little control arm for the servo comes uncomfortably close to the propeller. I decided that while I was fixing one of the control horns, it would be good if I unglued the servos and mounted them further back.

And here’s where having a great mentor like Mark really helps: he informed me that isopropyl alcohol applied to the glue joint would wick in, and I’d be able to peel the glue off. A trip to Walgreens and $2 got me a nice bottle of 91%, which I applied with a cotton swab. A few minutes of waiting, a little wiggle, and the servos popped right off. A little more alcohol applied, and I was able to peel the remnants off the foam and the servo. Very cute.

Today, I hope to get the new, shorter control arms in place, with better control rods in place, with hopefully less flexure. Then, the question will be: dare I try it out? I actually have no experience at all with RC planes: I was going to rely on Mark to help me get it off the ground and maybe avoid a crash by using “trainer mode” on my transmitter (enabling him to take over and fly). I probably shouldn’t have begun with the F-22. Something with some dihedral and maybe even a real airfoil so it can glide in without power would be better for a beginner, but it looks really cool. 🙂 I expect that after two or three flights, it will be in such bad shape I’ll have to harvest its organs for use in another plane. But I will have learned alot.

I’ve already begun to plan a second plane, and to acquire the parts for it (whatever it turns out to be). Ultimately, I’d like to get to the whole FPV (first person video) setup, and be able to fly with cameras aboard, but I think until I gain some experience, it would be pointless (or even counterproductive) to spend lots of money on equipment. After all, you have to walk before you can run.

But I did find an interesting gadget that’s a baby step in that direction: an $8 Turnigy keychain video camera. It records MP4 video at 640×480 resolution onto a microSD card (not provided). I had a 4GB class 4 card, which worked okay for early testing, but it seemed like it had a problem maintaining full frame rate with that, so I ordered a couple of nice little Class 10 cards from Amazon, and they seemed to work out very well. Since my plane isn’t ready for flight testing, I decided to test the camera by velcroing it to the license plate holder on my car, and taking it for a short 15 minute drive. I then took the video and post processed it with ffmpeg to turn it into a time lapse video (25x faster) and got this result:

The overall clarity is not bad: the automatic exposures can sometimes lower contrast and wash out the image, but perhaps less than I might have expected. The biggest problem I suspect I’ll have is that the field of view is quite narrow, and thus when mounted on the airplane, may jerk around a lot. But for a total investment of around $17, it’s perhaps better than I might expect.

Stay tuned for more, and thanks for your patience!

Three years ago, I wrote a short post about volume rendering. I always meant to follow up, because I finally sorted out the problems with generating multiple, overlapping images. Here’s a new video generated with the improved code:

Fourier volume rendering is less flexible than raytracing, but it does have certain computational advantages, most notably in that you can generate images in less than O(n^3) time, which is the typical bound for conventional raytracing. It also has some applications in light field refocusing applications. But overall, I still thing that raytracing has a number of advantages. Perhaps that would make a good first serious Go program? I’ll ponder it more.

I’m one of these…

About once a year, I get the urge to push my programming skills and knowledge in a new direction. Some years, this results in some new (usually small) raytracers. Sometimes, it results in a program that plays a moderately good game of checkers. Other years, it results in code that predicts the orbits of satellites.

For quite some time, I’ve been pondering actually trying to develop some modest skills with GPU programming. After all, the images produced by state of the art GPU programs are arguably as good as the ones produced by my software based raytracers, and are rendered factors of a hundred, a thousand or even more faster than the programs that I bat out in C.

But here’s the thing: I’m a dinosaur.

I learned to program over 30 years ago. I’ve been programming in C on Unix machines for about 28 years. I am a master of old-school tools. I edit with vi. I write Makefiles. I can program in PostScript, and use it to draw diagrams. I write HTML and CSS by hand. I know how to use awk and sed. I’ve written compilers with yacc/lex, and later flex/bison.

I mostly hate IDEs and debuggers. I’ve heard (from people I respect) that Visual Studio/Xcode/Eclipse is awesome, that it allows to edit code and refactor, that it has all sorts of cool wizards to write the code that you don’t want to write, that it helps you remember the arguments to all those API functions you can’t remember.

My dinosaur brain hates this stuff.

By my way of thinking, a wizard to write the parts of code you don’t want to write is writing code that I probably don’t really want to read either. If I can’t keep enough of an API in my head to write my application, my application is either just a bunch of API calls, inarticulately jammed to together, or the API is so convoluted and absurd that you can’t discern it’s rhyme or reason.

An hour of doing this kind of programming is painful. A day of doing it gives me a headache. If I had to do it for a living, my dinosaur brain would make me lift my eyes toward the heavens and pray for the asteroid that would bring me sweet, sweet release.

Programming is supposed to be fun, not make one consider shuffling off one’s mortal coil.

Okay, that’s the abstract version of my angst. Here’s the down to earth measure of my pain. I was surfing over at legendary demoscene programmer and fellow Pixarian Inigo Quilez’s blog looking for inspiration. He has a bunch of super cool stuff, and was again inspiring me to consider doing some more advanced GPU programming. In particular, I found his live coding thing to be very, very cool. He built an editing tool that allows him to type in shading language code and immediately execute it. It seemed very, very cool. Here’s an example YouTube vid to give you a hint:

I sat there thinking about how I might write such a thing. I didn’t feel a great desire to write a text editor (I think I last did it around 1983) so my idea was simple: design a simple OpenGL program that drew a single quad on the screen, using code from a vertex/fragment shader that I could edit using good old fashioned vi. Whenever the OpenGL program noted that the saved version of these programs had been updated, it would reload/rebind the shader, and excecute it. It wouldn’t be as fancy as Inigo’s, but I figured I could get it going quickly.

While I have said I don’t know much about GPU programming, that strictly speaking isn’t true. I did some OpenGL stuff recently, using both GLSL and even CUDA for a project, so it’s safe to say this isn’t exactly my first rodeo. But this time, I thought that perhaps I should do it on my Windows box. After all, Windows probably still has the best support for 3D graphics (think I) and it might be of more use. And besides, it would give me a bit broader skill base. Not a bad thing.

So, I downloaded Visual Studio 2010. And just like the Diplodocus of old, I began to feel the pain, slowly at first, as if some small proto-mammals were gnawing at my tail, but slowly growing into a deep throbbing in my head.

On my Mac or my Linux box, it was pretty straightforward to get OpenGL and GLUT up and running. Being the open source guy that I am, I had MacPorts installed on my MacBook, and a few judicious apt-get installs on Linux got all the libraries I needed. On the Mac, the paths I needed to know were mostly /opt/local/{include/lib} and on the Linux box, perhaps /usr/local/{include/lib}. The same six line Makefile would compile the code that I had written on either platform if I just changed those things.

But on Windows, you have this “helpful” IDE.

Mind you, it doesn’t actually know where any of these packages you might want to use live. So, you go out on the web, trying to find the distributions you need. When you do find them, they aren’t in a nice, self-installing format: they just naked zip files, usually with 32 bit and 64 bit versions, and without even a good old .bat file to copy them to the right place for you. On Mac OS X/Linux, I didn’t even need to know if I was running 64 bit or 32 bit: the package managers figured that out for me. On Windows, the system with the helpful IDE, I have to know that I need to copy the libs to a particular place (probably something like \Program Files(x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Lib) and the include files to somewhere else, and maybe the DLLs to a third place, and if you put a 32 bit DLL where it expected a 64 bit one (or vice versa) you are screwed. But even after dumping the files in those places, you still have to configure your project wizard to add these libraries, by tunneling down through the Linker properties, under tab after tab. Oh, and these tabs where you enter library names like freeglut32.lib? They don’t even bring up the file browser, not that you would really want to go grovelling around in these directories anyway, but at least there would be a certain logic to it.

And then, of course, you can start your Project. Go look up a tutorial on doing a basic OpenGL program in Visual C++, and they’ll tell you to use the Windows Wizard to create an empty project: in other words, all that vaunted technology, and they won’t even write the first line of code for you for your trouble.

After all this, I got to the point where I could hit F5 to compile, and what happened? It failed to compile my simple (and proven on other operating systems) code, with the message:

Application was unable to start correctly (0xc000007b)

You have got to be kidding me. When did we transport ourselves back to 1962 or so when a numerical error code might have been a reasonable choice? If your error code can’t tell you a) what is wrong and b) how to fix it, it’s absolutely useless. You might as well just crash the machine.

This was the start of hour three for me. And it was the end of Visual Studio. I must compliment Microsoft on their uninstaller: it worked perfectly, the first actual success of the day.

Undoubtedly some of you out there are going to proclaim that I’m stupid (probably true) or inexperienced with it (certainly true) and that if I just kept at it, all would be well. These are remarkably similar to the claims that I’ve heard from other religions, and I have no reason to believe that the “Faith of Video Studio” will turn out any better than any of the other religions.

Perhaps before you post, you should just consider that I warned you that I was a dinosaur when I began, and perhaps I was right, at least about that.

Luckily, along with this project, I’ve been thinking of another dimension along which I could develop some new skills, and it turns out that this stuff appears to be more in line with my dinosaur sensibilities, and that’s the Go Programming Language.

Go has some really cool ideas and technology inside, but at it’s core, it’s simply seems better to my dinosaur brain. The legendary Rob Pike does a great job explaining it’s strengths, and almost everything he says about Go resonates with me and addresses the subject of the long rant above. Here’s one of his great talks from OSCON 2010:

I know it will be hard to get my mind wrapped around it, but I can’t help but think it will be a more pleasant experience than the three hours I just spent.

I know the GPU thing isn’t going to go away either. I just kind of wish it would.

Today, around 10:31 Pacific Time, Curiosity successfully landed in the Gale crater on the surface of Mars, and has already sent back a couple of small black and white images. Carman and I were watching it on a combination of Nasa TV on our laptops and the CNN coverage. Thrilling stuff. Here are some of the cool tweets that hit my twitter feed, sampled from some net personalities, as well as just ordinary people that I know.

It once was one small step… now it's six big wheels. Here's a look at one of them on the soil of Mars #MSL http://t.co/uzO99NZz

— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) August 6, 2012

https://twitter.com/BadAstronomer/status/232350776180211712
https://twitter.com/RoyEltham/status/232354087637749760
https://twitter.com/Chris_Gammell/status/232349579373314048

From the crowd just before entry: "JPL, baby!" After first picture, it's a mighty roar of "JPL! JPL! JPL!" #Curiosity

— Doug Weathers (@gdunge) August 6, 2012

https://twitter.com/ragebauer/status/232350662900473857

If they stick the landing, I say put the @MarsCuriosity team on a Wheaties box.

— Larry O'Brien (@lobrien) August 5, 2012

https://twitter.com/dangillmor/status/232355807730208768

Apologies, the blackbird plugin that allows me to inject tweets into WordPress seems to be having difficulties. It may just resolve itself, so if you see tweets above, it got fixed.

Awesome stuff. I’ve previously blogged about how the Apollo program was instrumental in fanning the flames of curiosity and discovery in me when I was just five. I’d like to think that there are a bunch of kids, staying up past their bedtime (with the permission of their parents, naturally), who were inspired to learn about science, engineering and mathematics. What would even be more amazing would be for each of us to consider what we really want to achieve not just as a nation, but as a species. In the words of a former Facebook founder:

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
Jeff Hammerbacher

Let’s reach beyond the limits of our own greed, and work to solve the big problems that the world faces: poverty, hunger, pollution, energy, and intolerance. And let’s try to use science and engineering to learn more about our universe and our place in it.

You made me smile, Curiosity.

Okay, I haven’t made a lot of headway, but I did at least print out the pattern for my F-22 and cut the pieces for it. It’s literally the very first time I’ve done this, so the pieces aren’t perfect, but they aren’t bad. Witness:

The foam pieces for my F-22, with the radio transmitter to give some sense of scale.

I basically made the patterns by printing out the pieces, taping them together and then cutting out each individual piece. I then held them down and traced each piece with a wide point sharpy onto the foam, and then cut them pretty much freehand with an exacto knife, trying to cut pretty much all of the black off. It mostly worked okay, but the cellular nature of the foam made for some slight rough divets, and I found the first knife I used was actually a bit dull, which is a no-no. Switching it to a new blade helped, and the main body deck (which I cut last) was pretty good.

It’s some progress. I’ll think about it a bit more, and then figure out what else I need to do. I know I need to put in some carbon fiber rods across the body to stiffen it. I’ll have to review some of the online help to figure out what the best order to do things is. It also appears that Mark’s version has some kind of internal stiffening between the two identical body parts, not sure though, I’ll have to check it out.

Okay, off to vacuum up the styrofoam bits…

Just a quickie Arduino project that I ran across this morning: Sudoku on the Arduino. It’s pretty cute, since it uses the Arduino tvout library to generate video, meaning that you can display and play on your TV set. Neat! The only real description of the project is inside the zip file which you can find on the following Google Project host, but it’s pretty good at describing both the theory and implementation. I haven’t downloaded and tried it myself yet, but maybe this weekend.

SudokuUsingTVout.zip – mysudoku – ArduinoSudoku – sudoku on arduino – Google Project Hosting

Do I really need another hobby? Sigh. Oh well, it appears that whether I need one or not, I’ve taken my first tentative steps into the world of radio controlled airplanes, and I have Mark H. of the Eastbay RC blog to blame. Mark is a fellow Pixarian, and has lately been sucked into the world of model aircraft, building both autonomous UAVs as well as more conventional aircraft. I first started talking to him about this stuff through our interest in the Arduino, but he’s got me interested in scratch building my first RC aircraft.

To entice me (and to serve as a model for copying) Mark left his version of the F-22 Raptor in my care:

Mark’s scratchbuilt F-22 Raptor, in EPP Foam

The design comes from this posting on rcgroups.com, and seems pretty straightforward. But I’m so inexperienced with this stuff, I was a little bit intimidated, so I spent most of the weekend staring at the plans, and digging up further resources. The page above listed this nice vimeo video:

which is also available in four parts on YouTube (glad to find, so I could watch it on my Apple TV on the big screen TV):

When I start working on mine, I’ll post more pictures and information. I did stop by Harbor Freight and picked up some X-acto knives and one of the Dremel-tool-knockoffs, and I picked up a Turnigy 9X transmitter-receiver pair. Stay tuned for more soon!

I have an on-again, off-again love affair with beacons. I spent many a day monitoring QRSS beacons on 30m, and have built a series of different beacon transmitters. Most of my work has been inspired by Hans Summers, G0UPL, so when I found he was selling something called the Ultimate QRSS kit for a mere $20 U.S., I decided I had to have one. I ordered it a bit back, and was beginning to wonder if I should shoot him an email, but yesterday some overseas mail was on my doorstep, and it had arrived!

The Ultimate QRSS kit is cool for a couple of reasons: first, it includes an LCD display and two button interface. It supports a wide variety of modes, including QRSS, Hellschrieber and WSPR. And, from my perspective the most cool feature: it can time and frequency lock with a GPS source to stay on frequency and will autosynchronize time and gridsquare. For this purpose, not all GPSes are considered equal: you’d like to have one with a 1PPS (one pulse per second) output. Luckily, I have an old Garmin 18 LVC lying around, which will fit the bill nicely.

The kit is very simple, it’s basically his tried and true “LED as varicap” design, driving a power amplifier which consists of a 2N7000, generating perhaps 180mw. It should take me just an hour or two to assemble. Stay tuned.

Steve, K9ZW wrote an interesting post on his blog: Where are the Positive Hams? And How to Tell? – Part I « With Varying Frequency – Amateur Radio Ponderings. I understand what he’s saying, and while I don’t think it’s wrong per se, I think my own opinions are somewhat at right angles to the ideas he expresses.

It is important to realize that there is no single activity which characterizes “real” ham radio. It’s a whole bunch of diverse activities linked by the need to be licensed to use amateur frequencies. Ham radio is public safety and contesting. Homebrewing and antennas. Repeaters and EME. Digital modes and morse. Voice and SSTV. And so on. No one mode or activity is any more “real” than any others. It’s up to us as individuals to become licensed and explore the areas which interest us. We seek out others with similar interests and perhaps greater expertise to help us enhance our own enjoyment of our hobby.

We should remember: it is a hobby. It’s not an obligation, a calling or a job.

Steve writes:

Seems that some of us in the hobby have become forgetful of the debt we owe our Elmers (Mentors) and our fellow hams who helped us learn more about this hobby.

And here’s the thing: I don’t believe that any such debt exists. The mentoring that we do in ham radio isn’t a burden, it’s just another facet of the diverse hobby. If someone doesn’t wish to be a mentor, there is no reason for them to be one, and that’s okay. If someone is a mentor, it can only be because they gain pleasure from doing it, and therefore no “debt” from student to mentor is “owed”. As a mentor, I gain pleasure from helping others learn, and more often than not, find my own understanding increasing as I explain stuff that I already “know”. I think it makes as much sense to talk about the debt that mentors owe to students, for taking the time to perpetuate the activities that we have found interesting and engaging, and providing a rich, growing community for greater exploration and enjoyment.

I also find this idea of “debt” to be a bit self-serving: the ham radio “elite” tell us that Elmers are important, so important that anyone it seems that anyone who doesn’t apprentice themselves to an Elmer can’t experience the “real” ham radio that they should. It’s nice to think so, because it places the newly licensed in a position where they need Elmers (and by Elmers, we mean “people like us”) and that perpetuates our own sense of importance. But it’s an unnatural distinction: mentors are students, and students can be mentors. There is no magic transition that occurs where the student becomes the master. Once we begin to think of ourselves as masters, it can become easy to think that we’ve arrived, and to stop challenging ourselves to learn and to achieve. Rather than finding mentors, we need to find people who are doing and sharing.

So, I think the question isn’t really finding “positive” hams, it’s finding hams who are doing interesting things, and who are willing to share their experiences with you to inspire you. Whether you can find those in your local area is a bit of a hit and miss prospect: some clubs are engaged, fun, vibrant communities. Others are stodgy, old boy networks that talk a lot but do little. Luckily, even if your local clubs are more the latter, the Internet provides a great resource to find these people. Through YouTube, websites and mailing lists, we can find the people who are both doing, and taking the time to share those experiences with you, even if they don’t know you personally.

I don’t worry about finding “positive hams”. I just ignore the negative ones, life is too short. Do what you like. Look around for people doing the things you like. Share what you like. The rest will work itself out.

We also have to recognize that ham radio (or the parts of ham radio we happen to love) isn’t for everyone. Steve wrote:

Look at the number of amateurs who somehow can’t even interest their own family in the hobby – what sad things is that saying?

This isn’t sad at all. People get to pick the hobbies which make them happy. Get some perspective!

What do you all think?

I have previously mentioned Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread (posts here and here and here. I’ve continued to make this at least once a week since those early days of experimentation. I thought I might include a few notes about how I’m makind and refining the process that I use.

My early loaves kind of reminded me of the experience I had when first taking drawing classes. When I first started drawing classes, my improvement was immediate and dramatic. Childish squiggles gave way to portraits which were at least recognizable. But after that initial rush, you become more discerning, more critical of your own work. It’s that way for this bread as well. Initially, it’s amazingly good. But then, you begin to notice a few things which are perhaps not as good as you imagined. After a few weeks of that, I decided to try to be somewhat more methodical in trying to figure out what I was doing right or wrong, which approaches yielded better results, or worse results, and try to refine the basic recipe into something that is repeatable.

The recipe is so simple (flour, salt, yeast and water) that simple experimentation wasn’t difficult. The most obvious thing to vary was the ratio of water to flour. Jim Lahey’s book suggests a 2:1 ratio by volume (three cups of flour to one and a half of water) but when I tried to do that, I didn’t get repeatable results. Sometimes, the dough would appear to be fairly dry and it was difficult to get the flour to integrate, other times, the dough would be wet, and the second “rise” would look more like a “relax”: the dough would spread out rather than rise up. “Real” bakers will tell you that you need to weigh your ingredients to get an accurate measure, so I went ahead and bought a simple mechanical food scale that I could use.

Okay, but what amounts to use? Three cups of flour doesn’t really have a consistent weight, but it probably weighs a little over 4.5 ounces per cup. That would make for 13.5 ounces for three cups. Water is easier: a cup and a half is 12 ounces. So, I started experimenting. To make things easy, I decided to keep the weight of flour constant, and only vary the amount of water to
try to find the appropriate hydration ratio. My early experiments were all with dry yeast (1/4 tsp) and one teaspoon of salt.

I was a bit surprised. I’m using slightly more flour than the recipe would normally recommend, but it turns out that 12 ounces of water was ample to hydrate the flour. In fact, it appeared that the final dough was too wet: it spread out a lot during the second rise, and the final loaf was quite flat. A few more trials over the next couple of weeks (I can only eat so much bread) revealed that decreasing the water to eleven ounces gave a nicer result.

So, here’s my first rule of thumb: weigh your ingredients, sixteen ounces of flour, eleven ounces of water seems good for basic bread.

Secondly, I was concerned that my oven wasn’t coming up to temperature. I purchased an oven thermometer, and verified my oven was having a difficult time getting even to 450 degrees. Even with 30 minutes of pre-heating, it seems to reach a maximum temperature of 430 degrees or so. By 45 minutes, it seems to be more or less at 450 degrees. If I do a long preheat, I end up with nicer deeper color on the crusts, and the bread seems nicer overall.

Second rule of thumb: don’t rush your preheat, especially if your oven might have a hard time getting that hot.

Third, the depth and crispiness of the crust seems to be dependent on the humidity in the Dutch oven. Some have suggested spraying the bread with water as it goes into the oven, and I’ve found that to be helpful. When I take the time to spritz the loaf, the loaf seems to expand a bit better, and the resulting crust forms more nicely (more tender). But when you remove the lid during cooking, it also appears to be helpful to let the oven vent for thirty seconds or so: if you are too quick, the humidity in the oven can remain high, and when you pull the loaf out at the end, you may still feel some wet steam. That prevents the “singing” crackling crust that you want.

Third rule: spritz it with water when it goes in, when you remove the lid for the last fifteen minutes, vent the oven pretty well.

Fourth rule: let the bread cool before you eat it. My wife loves it when it’s hot, but frankly, some of the starches inside still seem fairly gelatinous to me when you cut into it, and they need some time for the steam to redistribute water inside the loafs. Just like resting a steak, the bread will be better when it’s rested for a while. After an hour or two, I put the whole loaves into paper bags and store them in our bread box until they are ready to eat. I don’t recommend plastic for whole loaves, especially if the loaves are not completely cool: the residual steam condenses inside the plastic, and wrecks the crust. Once you’ve cut into the loaf, plastic might be useful to store the bread to keep it from drying out.

I’ve just begun experimenting with similar ratios for using sourdough. My first tests have been with the same amounts of flour and salt. Previously I would use one and a half cups of water and 1/4 cup of starter, but again, I found that to be a fairly wet dough, creating a fairly flat loaf. My current experiments have centered around the ratio that I found for my yeast loaves: I take 1/4 cup of starter, and add enough water to make eleven ounces. I’ve made this twice, and the resulting loaves are nice and round, but perhaps a bit dense, with fairly even but small bubbles inside the loaf. I think I’ll try to add a very small amount of additional water (11.5 ounces total weight) to compensate for the small amount of additional flour that is in the starter. More experimentation is clearly called for.

I also have begun to wonder if I’m “overrising” some of my dough. Leaving this dough for 24 hours may be too long. I like to make the dough when I get home after work, and then bake it the next day, meaning a full day for it to rise. I suspect that (especially for the bread made with commercial yeast) it may be better to cut that down to 18 hours or so (make the dough just before going to bed, but bake it when I get home from work). I’ll be experimenting some more over the next few weeks.

Anybody else having fun with this recipe? Any tips you might want to give this budding baker?

After 12 hours of rockiness, I believe that I have brainwagon moved to new hosting. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble, but if you do, you might want to clear your cache/cookies and try reloading again. If you spot anything broken, feel free to drop me an email with the problem.

Previously this blog was hosted at Go Daddy!, but while their hosting service has been in most respects quite troublefree, I’ve decided to discontinue using them for two basic reasons:

• Their ads. They are just plain sexist. The reliability and security of domain services and web hosting are not significantly enhanced by “Go Daddy Girls”.
• Go Daddy! supported SOPA. I can’t imagine why any company who participates as strongly in the Internet economy could back a policy which would do such significant harm to it.
• Oh, and a third one. I like elephants.

So, I’m over to bluehost.com, for no other reason than a number of people I know use it and seem to like it. The only problems I had transferring it over were problems of my own creation. Here’s to a new era for the brainwagon blog!

It’s about time I did some long overdue maintenance on my website, including some name service changes, which may bring brainwagon off the net for (hopefully short) periods over the next week. Please bear with me, and all will soon be sorted out.