#so we took my old battery to a shop and they tested its charge before showing us which new one we should get

[dawnthefluffyduck]

New game interest unlocked

(crow in bottom right belongs to @patchwork-crow-writes)

[capricornus-rex]

A Test of Wills (2)

Requested by Anon. Prompt:

What about...Cal x reader fic, getting stuck on Jakku because the Mantis needs repairs?

Cal Kestis x Reader

Part 1 | Part 3 | Masterlist

2 of ?

The door lowered itself to open and the planet presented itself to you. The Mantis has landed in the outskirts of the settlement—and perhaps in a safe distance away from that particular settlement in case the locals weren’t too friendly.

The trek roughly took an hour to travel by foot. Next thing you know, you and Cal were already standing by the arch that bore the place’s name.

Niima Outpost.

The sights and the sounds gave you an idea of what life in this place looks like.

Lightweight speeders and ferries come in droves, the drivers carrying out loads of parts—treating them just as carefully as actual smuggler’s bounty—and all of these junk traders gravitate towards the biggest tent resting in the center of the settlement.

It doesn’t take a genius that majority—if not all—of these people are scavengers. The real question is where they are finding their bounties.

“Get ‘yer own loot!” a Sullustan growled at Cal while he hauled a sled filled with scraps.

“Sorry, I was just looking,” Cal scoffed.

He turned to face front before speaking, “It’s almost like Bracca in here.”

“There a difference?”

“Well, there doesn’t seem to be any rain in here,”

There were a few ruffians here and there, a few benevolent dwellers sprinkled into the population—the ones who just go about their business and avoid trouble when they could—you place yourself in the latter category. Keeping your cowls low, you and Cal make your way towards the cluster of tents.

“Where do you think we can get the best parts?” Cal muttered within your earshot.

“I don’t know, but I guess we can keep looking,”

“Okay…”

The two of you fanned out, covering more ground and merchandise instead of sticking together. As you passed and stopped by the tents, the peddlers implored you to buy their scavenged parts. Cal, on the other hand, decided to get intel whilst window shopping. He stopped at one of the tents that sold a certain array of parts, he looked around until the merchant in charge of the booth arrives.

Much to his surprise, he meets the merchant—an Abednedo, the same species as Prauf.

“I used to scrap things like these before,” he said while studying what appears to be a central processing unit board, he looked the part of an interested buyer as he weighed it on his hands. “Where do you get them?”

“Most of these are the fruits of my labor. Some others here are ones I’ve traded with the bunch o’ riffraff that come here,”

“Oh, I see,”

There was a pause between the exchange. Suddenly, Cal’s memories caught him off-guard. He remembers the last thing that Prauf told him: to get out and see the galaxy. Well, now he’s doing it.

“Kiddo, hey, you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m okay,” he muttered. “Just remembered a friend.”

The Abednedo nodded and gestured over his wares, advertising some more to Cal.

“I wager you have some emergency power cells for the ship I’m in,”

“Well, that depends on what kind of ship you’re talking about,”

“An S-161 Stinger XL,”

Cal added the other parts that they needed—the hyperspace compressor as well as enough tanks of fuel that could cover the distance between Jakku and the Core World systems.

The merchant adjusts himself on his seat, thoroughly intrigued by the mention of the Mantis’s manufacture name, “Well now, that’s a fancy ship for a kid like you to be in—and here in this middle o’ nowhere planet too!”

“Do you have them?” Cal pressed.

Even with its small mouth, the Abednedo’s expression took a dramatic shift. Suddenly, his laidback demeanor became stiff and wary, his small eyes looked left and right, and then he leaned over his table so that his words would only be in Cal’s earshot.

“Listen, the stuff in your shopping list is something we vendors combined can’t cover—even if we take to the best trader that might come here,”

“So what can you suggest?”

“See that big tent over there?”

Cal looked over to his shoulder and saw the exact same tent that he and you first noticed when you set foot into this outpost. When he turned back to the merchant, he got a more elaborate explanation.

“That’s the best place you’re going to get your parts. They’ll accept Republic credits—if you have any on you—but getting them will be tough,”

“How so?”

“A blob with two legs—goes by Unkar Plutt—holds up an event of some kind every two weeks. You name it: auction, gamble—a game of Sabacc or Dejarik, whatever—and even fight club. I heard that there will be an event tomorrow,”

“Tomorrow,” Cal echoed. “Which of the three?”

“He didn’t say; or at least word hasn’t come out yet,”

Cal and the merchant exchanged nods. To throw off any suspicion, Cal bought the only mint power cell the Abednedo had. He also slid a single silver bar of Republic credit on the table for the intel. He leaves the tent and comes looking for you; he finds you studying a bunch of auxiliary power cells and compressors sold by an old vendor. Cal stops dead in his tracks, he looks at you from afar, and watches you converse with the peddler—you were sweetly smiling back at the vendor, even lending an ear to some stories that she felt compelled to tell you, and by the grace of your kindness, you stayed to listen before you could pay what you’ve taken.

The old and kindly lady-vendor gave a weak squeeze on your hand when she saw that you have given some excess in the payment—which you insisted she keep. Cal smiled to himself while keeping his eyes on you, still studying your hauls for today. He thinks that your endearing nature seems to persist even in an unforgiving setting such as this planet.

You look to your front and see Cal walking up to you with a smile.

“Why are you smiling?” you curiously asked.

He shakes his head but his smile stretched a few inches more, “Nothing. What’d you get there?”

“Something we might need in the future. This,” you hold up the part in your hand to show Cal, “Is a compact auxiliary power battery. It may be small but can power up a ship as big as the Mantis or perhaps a Corellian freighter.”

“You know your parts, huh?”

“I met a good scrapper,” you winked.

“Is he good-looking too?”

You pursed your lips, tipped your head sideways and shrugged, “Most likely.”

Cal lets you in on the intel that he’s gathered from the Abednedo merchant—everything that he’s learned from start to finish. You conclude that there shouldn’t be any harm in just checking it out.

Both of you marched towards the biggest tent in the center of the settlement. Brushing past a couple of dwellers who were in the middle of a brawl because one of them apparently cut in line. Seconds later, a group of uniformed individuals entered the scene and broke off the fight, they had weapons on them too, and the fact that they were pointing it at the brawlers’ faces were enough for them to stand down.

Neither of you maintained eye contact and didn’t look long at the scenario—you continued your unassuming trader charade.

“You Unkar Plutt?” Cal abruptly spoke to the squelching blob that had its back turned to the window.

The creature in charge was a huge gob of pink, moist flesh. A pair of small eyes between a wide nose and a small mouth filled with tiny but sharp, yellow teeth. Neither of you jumped at the sight of him; but mentally, both of you agreed that he was definitely ugly… and rancid.

Cal did the talking. After all, he is the scrapper between the two of you.

“So what if I am?” he grumbled.

“What’s tomorrow’s main event?”

Unkar didn’t seem to be impressed that a pair of new faces have caught wind about the events he holds for the best prizes in his stronghold. He planted his pudgy fist on the table and leaned closer to the grated window that separated him from Cal.

“I don’t think you can take what you’re getting yourself into,”

“Oh, trust me—I’ve had worse,”

The Blobfish—as most scavengers call him—chuckled sinisterly, unknowingly underestimating Cal.

“At dawn. You win; you name your boon. That’s all I could tell ya,”

“Do we get like a schedule or a sign-up list or whatever?”

“At dawn, boy. At my shipyard out there,” he snarled.

“Thanks. We’ll be in touch,”

You and Cal pace away from the window, he starts to whisper his ideas to your ear—but in your periphery, some of the thugs had their eye on you, even while you were still speaking with Unkar, you take Cal by the arm and exit the tent, away from prying eyes and ears.

[ecodweeb]

Taking a Nissan LEAF 326 miles round trip to Charlotte

So after our trip to San Francisco, my 5-year old IKEA rolling carry on luggage was indicating that this was its last big trip. Two zipper pulls broke and one of the plastic clasps that cinches/compacts the bag so it’ll fit in the airline overhead bin had busted. It was time to source a replacement to my $50 travel buddy.

My luggage had been discontinued, but, for the same price they had a new model with the same functionality and a better handle design for when it is rolling. Cool! But... I don’t wanna burn gas to get there in my BMW i3 REx. Having just come back from California and test riding two electric motorcycles and the W453 Smart ForTwo Electric Drive cabriolet, I didn’t wanna burn any dino juice. As such, I texted my friend Elson and asked if we could swap cars for the day. Elson has a 2017 Nissan LEAF with the 30kWh battery, so it can go just over 100 miles between charges. He agreed, and we traded cars around lunch time. My friend Patrick was coming with me, so I picked him up and set off! Our first stop was Carolina Nissan in Burlington for a charge. 

The LEAF charge really quickly during, taking less than 26 minutes to reach 90%. It also added one bar on the battery temperature gauge. Our nest stop was Ben Mynatt Nissan in Salisbury. The LEAF again charged very fast to 90% at this stop, but another bar appeared on the temp gauge. 

With this charge, we had enough range to reach IKEA, shop, then turn around and recharge at this location.

We made it! We did our shopping, spending a little over an hour in the store. The car dropped one temp bar while we were shopping. We drove back to Ben Mynatt Nissan to charge, and plugged in right as a massive storm hit.

This charge took a much longer time, more than 30 minutes to reach 90%. The battery added two temp bars after this charge. 

I decided to drive a little more conservatively for the next leg, arrive back at Carolina Nissan for our final charge before going home.

This charge took almost 45 minutes, and the battery temp gauge was really high. I was and wasn’t concerned -- I knew that Nissan programmed the 2017s to show a higher than actual temp on the gauge to dissuade drivers from repeatedly rapid charging their cars.

We drove home, in the rain, and arrived back at the house with 10% / 9 miles left on the clock. I plugged the car into my Level 2 charger at home, and by morning the car was around 90% charged with the battery temp back in the normal range. I returned the car to Elson, who was so excited that his car went on a long trip. He bought this car for two reasons: he didn’t want to feel he was being taken advantage of by the service department anymore, and, he wanted the excuse of “my car can’t drive that far” so that his sister would have to drive when they visit family in Wilmington. One more trip in the books1

[elleleuthold]

Exit Arc (6k short story, sci-fi)

This is a sci-fi story I wrote last year, submitted around, edited over and over, etc. I learned a lot writing it, and editing it, and I think the best thing to do now is share it! Many thanks to @laireshi for holding my hand and being a terrific beta through my first shaky steps into original fiction. Comments and critique are welcome, and I hope you enjoy reading! If you don’t want to read it on tumblr, it’s available on wordpress here.

Up on a spire, hanging by her pilot line and magboots, Skip could pick out a delicate spray of starlight above the lurid glow of the sunset. With the solar arrays stretching out to the south and east, wind towers soaring above them and dew catchments spiraling away to every corner of the city, it was easy to feel like she had the whole world at her feet. Like she was already up in the black, watching the city fade away like a bad dream.

Just one more night. Get the bounty, get her ticket, get out.

She toggled her comm.

“Fell, you coming or am I doing this skate by myself?”

“Got cut off by a parade and had to detour around the whole club district,” he reported. “ETA, two minutes. You got our target?”

“Did a flyby an hour ago,” she told him. “Been charging on First Spire since with no sign of trouble. Should be good to go.” She hauled herself up level with her seat and hooked herself in, starting pre-flight checks. The Phoenix’s solar batteries blinked green, the propellers cycled smoothly, and the wing joints clicked through their tests without snags or jams. It was a tiny rebellion, getting her charge for free up here, but it still gave her a fierce sort of satisfaction. One last act of defiance.

The navcom flashed percentages at her: balance ratios, weight and capacity, wind speed, altitude. All systems ready for launch. She locked her boots to the runners and transferred the navigator feed straight to her visor. Fell would be coming up from the southeast, pushing too fast if she had to guess. He always pushed his bird too fast if it’d been a while since their last flight, and it’d been months this time. Long, dreary months of drudging through cheap engines in second-hand light and scraping together every credit she could come by. A proper flight was just the send-off she needed.

“I’ll meet you at the border,” she told him, and disengaged the parking lock.

The glider fell away from the spire smoothly, and Skip let the momentum build for a moment. This was the best part, really. The biggest thrill she got anymore. That little frisson down her spine as the city rose up before her, sparks grounding in her elbows, her wrists, the joints of her fingers. She leaned to the left and fed the engines more power, pushing the nose down and around for the right angle with one hand and easing the wingtips out with the other. A clean sweep-and-roll maneuver and she was soaring back toward the rising moon, the bulk of New Tarel sprawling beneath her.

Fell caught her in the ribbon of airspace between First Spire’s reach and the legally convoluted domain above the commercial district, his own bird a blue-and-white flicker in her peripheral vision.

“Ready when you are,” he reported, slowing a little to match her. “So, where we going?”

“Darbinian solar arrays” she said, “They’re well ripe for harvest.”

Fell whistled, high and sharp enough to make the mic crackle on the edge of the sound.

“Darbinian? You got a premonition I should know about? Someone give you a lucky charm with your lunch today?”

“We can do it,” Skip insisted. “Low and fast, like the old days.”

“I ain’t saying we can’t do it, Skip, but you know that’s Karga territory. They catch us, it won’t matter what we did four years ago. Those punks don’t care who’s in their airspace, they make ‘em all dead.”

“So we won’t let them catch us then,” she squeezed the controls and flipped into a tight spiral, then snapped her wings out broad again: let ‘em try.

“You’re a regular thrill-chaser tonight, aren’t you,” Fell grumbled, but he dipped his wings in agreement.

“I learned from the best.”

They came up on the sky fields quickly. The panels gleamed in the twilight, each one steadily and efficiently collecting power for the busy offices, shops and homes below. Or they would be, once she and Fell cleared out the leeches.

They’d been beneficial, once. Fist-sized artificial mechanics to make sure the supports stayed stable, the power lines stayed undamaged and the arrays stayed free of any debris that made it up this high. The Coalition had made millions of the things. But a machine needed power, didn’t it? And some clever programmer or engineer, or maybe some not-so clever budget balancer, had looked at the little things and said, “Well, why don’t we power them from the array? They’re up there anyway, aren’t they?”

A year later, half the city was living in rolling brownouts and two districts barely had power at all. A good-size leech could drain a fully charged private grid in a day, suck up a speeder’s reserves in less than an hour, and stars help you if they latched onto your glider. Dead propellers and the weight of a few leeches in the wrong place could take an unwary pilot all the way down to real dirt-and-sand ground. But the Coalition bounty was a powerful lure. If you were fast enough, smart enough, lucky enough, you could make a salary-plugger’s monthly pay in a night. More, if you hit the right places.

She and Fell were careful; tempered glass storage pods, protective paneling, armored flight jackets. And they used the old hooks, wide, curving blades on the end of a meter-long stick. You could go faster with one of the new sticky-net scoops, but the overhead was higher, and Fell was afraid the leeches would adapt to the things in another month or three. Better to be slow and careful than fast and dead, he said. Taking things slow wasn’t one of Skip’s talents, but life under the Coalition’s strictures had taught her a deliberate wariness that worked well enough for circumstance.

“You sure this is what you want to do tonight?” Fell asked as they lined up on the narrow corridors between two arrays. “Poach Karga hunting grounds?”

Skip slid her hook out of its holster. The computer highlighted the closest targets, little bundles of pulsing energy in corner struts or clinging tight in the middle of a panel.

“You got a better way to get green-fresh credits before morning? Besides, I’m quicker than lightning, remember?” She couldn’t keep her grin out of her voice. “Just try to keep up.”

Fell sighed, low and long-suffering, but he didn’t argue.

The first leech came easy: sting, scrape, scoop. A rattle of metal on glass and a swipe of her glove and the capture pod sealed shut. The second settled beside it, then a third. At the end of the row was a stubborn one, larger than average and scrunched in on itself, rooted securely to the array

Skip took a few breaths, resettling her grip. It was no good stunning the thing if she couldn’t get it off its perch; any leech that fell would just latch on somewhere else, maybe somewhere that didn’t get its power renewed every day, or every week. And the Coalition only paid for whole leeches delivered in person.

She jabbed, missed and jabbed again. The leech hung on, waving a sparking bundle of wires at her and she twisted her hook, arm aching with the motion. She had to bob down a breath to catch it when it finally popped free, but she managed to get the seal on just before the leech reached the lip. She gave it a good glare to match its malevolent scrabbling and nestled it with the others. The next two were simpler, and she fell back into the rhythm of the job, moving from corridor to corridor methodically. Every filled pod was another handful of trapped sunlight pushing her name higher and higher on the waiting list.

“Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?” The corridor ahead was just as full as the previous one, and Skip leaned back to check her supply of storage pods. The horizon looked clear.

“That.” Fell angled his bird away and flashed his wingtips, pointing deeper into the solar fields. Skip looked closer, prodding her visor to magnify.

Movement, she could make out that much. Vague shapes her navcom gradually identified as other flyers, moving with purpose.

“We should—”

“Yeah,” Skip agreed, but it was too late. The Karga crashed over the arrays in a wave of orange and violet neon, the scream of tortured engines riding with them. Their gliders ranged from top-market single-jets and faux-flash kites to older bike-bird combos like Skip’s own. Some pilots didn’t even have helmets, just gas masks and the sort of manic keenness that spelled ruin for anyone else in their airspace.

“Go, go!” Fell shouted, making the radio crackle and spit in Skip’s ear. She turned and dove, folding the wings in close to minimize visibility. The glint of starlight off glider wings was a dead giveaway, and that wasn’t an exaggeration with New Tarel’s gangs. If they were lucky, they hadn’t actually been seen. She risked a glance back for Fell, but if he was there he was doing a good job of hiding.

Two orange-lit riders had broken off from the pack. They were gaining on her.

Thrice-crashed sons of a cud-chewer. She changed course, weaving through arrays as closely as she dared. No luck. Her pursuers were close enough for the navcom to pick up now, and from the look of it their gliders were fresh-charged and flash-modded. She’d be lucky to make it to the edge of the field.

What was down below over here? Offices? Apartments? Shops? She prayed for shops. They had the best parking balconies, and she was going to need one.

One of the riders was almost above her now. Nothing else for it.

The wings strained as she plummeted into sharp dive, and she cinched them even closer. Speed, that was the key. Get just enough of a lead to slip out of navcom range.

She eased the wings back out as late as she dared and skidded to a stop under a penthouse garden overhang. A moment later the Karga enforcers streamed past with a roar of over-juiced jets. She counted back from a hundred in her head, listening hard. When she reached 25 without seeing or hearing any more flyers, she ducked into open air again and jinked between buildings, dropping levels and merging with traffic where she could. After 5 full minutes with no signs of pursuit, she picked out a more deliberate course.

Fell was waiting for her at the bounty drop-off, polishing a wingtip and trying to look as if he hadn’t been tracking her approach.

“Worrying over me again?” she teased as she gathered her packs. Fifty-two leeches. Enough to put her in the running, maybe enough to push into the top percentages.

“Just wondering how long you were going to keep me waiting in the cold,” he shot back, hefting his own haul. “My bones aren’t as young as they used to be, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah, suck it up old man,” she grinned at him. “Come on, let’s get you into the warm.”

The Coalition reps didn’t talk much, which suited Skip fine. She was always on edge at the drop-off, jittery in the presence of those green uniforms, sure someone would call her out even after the pardon. She pulled up the colony lottery feeds to distract herself. Fell settled beside her.

“You’re really going up.” His voice was tight and low, a reminder of the days when he’d still been her sergeant and she’d still thought New Tarel held a future she wanted.

“You know I am.”

“They could kill you, up there in the black.”

“They got no reason to. Not anymore.”

He hunkered lower, pressing their shoulders together.

“You’re the best thing here, you know? Without you, I might as well pack up the kid and Nadine and move in with her parents like they’re always asking. Get some corporate net-spider job down in the lower levels and forget I ever touched real sky.”

“You could come with me,” Skip said. “All three of you could. They like families. You’d be a sure thing.”

“No such animal,” he said. “Not in this lifetime. You and me, we know how fast that sure thing turns to vapor, don’t we.”

“Not this time,” she said. She grabbed his arm, staring intently at the numbers on her visor. Their pods must’ve been processed; there were new credits in her account. Shiny green energy credits, straight from the Coalition coffers, buoying up the pale, recycled ranks of her savings. On the passenger list her name flickered, then flashed green and started moving. Up and up, higher and higher, pushing right to the top of the waiting list. Giddy hope swelled in her chest.

And there it was. An actual ticket with her name and reservation number. Boarding time: 0600. All she had to do was grab her bag from the spaceport storage locker and show up. She tried not to hug herself too obviously. Months of planning, paperwork and interviews and she was finally, finally getting out. Away from crowded airspace and choking power restrictions. Away from shadows and smog, away from stale, recycled water, away from everything that’d been dragging like weights on her neck these last four years.

“It’s really happening,” she whispered. “Fell, I really—”

A flicker at the corner of her vision. Orange and violet lights, sweeping the byways above them. Getting closer.

Shit.

“Eyes on us,” she muttered. Fell squeezed her shoulder and stepped away. Go to ground, he signed, and she nodded. If they dropped a few more levels they’d be in Duster territory: risky enough, but safer than trying to dodge a dozen Karga at once. She slipped into the Phoenix in the half-focused state she’d run most of her old missions in. The tremble of the engine between her knees matched the buzz under her skin, the wings stretching out restlessly like extensions of her fingers.

She took the first gap in traffic she saw and didn’t look back, let her instincts take over. A left turn here, right turn there, down two levels and left again, some part of her brain tracking the flashes of orange and blue in her peripherals, flying by sight alone because the navcom made too much digital noise to go unnoticed forever. Fell would catch up, or he’d find her after. Take a few days to lie low in one of their old haunts and—

She didn’t have a few days, the glowing dream of the future reminded her. She had to be at the spaceport in a few hours.

She snapped back to full awareness. Karga lights were closing in on her left. She dodged away, climbed a few levels, dodged again and broke out of the old byways into a corridor she’d never seen before. Streamers and neon danced on every side, gang-signs scrawled over building after building.

She’d been herded into Karga territory. Idiot. She should’ve never let herself go on automatic. An orange glow off to her right was getting closer. She switched on the navcom, swept through a side corridor and banked up and left at the intersection, heartbeat loud in her ears. The navcom beeped: eight flyers, and Fell running before them.

She’d never shake them all down here. They knew the byways, they probably had traps at every corner. She needed proper sky. She gunned the engines and pushed straight up. Nine more levels to open airspace.

She made it four levels before they caught up, mocking whoops and roaring jets announcing them. Skip dodged around a modified Falcon and ducked as its rider swiped a hook over her head. Still she climbed, eyes fixed on the faint glow of moonlight ahead. Another glider swept towards her, a collision course, and she gritted her teeth and swept to the side, her climb slowing. The rider hefted a storage pod, grinned, and threw it just as she swept past. Glass shattered, and she caught a whip of wires and clinking aluminum plates in the corner of her eye.

No, nonono.

She toggled to autopilot and reached for her hook. The leech was the largest she’d ever seen, at least as long as her forearm and as wide as her splayed hand. It scrabbled over the wings, knocking out p-v panels and jamming up joints as it moved toward the power hubs. She jabbed at it, missed, took the hook in both hands and jabbed again.

“Use your damn eyes, Skip,” Fell growled down the line. She jerked around as he blew over the space above her, two Karga in his wake.

They’d stretched a sticky-net up ahead, a leech trap for the windfields but just as deadly to the average glider. And unlikely to show up on the navcom as an obstacle. She swept the stunned leech off her wing hurriedly and grabbed the controls, twisting into a spiral and pulling the wings in close. Just a little further…

Clear.

The power display dipped, red flashing across her visor. The leech, it had to be. The navigator flickered and went dark, the wing joints stiff and unresponsive; she was falling, uncontrolled, the glider little more than weight pulling her down. She toggled the controls, reached under the front cover and flipped the hard reset switch. Nothing. No power left at all.

“Skip!” Fell swooped back, circling toward her. “Try to steer for the apartments.”

“You always did have shit plans,” Skip retorted, but she was already shrugging out of her harness. No navigator. None of the delicate magnetic arrays that controlled the wings would respond. She reached down to pop her boot locks. The only way to right a falling bird without power was weight dispersal and manual control.

“Give me a heading?” she asked, pulling herself up behind the seat.

“2 points south, southwest, try to keep the Spire in sight.”

“Wind-blessed miracles, that’s what you’re asking for,” she muttered and pushed herself back over the storage pods. Her feet found the right positions and she stomped hard on the elevator pedal. The nose soared up. A little too high, but she’d drop again when she adjusted the wings. Her fingers curled over the wing-joint switches. She extended the tips and tugged on the flaps, fighting for every hint of drift and lift. The Karga were closing in again, a spiral of blurred masks and streaming lights.

She missed the first platform.

“Hold on Skip, I’m coming!”

She flexed her hands, breath hissing between her lips. She had to make the next one. She could see the warning lights of an abandoned landing pad. It was lower than she’d hoped, but if she kept falling she was definitely dead. Better a climb than nothing.

It wasn’t graceful. Even with the lift she’d bought and further slowing by snagged wing panels, the impact still flung her across the platform, screaming metal echoing in her ears and the coppery taste of blood on her tongue.

For a moment she just lay there, curled around her middle and running mental checks: toes still wiggled, fingers still waggled. Her whole right side hurt with the kind of deep, aching pain that stuck around for weeks in big dark bruises, but she could breathe. She leaned on her elbow to lever herself up and fell back as stars exploded behind her eyes. Her right shoulder was definitely in trouble. She took a few breaths and tried again, using her left hand instead, and made it to what could technically be called a sitting position against the guardrail.

Her hook lay just in front of her feet. She tried to clamp it under her boot and drag it closer on the vague idea of using it as a crutch, but had to give up when the attempt left her breathless and light-headed, sweat dripping down the side of her face as white-lightning pain crawled down her side. Stars and frostwinds, she was definitely in trouble now. If they came after her again…

A whirr of engines, broken messages streaming over her cracked visor. She held as still as she could, eyes half-open and unfocused. Her jacket should block most scanners. If she was lucky, an unmoving target would satisfy them.

A blur of orange and blue hovered at the edge of her vision. Her visor buzzed again, fragments of a freeze warning, but she held still, not looking, not blinking.

A shout, and what sounded like laughter, and the glider lifted away. She kept her breaths slow and shallow until she was sure they’d moved out of visual range.

She took stock again, widening her range of focus to include her Phoenix. The initial inspection was not promising. Both wings stuck out at strange angles, the photo-voltaic bands hanging loose or scattered over the floor. The armor plating was half-peeled off the nose and one of the propellers dangled from the tail shaft, cracked to reveal the wiring inside.

Something clinked. There was a screech of metal-on-metal and Skip realized something was moving. She scrabbled for the hook, heedless of the pain in her shoulder. The leech. It couldn’t be anything else.

A sparking wire snaked out of the wreck, closely followed by more clinking taps of metal legs and the dull glow of the main body itself.

Skip braced the hook against the corner where wall met floor and hauled herself to her feet. Her visor still had power, broken as it was. Her jacket had a battery. Her boots, too. And there were stories. Bodies found with a leech hooked into skin and bone. Unlucky mechanics and stupid kids taking stupid risks with bad equipment.

That wasn’t going to happen to her. She had her ticket. She was getting out.

She’d wounded it, at least, in their first scrabble. It was half-dragging itself along, not as fast as before. She jabbed with the stinger and it curled away, but a hook couldn’t kill a leech. She’d have to smash it. There were enough broken bits of Plastech and metal around, she’d find something. Something heavy enough to pin it down, or sharp-edged, for preference. Something she could wield one-handed. The running board. It was solid steel, as long as her arm. It had torn half off its mounting, held only by the last screw.

It took three more stinging jabs for her to cross the platform, and another before she could claw her multitool out of its compartment. She got the screw out just as the last sting wore off, and as the leech lunged she batted at it, knocked it skittering to the side and flipped it onto its stomach. She chased, bringing the bar down again and again, ignoring the twinges in her side until all the little parts were scattered and there was nothing but crushed rubber and spattered slime left.

Then she threw off her visor and toggled her wrist radio, rubbing at the gritty feeling behind her eyes.

“Fell?” she whispered, as if that would keep the transmission off monitors. “Fell, you out there?”

Silence.

She dragged herself back to her Phoenix and slumped against the fuselage.

“Fell, you better not be dead, you hear me? You are not dying on me now. Not today.”

She closed her eyes and waited, listening for anything but the sound of her own breath rattling in her throat and faint buzz of static. Nothing.

The medkit in her pocket was bare-bones basic but it had painkillers and antibiotics, and she needed both. The pain in her shoulder spiked when she reached for it, but she gritted her teeth and pushed through.

The timer display blinked as she peeled two doses of each off the squat blue and green stacks. 0400. Two hours to get herself to the shuttle launch on the other side of First Spire. The Phoenix was trashed. She wouldn’t be flying anywhere. She probably had an hour of leeway, maybe two before they gave her ticket away, but with miles of stairs and bridges to cross she’d still be walking then.

And she couldn’t leave without making sure Fell was okay.

She dragged herself to the navcom, the meds bitter on her tongue. If he wasn’t on comms, maybe she could still track him down.

“Perks of colony life, Fell, listen close. One, there ain’t no Karga there. Next best thing to getting disappeared for hiding, a whole new planet. Two, they got jobs with benefits. Retirement plans and that. They got me a shop all ready to go. Get to set my own hours, too, long as the work gets done.”

She took the back off the navigator and wired her boot batteries into it. It wouldn’t last long, but she didn’t need it to. She set the search grid to 1000 meters and settled in to wait.

“Three, the summer’s warm and lasts seven whole months. None of this snap-change weather like we got to deal with.”

Nothing. Not even a blip. Maybe the oncoming freeze was fritzing out the signal.

“Four—” she coughed over the crack in her voice, wincing against the throbbing in her side. “Four,” she repeated. “Four is, is I’ll be there, Fell, and I know it’d be better with you, okay, so you better answer me before I track you down in whatever mess you’ve—”

A crash, something heavy hitting something fragile, and the guide-lights on the landing pad blinked out all at once. The door at the other end of the pad shivered, then popped open.

“Skip? That you?”

Fell’s dimly lit face peered at her from the corridor. His jacket was torn and his boots scuffed, but it was definitely him and he was definitely alive. If anything, he looked better off than she was.

“Still kicking,” Skip said, the words half-strangled by the tightness in her throat.

“Sorry for the wait,” he said, tossing aside what looked like a piece of rebar. “I busted my radio, couldn’t get it to pick up more’n static. You alright?”

Skip nodded, swiping at her eyes surreptitiously. “Just waiting for you to get over yourself so’s I don’t have to be getting any angry comms from Nadine when I’m finally free of this place.”

She could see him chewing the inside of his cheek, nothing but friendly concern in his eyes.

“Skip…”

“I’m going,” she insisted. “I’m going if I have to walk the whole way and carry you besides, I am.”

“Okay,” he said. He sighed and dragged his hand over his scalp. “Okay. Well, staying here’s a no-go anyway. Temperature’s dropping fast; in a few hours we might not be able to fly at all. How’s your bird?”

She gave him a look. As if he had to ask, the way she’d crashed. He sighed again.

“You got any good propellers left? A few wing panels? Your navcom alright? I wrecked pretty good but we might be able to get her limping if you’ve got the parts.”

“I got…” she scanned the wreck again, looking for anything that might still be whole this time. “Yeah, I think I got all that.” She didn’t mention that trying to scavenge anything useful in the near-dark was going to be frustrating at best. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d made do with so little.

“Where’d you crash?” she asked instead.

“Old shopfront one bridge over. I had to scrape a wing and blow the nav to make it convincing, but they didn’t stick around too long after.”

She nodded. With a solid freeze on the way even the Karga would get in the warm. “Guess we better get started then.”

She wedged her helmet back on for light and started dismantling the navcom while Fell wrenched at the propellers. It was slow work, and the creeping chill slowed them further. The third time her tool slipped and she was left cursing at cold-numbed fingers, Fell took over that task, too.

“You’re just gonna hurt yourself worse,” he said, waving her away. “Tell me how you got on all this. What’s up there you’re so eager to get to?”

Skip grudgingly took a seat on a broken chunk of concrete.

“Ren sent me a message, said she’d drop my name. Must’ve been a good drop too, ‘cause it didn’t take them more than a week to process my forms. Part time security, part time mechanic. And she found me a little place to stay. It’s got real trees and a real river and she says there’s glider access less than a klick up the road.” She’d even had a permit for the Phoenix, but that was hardly important now.

Fell’s forehead scrunched up. “Well, it certainly sounds nice,” he said.

“But?” Skip prompted.

His hands waved denial. “You don’t need to hear it.”

“What else am I gonna do? You got something to say, tell me.” She squeezed her multitool tight against her palm, the edges hard even through her glove.

“Just keep talking, Skip,” he said. “You already know what I want to say.”

She did. He was going to say it sounded too good to be true. Her own personal idea of paradise, specially packaged to catch her eye. Too good. Too perfect. Nothing that nice ever happened in New Tarel. Not anymore. Not for people like them.

“They took Ren,” she pointed out. “She says no one up there cares what you did in the war. Just what you do now.”

Fell just shook his head and pulled the memory bank from its slot.

“Carry this,” he said, holding the jumble of computer bits out to her. “I’ll get the rest.”

He kept her talking all the way through the dim corridors, trudging onward with a stack of wing panels under one arm and two propellers slung over his shoulder while she did her best to paint the icy air with her words, giving all her hopes color. The shop, the open sky, the spread of farmland instead of skyscrapers.

“You really should come with me,” she tried as he shouldered the last door open, revealing his own crashed bird. It wasn’t as bad off as her Phoenix, but it wasn’t pretty. If they got her off the ground it’d be a wobbly flight at best.

Fell set down his load and stretched, rolling his shoulders.

“I got responsibilities to think of,” he said.

“Think on ‘em then,” she insisted. She dumped her tangle of parts into his pilot’s seat. “Think hard. If you see a future for little Eri here, you tell me, ‘cause I’ve been trying for four years and all I can see anymore is walls closing in. And I need to breathe, Fell, I need sky.”

He shook his head and didn’t answer for a while, slotting the propellers and p-v panels into place with half-muttered curses. Skip set to work on the shattered navcom, keeping her silence. Sometimes Fell needed time to stew over a thing, and opening her mouth too early never made him think any faster.

“The world won’t change if you run away from it,” he said finally, and for a moment Skip was plunged into memory: her old shop, five years ago, their roles reversed as he tried to convince her the future was worth fighting for.

She’d learned a lot since then. She’d learned nothing would bring back lost soldiers, or lost ideals, or a way of life that had died choking on dust and blood and the burning bile of betrayal. The world had changed.

“My life might be better,” she said, half whisper. Then, stronger, “How long do you want to spend pretending you don’t see the cage? We tried to change things. I don’t remember that going so well for us.”

Fell grunted, clamping the last panel into position.

“I’m tired of beating myself bloody against this place,” she tried again. “Maybe it’s time we changed something else.”

The engine cranked, sputtered, then settled into a low, familiar hum.

“You’re the only thing I got left here,” she said. “I need this.”

“You need your head checked.” Fell pulled on his helmet and started system checks. “Strap in,” he ordered. “We better get on, if you’re gonna make that shuttle.”

“You’ll take me to the shuttle port?”

“If I don’t you’ll just rag on me forever, won’t you?”

“Thank you.”

Skip settled her helmet for a better seal and clambered up behind him, making room for herself among the storage packs. Her boots wouldn’t get a solid lock, but she strapped her legs down and wound her arms though the tether loops.

“Ready,” she told him, nudging his elbow with her toe in case he couldn’t hear, and his head bobbed in acknowledgment.

The flight was a tenuous one, the wings vibrating through turns and the propellers buzzing. Fell was careful, dropping down layers at any hint of a nearby flyer and taking the warmer squirrelly corridors with grim determination while Skip tried not to flinch when the tethers dragged on her shoulder, tried to keep herself still and her weight well-balanced.

They reached the shuttle port approach just as dawn broke over the horizon, a muzzy glow through the clouds highlighting busses and larger hovercars ahead. The admissions area teemed with travelers and well-wishers, all moving in the complicated Brownian motion of farewells and checkpoints.

Fell slowed to a stop in the drop-off zone, engine still running, and Skip half-climbed half-slid to the slick pavement. She pushed up her visor and the wind stung her eyes with grit and cold. Frost-sharp air stuck in her lungs.

“So I guess…” she bit her lip. There was a jagged snag of guilt and fear in her belly, like an open wound. She hadn’t thought about this part, in all her planning. Somehow she’d forgotten that leaving meant saying goodbye.

After a moment Fell shut off the engine and shrugged out of his harness. The solid hand on her shoulder, she was almost expecting. The rough hug he pulled her into, his helmet bumping hers and the bitter smells of grease and sweat and charred rubber in his jacket, she wasn’t.

“You take care of yourself,” he said, eyes bright, and she nodded, wound her arms around his back and held on a moment longer.

“You too.” She took a long breath and stepped back. “I expect to see pictures of Eri’s birthdays,” she said. “And your bird, you gotta show me how you fix her up, alright? Take whatever you want from the Phoenix. And I still got some credit at the junkyard, if you need parts.”

He nodded, jaw tight, and she took another step back, and another, and finally stepped toward the storage lockers.

“Skip.”

She swiveled back.

“I’ll talk to Nadine. You get up there alright, you tell me there’s something worth doing there, I’ll try.”

It’d be two years in the black at least before she could start of offer any assurances, and another year after that before the next recruitment, but she clung to the chance anyway.

“I’ll see you there,” she said, trying for a smile. It probably didn’t look like much, but Fell smiled back anyway.

“Go on then,” he said, and she turned her back on New Tarel, nothing but glittering possibilities lining the path ahead.

[durfeehtbelloraco98insuranc-blog]

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Our last test is likely the most important one for those who buy a laptop: battery life. We loop a 4K video at a relatively bright 250 to 260 nits, with the laptop set to airplane mode, and with earbuds connected. The results for the Spectre x360 15 are fairly impressive, but not the winner. The winner is its near-twin, the Spectre x360 15 with a Core i5-8550U and GeForce MX150. Remember: Both laptops have the exact same-size battery and the exact same screen. Still, for a laptop with this much CPU and GPU performance, this is an impressive result.This still doesn’t mean you can play a game on batteries for nine hours. It means you can probably watch movies on the SSD for that long. Browsing, gaming, and other CPU-intensive tasks will use far more battery.There’s two conclusions to be made here. The first is the HP Spectre x360 15 itself. The high-end laptop has been around for two years now, but it took Intel’s Kaby Lake-G to make it sing, delivering plenty of performance to go with the looks.

We have few quibbles with the Spectre x360 15 design. But we were hoping it'd be lighter rather than heavier. The slender profile hides our biggest disappointment, though: the weight. Blame the 4K panel, or look on the bright side and appreciate the sturdiness, but bottom line, this is a heavier laptop than we'd like. The second conclusion is that Intel’s Kaby Lake-G Core i7-8705G is a pretty impressive package (our review of the CPU is here.) It’s not enough to threaten Nvidia’s dominance at the high-end of gaming laptops, but the truth is, the lion’s share of gaming laptops sales are actually in the GeForce GTX 1050 range. The Spectre x360 15 can hold its own in this crowd, further blurring the line between mainstream and gaming machines. Microsoft has announced a new Surface tablet computer called the Go. It’s smaller, lighter, and cheaper than its siblings. Initial thoughts by most tech journalists is to assume it’s going to be too small and too underpowered to function as a proper laptop. They’re right, of course, but I’m interested in it for a different purpose: a travel laptop.

Small, light, and cheap are some of the main aspects I look for in my search for the perfect travel laptop, but those aren’t the only ones.Regardless how long you’re travelling, you almost certainly don’t need a full-size laptop. Most people don’t need any laptop, but if you’re reading this I’m guessing you need to do some work while you’re on the go, and a regular tablet just doesn’t cut it. As handy as they are, there’s something to be said about a device that can run all the same software as your computer at home. There are workarounds and options with a tablet, but a “real” computer is just a bit easier.In my years as a digital nomad, I rely on my laptop to make a living while I’m on the road. I’ve figured out what I need, and what I don’t. The new Surface Go ticks a lot of the right boxes, but lets first talk about what I’m looking for in a laptop specifically for travel.

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Size: Small. Lugging a 17-inch behemoth gets old before you make it across the airport. Something small and light is vital.Price: Low. There is something freeing about having a laptop that won't break your wallet and mind if it got stolen, like mine almost did last year with the rest of my gear.Battery life: Between long flights, long sessions at coffee shops, and perhaps a few days between being able to charge properly, exceptionally long battery life is crucial. My current laptop, for example, lasts for 11 hours or more, depending what I’m doing.Charge via USB: This is probably the hidden key to it all. Being able to charge your laptop via USB means you can connect a USB battery pack and have, essentially, unlimited battery life. OK, not “unlimited” but depending on the pack, between a few hours to more than double the already long battery life. That’s huge, and sadly, rare.

The traditional must-haves when it comes to computers are far less important. Screen size, resolution, processing power, etc, are all secondary to the above. If it’s a little slow, isn’t that a fair trade for something that weighs next to nothing and lasts for 10 hours?The Surface Go ticks a lot of the right boxes. It’s got a 10-inch screen and is 8.3mm thick (about a third of an inch), so it’s small and compact. At 1.15-pounds it’s light too.It charges via USB-C, which is fantastic and pretty much the reason I’m writing this preview at all.As far as the price goes, it’s more expensive than my go-to Asus. List is $400, but that’s without the, for our purposes, required keyboard. Figure $100 for that, according to Microsoft’s pricing, and we’re looking at a $500 laptop. There are some great budget laptops for $500 that will offer more in terms of traditional “computery” things, but all are much larger and heavier.

Battery life is a claimed 9 hours, which is quite good. One of the ways my current travel laptop pick does its 11+ hour trick is by having an Intel Atom processor. This performs far below what you’d expect in one of their regular chips. It’s a hypermiling Toyota Prius, so expecting a good 0-60 time misses the point.The Surface Go is using an Intel Pentium Gold 4415Y processor, which is of the Kaby Lake family. It will be interesting to see if this performs better than the Atoms. It’s a year newer than the Atom x5-Z8350 in my Asus, and not of the Atom family, so it’s possible it will be faster. My assumption is it will, based on a fair guess that Microsoft wouldn’t release one of their few hardware products with the kind of performance I’m willing to tolerate in a travel laptop. People expecting even tablet-like performance would likely be flustered with Atom-speed, and that doesn’t sound like what Microsoft would want to do. So I think it’s a fair guess the Go will be faster than other 10-inch tablet/computer hybrids, but with less battery life. But I could be wrong.

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And a faster processor wouldn’t be bad. My Asus is fine for writing, web, Netflix, even photo editing, but try to do more than one thing at a time, or any sort of video editing, and it becomes an infuriating slog.There are other aspects, too, that are good, but not vital for the travel minded. The screen has a decent resolution of 1800x1200, for example. I briefly had a 10-inch laptop with a 1920x1080 screen and I’ll tell you, it was too much. Everything was just too small, and there’s only so much that zooming in and increasing font size can do. Which is to say, on this size screen, 1800x1200 should plenty for a laptop, especially one that's a more squarish 3:2 aspect ratio vs the usual laptop 16x9. The Asus Transformer is 1280x800, for comparison, and that's a bit of a weak spot.

I’m not rushing out to get a Surface Go. While it looks good on paper, it’s also remarkably similar to my year- and-a-half-old Asus Transformer Mini T102HA. If the Go really does last 9 hours, and if it is a little faster than the Atom-based 10-inchers, it will certainly be worth considering. I love my travel laptop, but something with a higher resolution screen and some more horsepower would do nicely.It’s also worth considering that the price isn’t really $400. As mentioned, it’s really $500 with the keyboard, and that’s with a 64GB harddrive and 4GB of RAM. That’s “fine” for a travel laptop, and I made do with those numbers for years across several computers (a built-in SD card slot handles most of the storage for them and for the Go). If you add in $50 more, the Go gets a 128GB harddrive and 8GB of RAM. That’s definitely the way to go, but now we’re talking even more money than the Asus, for only a little bit better on paper.

[gta-5-cheats]

DJI Mavic Air review

New Post has been published on http://secondcovers.com/dji-mavic-air-review/

DJI Mavic Air review

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The Mavic Air is a minor engineering marvel. The first time you set up DJI’s new drone it’s like trying to solve a puzzle box. You flip, you twist, you unfold.

The metal joysticks are safely nestled inside the flip-out arms of the controller, the landing gear safely nestled in the propeller arms. Not a millimeter is wasted, not even in the packaging. It’s the culmination of a dozen years of drone making experience — but really, it’s built directly on top of the company’s recent push to make the perfect consumer quadcopter.

More than anything, the Air feels like a refinement of the company’s first two folding drones, the Mavic Pro and Spark. It slots somewhere between its predecessors in terms of both sizing and price. But the device has the benefit of six additional months of hardware and software advancements, in some ways even besting the pricier Pro.

Like the Pro and Spark, the Air is another strong step toward a truly mainstream drone. But between the $799 starting price and some still idiosyncratic artifacts in the hardware and software design, it’s still a ways from the sort of plug and play setup the company is ultimately aiming for.

But hey, unlike our Pro and Spark reviews, this time things didn’t end too badly for either the reviewer or reviewee — so that certainly marks a positive step toward that ultimate goal.

Flight school

There are plenty of lessons one can draw from GoPro’s latest stumble. Chief among them is the fact that drones are hard. When the action-camera maker opted to go it alone on its own folding drone, it clearly didn’t know what lay ahead. Shortly after hitting the market, the Karma drone began falling from the skies. GoPro ultimately worked out the issue, but the product appears to have become something of an albatross around its neck, with the company pulling out of the space altogether late last year.

By its own accounts, on the other hand, DJI had a hit with the Mavic Pro. During its press conference it touted it as the “best selling drone of all-time” — a bit of hyperbole, perhaps, but company clearly had enough confidence in the product to make the Pro the template for its future consumer products.

Introduced in May of last year, the $399 Spark was positioned as the drone for everyone, complete with gesture-based controls and special selfie-focused flight modes. Ultimately, I think, the company did itself a bit of a disservice with videos of people enjoying the Spark as though it was as easy to use out of the box as an iPhone. It’s just not. Among other things, there’s too much uncertainty when flying a tiny quadcopter through the air, even with the latest technological advancements on-board.

DJI insisted on giving us a quick crash course (so to speak) on drone operations before taking the Air out into the real world, and honestly, I’m glad they did. I’m not really an experienced pilot — so in some ways, I’m probably the target demographic here. The training consisted of walking through setup, learning the gesture controls and taking taking it through a quick demo in the company’s (thankfully) high-ceilinged New York office.

It’s a lot to take in — and quite frankly, I wasn’t sure I was ready to take it out into the world after 10 minutes or so of flight time. But DJI sent us on our way, along with a note to reach out when, invariably, we ran into an issue — which, of course, we did.

Field testing

The main reason I’m not generally the person who tests out drones here at TechCrunch is one of geography. Frankly, it’s a pain in the ass trying to find a spot in New York where it’s okay to test the things out. I’m glad. Sometimes I think about a future where everyone is flying around a personal drone around Manhattan, and it begins to resemble a sort of dystopian hellscape.

On DJI’s recommendation, we found a spot about an hour and a half north of the city. We rented a car, with TechCrunch video producer Veanne behind the wheel and her dog Henri on my lap in the passenger seat. We made it through the tangled maze of cars through Queens and the Bronx, finally making it out to the Moodna Viaduct, a large, grassy space suitable for piloting small crafts.

So, a couple of things before we get started here. First: if you do end up buying the Mavic Air, I highly recommend splurging a bit and going in for the aptly named Fly More Combo. For a limited time at least, it’s an additional $200. That price includes additional propellers, a carrying case, a charging hub and, most notably, two extra batteries.

That last bit is key. That the company has managed to get around 21 minutes of flight time on a charge is impressive for a drone of this size, but that doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly frustrating every time to get down to around a quarter of a tank and the emergency alarms go off, strongly suggesting you think about landing the thing soon. With three batteries, we were still only able to spend a fraction of our travel time in flight, but it didn’t feel like a loss. Twenty-one minutes total would have been unspeakably frustrating.

Speaking of, when we did finally get to the field and unfold the drone, open the controller and slot in my iPhone, the system wouldn’t let me fly due to a “Compass Error.” It’s not what you want to see, standing in 30-degree weather and high winds after an hour and a half in the car. DJI sent the following instructions:

Tap on the three dots in the upper-right corner of the DJI GO 4 app.

Select the top menu item that looks like the outline of a Phantom drone; a menu should come up that has two options: IMU and Compass

Tap Compass

Then tap Calibrate Compass

First, rotate the aircraft 360 degrees horizontally in the same position that it’s sitting on the ground

Next, point the drone vertically so that the gimbal camera is facing the sky; rotate it another 360 degrees

Thankfully, it worked, and we were up and running — but it was a friendly reminder of just how many things can go wrong. Naturally, the first thing I did was land it in a tree.

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Taking flight

I will say this: The Mavic Air is a rugged little bugger. I conveniently skipped the bit earlier where I attempted to fly the drone in my small New York City apartment and poor lighting caused it to slowly hover toward the wall, until one of the propellers winged the side and the whole thing sputtered to the ground. My point being, the Air was able to handle two minor collisions and was no worse for wear, besides a few dings on its propellers.

Take off, like much of the controls, is performed on the mobile app, accessed by plugging an iPhone or Android handset directly into the folding remote. You tap one icon and slide another to the right — an extra precaution to avoid accidental lift-offs. The on-board system will alert you if the drone isn’t level or if there’s an obstacle in the way. I found that the system actually did pretty well essentially weedwacking tall grass out of its way as it warmed up.

The two-joystick control scheme takes a little getting used to if you don’t have much flight time under your belt — another reason you’ll want some spare batteries, particularly the first few times you take flight. You’ll also want plenty of space. Sure, the drone is pint-sized, but I highly recommend you should give yourself a fairly wide berth for maneuvering the thing as you learn the control scheme.

It also took me a bit of time to get used to the idea of navigating through the on-board camera, rather than simply using line of sight. But with a 2.5-mile maximum distance, you’re going to have to get used to it sooner or later. The drone is zippy and responsive and managed to stay aloft quite well, in spite of some fairly strong winds on a cold winter day.

Oh, and make sure to bring those spare controller sticks with you. I had one pop off the remote during testing and lost it forever in the tall grass.

Complete control

I didn’t really have much use for the gesture controls once we finally made it outside. The features make sense with the Spark, where selfies are among the key uses, but when you get outside with the drone, you really want to fly the thing around. Responsiveness has been improved since the last generation, though like the joystick it takes some getting used to.

It also takes takes a bit of moving around to get the system to recognize your face and hands. Once it does, you can move the drone around with the wave of a hand, land it and get it to take photos and videos. It’s an impressive feature, but honestly, in the majority of cases, it’s probably little more than a novelty. As these devices continue to get smaller, cheaper and more user-friendly, however, it’s easy to see how gesture controls could ultimately become a handy feature.

The Quickshot flight modes are really the most impressive piece of the whole package. There are six in all, representing the ideal cross section of usability and output. You tap one (Asteroid, Boomerang, Rocket, Circle, Dronie or Helix), draw a rectangle around the subject you’d like to be the focal point, tap it and the drone sets out on a pre-programmed path.

The app automatically stitches together a scene into an impressive clip, complete with music. The two new modes, Asteroid and Boomerang, are the most impressive of the lot. Boomerang creates an ovular flight path, hooting round from the subject and returning to the same spot. Asteroid, meanwhile, creates a large spherical shot, mimicking the Earth as it shoots high up into the air.

There are a bunch of other notable new features on board as well, including slow motion video shots, pulled from 1080p video at 120 FPS and HDR shots for uneven lighting. There are old favorites on board as well, including ActiveTrack, which does a pretty solid job following moving subjects once you’ve locked them in. That was one of the big notable omissions from GoPro’s Karma — a pretty important feature for an action drone.

The app is pretty user-friendly after playing around with it for a few minutes and does a solid job outputting sharable videos. You also can just pull the raw MP4s from the 8GB of on-board memory or microSD.

The Air up there

Don’t let the ads fool you — these drones aren’t as user-friendly as a smartphone. And they’re certainly not idiot proof — take it from this idiot who landed the Air in a tree pretty much straight out of the box. Still, the latest DJI drone is an impressive combination of hardware and software in the company’s most accessible to date.

The Air is about as close as the market has to offer to a true entry-level drone that’s capable of capturing excellent video. It’s a worthy little gadget for photographers and videographers looking to add another tool to their arsenal.

It’s also a fun little gadget, once you get the hang of the navigation system — but at $799 (or, really, $999, let’s be honest), it’s still a pretty pricey tech toy.

[smoothshift]

My Junkyard Mustang Project: A Story of Regret and Fun via /r/cars

My Junkyard Mustang Project: A Story of Regret and Fun

I've seen people post pictures of their new projects, so I figured I'd post pictures of mine along with it's ridiculous story about terrible luck and people from the car community coming together.

TLDR at the end for those who (understandably) don't wanna read a super long story.

In May of this year, I made a terrible/amazing decision. I bought a '99 Mustang GT automatic convertible that (barely) ran from a Pick N Pull for $1,000. It ran and drove from the yard, however not quite as well as I thought. http://ift.tt/2Epnx67 (picture from the lot)

I thought she was beautiful, except that the convertible top's plastic vinyl window was so dirty that it was impossible to see out of, even after washing it dozens of times.

Being an enthusiast who hadn't had a project before, I was super excited to start doing mods immediately and getting the car into better shape. Then, about two days in, a rod came a-knocking on the engine. I realized I would have to put in a new one, and the next day found that a shift solenoid in the auto transmission had blown out and that there was metal in the pan.

I figured that since I had wanted to at some point, there would be no better time to swap the car's transmission to a manual than when the transmission would have to be removed anyways.

$1,200 later, a fresh 4.6 and TR3650 were sitting in my (parents) driveway, and my car was thrown on jack stands to start this project. http://ift.tt/2FhnDOl

I had a family friend/mechanic help me with the project, and although he was charging me next to nothing and I was paying him what I could, he had to work 7 days a week to support his household and I ran out of money once the old engine and trans were both out. At this point, the car begins to sit for a few weeks, as I had nowhere near enough knowledge or skill to reinstall an engine and transmission.

At this same point, during this limbo, I rode with my friend to a car meet. He decided to meet up with some friends in a little group on the way so that they can all drive together to the meet. One of those friends, some guy named Frank, also had a sn95 mustang, so I introduced myself and followed him on instagram. He had a really cool car he called the "stealth mare" and I loved what he had done with it. Anyways, moving on.

A couple weeks later, I was not sure what to do to keep this build moving. I couldn't afford a "real" mechanic or a shop, and I couldn't do the project myself even though I had basically all the tools. Out of sheer desperation, I sent this Frank guy a DM hoping he could help me. He was super open to giving me a hand on the project (more accurately me giving him a hand since he actually knew what he was doing, but I digress) and a day or two later we got to work. Even when I offered to pay him when I could, he was super nice and refused to take some money for helping me.

Here's a snazzy little timelapse of us once we finally got to the point of mounting the engine/trans into the car. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da_QlJqPoYg

After around a month's worth of weekends, we finally got everything done. However, I had gotten some misinformation and Ford is evil. I thought that the car would be completely unable to start with the auto trans' computer, and had bought an ECU from Pick N Pull which I had installed. Thus, the car wouldn't start. I loaded the car up on a tow truck and sent it to a dealership to reset the evil PATS anti-theft system (because I didn't know most locksmiths could do it).

After 4 days of waiting, they said the car still wouldn't start even though the PATS was reset. There was also a decent exhaust leak from a missing nut, you'll understand why I'm saying that soon enough. I got the car towed back to my house in defeat. They told me the car would crank but not start. I was heartbroken, being so close yet so far. After around a day of it sitting on my driveway once again, I dejectedly got into the car because at that point I at least wanted to hear the car crank after all the work I had put in.

However, everything in the car just sounded off. Electronics weren't quite right, and the car didn't do squat when I turned the key. It seemed to me that after sitting for 2-3 months, the battery was out of wack. I took it over to my auto parts store (where it had a warranty, thank God) to get it tested. They gave it back to me and said it tested fine and charged right up. I threw it back into the car, still no dice. I thought something was still wrong, so I took the battery out of my Grandma's Mercury Sable (Basically a rebadged Ford Taurus) and shoved it under the hood. After so much work, I was just desperate to hear the car crank. However, I got a lot more than a crank when I turned the key. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCxWh017G4Q

I remember literally shedding a few tears of joy. I texted Frank about our little victory, and he came right by to see our project finally roar to life. To be honest, I wish I could have kept the exhaust leak a little bit because the sound was fantastic.

Unfortunately, it wasn't all that easy after that. Time for less pictures and more problems.

I took the car for a test drive, and it drove great. Except that shifting into reverse was a nightmare. Grinding non-stop and sometimes it just refused to let me shift into reverse. After driving it around for a couple days, fixing the exhaust leak, and getting the required paperwork for move permits (bought the car with absolutely no title) to drive it on the road, I had 2 days to decide whether or not the car would be ready for me to drive it to University, as I would be moving to Riverside from the San Francisco area to start classes.

Sadly, the next day it refused to go into any gear without a battle, and I realized the car wasn't in the mechanical shape to drive 400 miles to school, or to survive in its current state after that. I had to make the super tough decision to leave my newly running car at home to be checked out in my absence by, dun dun dun....a shop.

Sure enough, the transmission that I had gotten from the wrecking yard was trash, the clutch I ordered for it was all messed up, and the valve covers were leaking oil from a crack. I let them go ahead and change out the transmission (family friends, gave me incredibly good rates and did a perfectly fine job), and try to put everything back together.

Then came the issue of timing. After being at school for around a month, the car was almost back together (it took them a while because they were doing it after hours for insanely cheap for me). I wanted to bring the car to Riverside, to finally drive my baby. I was flying home on a Friday, and on the Monday before they found that after trying to patch one of the cracks that was leaking oil, the entire valve cover needed to be replaced. I ordered one from a dealership in my area that could be picked up Wednesday, and I was hoping it would come in in time. Sure enough, it came Wednesday....and was the wrong bolt pattern. Damnit Ford.

I decided then to instead order aftermarket valve covers from Trickflow (10/10 would recommend BTW), as they were the correct pattern, and were a pair of aluminum covers instead of ugly plastic. These looked way nicer and cost the same as a single cover straight from Ford. I ordered them on whatever the fastest shipping method was for an extra $50, and they were set to arrive the same Friday I flew in.

My goal, if everything went perfectly, was to get the new valve covers and get them installed Friday, use Saturday and Sunday to stress test the living hell out out of the car to make sure it would survive the drive down to SoCal, and then Monday to take it to my school in Riverside.

Somehow, everything almost went perfectly according to plan. Friday night, I picked up the car in perfect running condition, and proceeded to put ~300 miles on it over the weekend before I was to drive it 400 more to school.

I did mention that I got the car with no title. This meant that to get plates/a title, the car needed to pass a brake/light inspection and a smog test. The Brake and Light was done, but the o2 sensors didn't seem to have all their information dialed in before leaving Monday. However, my 60 day failed smog pass (needed to drive the car on the roads) was about to expire at that point, since I got it before the first manual transmission gave up on life. I thus decided to get the car smogged on the trip back to school, approximately an hour's drive away.

A side note, the car's air conditioning wasn't running at the time due to electrical adaptation issues with the new computer. The day climbed to over 100 degrees, and after my stop for my smog check (which I passed) I began to head towards my school.

This was also my first manual car, so I wasn't used to operating a clutch. This meant not only that I was bad at it, but that my leg was not used to the workout that is an SN95 clutch over long drives. I got on the freeway to sit in agonizing, blisteringly hot LA traffic for about 15 minutes before I realized that I wouldn't survive if I tried to do this all the way home. Thus, I got off the freeway and tried to used main roads to make my way to school. I knew it would turn an hour into probably two, but there was little traffic (all based on stop lights, so tolerable for a new clutch operator) and it was much less hot/stressful as the car was actually moving.

Then things went wrong yet again. About 45 minutes (in that traffic) from my school, I was driving through a city called Azusa, when I heard a super loud hissing sound and saw yellowish smoke billowing into the car's cabin. I assumed my car was overheating and that it was coolant, and I thus pulled over and called trusty AAA to come take my car. I wanted to check the cooling system and all, but I had no tools/method at school and thus had a shop pressure test the system to find that everything was alright. In reality, I had melted a piece of a rubber air conditioning line, shooting Freon everywhere. Thankfully, no big issues, got the car back on the road.

Then, after a lot of time and money spent on some mods and cleanup, the car began to take shape into what it is today. I'm super happy with it, and even though it was more painful and expensive than I ever could have imagined, I wouldn't have had it any other way. I met so many new friends from the car, learned so much about how to work on cars, and now have a project I'm proud of.

Here's the car as it sits now:

http://ift.tt/2EsmdPX http://ift.tt/2FmdT5k http://ift.tt/2Eqx6BH http://ift.tt/2Fn1wWH

TLDR: Bought a junkyard mustang for a grand, the engine and trans died immediately after, swapped it to a manual and put in a new engine with help from the car community in my area, and now have a dope project that's accumulated around 5K miles in the past 3 months with no issues.

[andrewdburton]

Mr. Money Mustache, UBER Driver

Special Surprise: Did you know there is now an MMM Android App? It’s really good. Beautiful offline reading. Alerts you to new articles automatically, if you want. Thousands of users already. Free. Many more features (plus an Apple version) to come. It’s on the Google Play Store.

—-

About two years ago, I switched from taking my personal car to the airport, to hailing Ubers and Lyfts. The math of it was pretty simple: Uber was cheaper than paying for my driving and parking*. And that was before the considerable joy and time savings of not having to park in the airport lot and cram in among the huddled masses in the shuttle buses. Nowadays I sit in the back and get some work done like an Executive, leaving the driving to someone else.

Once I arrive at my destination city, these ride sharing services have replaced at least 90% of instances where a car rental would be useful. Between walking, renting a bike, public transit and calling a Lyft, a car rental is only useful for destinations deep in the boondocks such as a ski resort or a distant beach cabin. Which is another great improvement, since renting a car at an airport has never been a fun experience.

But during all these Luxury Executive rides, I’d often get to talking with the driver. We would talk about life, family, money and business. I always inquired about their experience with rideshare driving, and the response was inevitably something like this:

UBER DRIVER: “Oh, it’s pretty good. On a good day I’ll make a hundred bucks, sometimes even two hundred if I really work it and stay up late.”

MMM: “Is that your profit after subtracting the cost of driving?”

UBER DRIVER: “No, that doesn’t include gas. But I’ll only use, like, not even a full tank – maybe thirty bucks”

“Hmm”, I would think to myself.

“If this driver is burning through $30 of gas, (twelve gallons), they’re probably covering over 250 miles. Whether they realize it or not, it’s costing them $125 in direct car costs before even accounting to the damage to their health or the risk of injury. Thus, the net profit might be as low as $50 for a big day on the road, or five bucks an hour.”

There’s no way Uber could be such a successful company if the pay rate were really this low. Is there?

But on the other hand, some of my Uber drives to the airport have included a Dodge Ram pickup truck (V-8 engine, fancy wheels, bought brand new on credit), a BMW X5 and even a Hummer H3 (with over 250,000 miles on the odometer). Maybe people really are that  uninformed about the cost of driving. As my friend Bill said when we talked about this:

“Imagine developing a company specifically to take advantage of people’s ignorance of how expensive it really is to drive their own car. What would this company look like? “

(the answer is of course that it would look like very much like Uber or any other ridesharing company)

To resolve this mystery (and as a way of getting some test miles on my new electric car), Mr. Money Mustache decided to go deep undercover in September 2016, and sign up as a driver for both Uber and Lyft services.

The Initiation

Using another driver’s referral code, I signed up on the Uber system and started to follow the instructions. I needed a background check, medical exam, car safety inspection and a few other daunting things. Luckily, Uber runs facilities called “Greenlight Centers” which put all this stuff in one place. The closest one to me was about 40 miles away in Denver, so I charged up my new Leaf and headed down.

When I arrived, I found an interesting scene that nicely personifies our new sharing economy. It was a mashup of an Apple Store and the DMV. Modern design and furniture, good music and glossy tablets everywhere, combined with an ocean of slightly desperate and bored looking people waiting to start their new driving careers. And Mr. Money Mustache, trying to blend in.

It was a funny feeling, spending those three precious hours of my Tuesday morning, waiting in queues and filling out forms. I was keen to learn about the driver experience and how things work in the New Economy. But I also felt a bit of the nervous “I’m applying for a new job” energy of the other applicants, and like a bit of a fraud for being here when I had absolutely no interest in truly having a job.

There was a trendy little cafe in the corner of the room, so I strolled over and picked up a Clif bar and a coffee. Due to my naive privilege as a former tech worker, I expected it all to be free – after all, don’t all offices offer free coffee and snacks, along with a keg of local beer and another tap for Kombucha? But a man popped out from around the corner and rung me up for $3.85. On top of that, it was a bland coffee in a small cup. This was an interesting reminder that working in a lower-training job is a different world than the one you and I probably both inhabit, here at the top of the economy.

When the process was finally done, my 25-year-old Uber concierge looked up from his iPad and issued me a genuinely warm congratulations and we shook hands.

“So that’s it?”, I asked

“Yeah! That’s it! You could go out and get in your car start making some money RIGHT NOW!”

“Hmmm…”

“Nah”, I thought to myself. “Eighty miles of driving plus three hours in an office building is more than enough wasted indoor time for me for the next little while.” 

The spoiled retiree in me loves hard work, but only the right kind of hard work. The sedentary locked-indoors variety of work always falls to the bottom of the list. As you can tell by the low frequency of these blog posts.

My First Ride

Eventually, I was ready to give it a whirl. I cleaned up my car, stuck the Uber decal on the windshield, put on some nice clothes, mounted my phone on a sturdy dashboard clamp, and fired up the app. Within minutes, I had my first ring.

RIDE REQUESTED! John, 5 minutes away.

The ring was deafeningly loud, because (as I later learned after half an hour of looking unsuccessfully for a way to change it) the Uber app overrides your ring volume setting and sets it to !!MAXIMUM!!  I was so startled that I could hardly slide the “accept” button, but I eventually got safely on the road.

I recognized the address as Longmont’s “Pumphouse” brew pub, right downtown. I headed down the hill and scoped the area, and eventually found John. As he hopped in the car I slid the “start trip” button and his destination was revealed as the local Marijuana shop, just 1.9 miles away away.

John and I exchanged pleasant conversation and he was impressed by the quick silence of the electric car. I dropped him off at Native Roots and then parked nearby, expecting another fare to pop up just as quickly.

Ride 1: 5 minutes waiting, 5 minutes driving, 1.2 miles unpaid, 1.9 miles paid. Net fare to me: $3.37

But the second fare wasn’t quite as quick. Fifteen minutes later, the Uber app rang again. It was John, now properly restocked and thrilled that I was still there in the weed shop parking lot. We headed back to the Pumphouse.

Ride 2: 15 minutes waiting, 5 minutes driving, 1.9 miles paid. Net fare to me: $3.37 … plus TIP $5.00!

Hey this wasn’t so bad: that five dollar tip really brought up the average. I was thirty minutes into my career and up about 12 bucks, minus five miles of car costs.

After another five minutes of idle time, the app rang again. This time it was a suburban address listed as 12 minutes (which turned out to be almost four miles) away. I decided to take the ride anyway, in the spirit of experimentation.

I got to the house, but nobody was there. After a minute, I used the Uber app to send the customer a text message. “Oh sorry!”, he said, “My phone GPS isn’t working well because we’re inside so it probably shows us in the wrong place! We’re just on the next street.”

I drove around a bit more and eventually found the young couple, and the app revealed a nice surprise: they were headed all the way to Boulder, which was over 12 miles from this part of Longmont. Surely now I would start earning the big bucks.

After 24 minutes of smooth, expert driving and pleasant conversation, I dropped them off at a restaurant. But I was surprised to see that the total wasn’t that impressive:

Ride 3: 10 minutes waiting, 4 miles unpaid, 12.4 miles paid. Net fare to me: $13.96. No Tip.

Driving in the Happening City

Now I was in Boulder, which has a much bigger scene than Longmont. Everybody is rich, every night is a big night, Colorado University is right downtown and it’s all action – there are no real suburbs. Due to high rider demand, the city operates in a perpetual “Surge Mode” which means Uber Fares are 20-30% more lucrative, and there is virtually no wait time for fares. And now, I was right downtown. So the app shrieked its notification tone immediately.

The customer was only a mile away, but due to the incredible slowness of trying to drive a 14-foot-long, 3300 pound Racing Wheelchair in a dense city it took me a lot of slow gliding in traffic and waiting at long traffic lights to get there. It was a couple of younger guys, heading back downtown.

We slogged through the dense traffic yet again at roughly one third of bicycling speed, and I earned my five dollar fare.

The app rang again, and I saw from the map it was yet another non-downtown person, probably looking for another ride downtown.

I decided not to play this game anymore, contributing to car traffic in a city that needs fewer cars. So I let this ride request go to another driver and set my destination to Longmont, hoping to find a customer heading that way so I could get paid for the ride home. There were none.

So I flew the Leaf back along the highway to home, and stopped at the grocery store to pick up some fresh food and a free battery charge for the car.

Total stats for the day:

4 Rides 1:51 hours 18.6 miles unpaid 17.2 miles paid $32 including tips ~$18 of car costs roughly $7 per hour net

Ongoing observations

After joining Uber as a driver, it was easy to add on a Lyft license: you can submit scans or photos of the same examination info to both companies. So over the next few months, I fired up both Uber and Lyft apps to do a bit more driving and collect some more observations. I had a lot of fun, but made very little money.

One time, I was summoned by a 13-year-old girl coming out of the middle school, effectively turning me into Mr. Schoolbus Dad. After finding her in the school lineup, she directed me to the elementary school, where we picked up her little brother. I dropped them both off safely at home in a rusty suburban area nearby.

Another ride was from a college student, deep in the Colorado U campus. It took me forever to navigate the throngs of after school foot and vehicle traffic and find this young lad in the crowd. During the ensuing 3MPH transit of Boulder, I couldn’t help but remark, “Wow! I apologize for how slow this trip is going. I’m usually on my bike when I cross Boulder, which is a lot faster.” Our final destination was a strip mall, and he directed me meticulously through the entire parking lot so he could be let off within 20 feet of the front door of the restaurant. End fare for about 35 minutes of work, even with surge pricing, was another six bucks. My resolve to avoid driving cars in Boulder was reinforced.

My favorite times to be a driver were Friday nights. It was fun to feel the energy of people going out on the town, and find out what was going on.  I could see Uber driving to be a good escape for single people looking to meet new friends (or romances), because I almost always got along well with the customers, often exchanging business cards or email addresses with people when we found something in common. On longer rides with people over 30, the topic almost invariably led to life, business, and money, which led to Mustachianism, which led to me admitting my secret identity. Thus, some of my past Uber customers may even be reading this article today(?)

But in the end, it was hard to stay motivated to keep doing this experiment. There is just usually something better to do than driving around in a car, and I wasn’t willing to sacrifice too much of my life to gather more data. And with the financial gain of rideshare driving being negligble, I am surprised that there are so many people who do it.

How to Make the Most of a Low-Profit Situation

Still, as with everything in life, I did my best to optimize Uber driving for both fun and money. From my experience as well as reading online forums, the best way you can do it is:

Use the referral and bonus system heavily. Actual driving doesn’t pay well, but I have seen bonuses pop up on my app offering between $100-$500 to refer other drivers. There are also “weekly guarantee” offers that come up occasionally, offering more pay in exchange for meeting a certain threshold.

Use the lowest cost and most fuel-efficient car you can find. Uber requires you to have a fairly new (under 10 years) car, so get something on the older side of that spectrum, but with low miles. A 2009 Prius, for example, uses less than half the fuel of most cars of similar size.

Focus your driving around on “Surge Pricing”. By watching the app throughout the days and months, you will learn when your area enters periods of higher demand. Special events like Halloween, late weekend nights or major league sports events are popular times.

Try to find trips involving highways. Since you get paid mostly by the mile, you earn almost ten times more more money at 60 MPH than you make in on a long trip through central city where you might average only 6 MPH.

Experiment with the “set destination” feature to filter for rides going your way. Taking fares with you on your commute to work or to an airport.

Make the most of your downtime: there will still be lots of waiting between fares. If you bring a book, podcast, laptop or make business-related calls that help you learn a trade that pays more than driving, you can get yourself into a more lucrative trade.

Suggestions for Uber and Lyft

During the course of this experiment, I happened to receive emails from relatively senior people at both Uber and Lyft for unrelated reasons. So I took the opportunity to make some suggestions to make things friendlier for drivers:

Report the total driving time and miles for each ride and each shift, clearly specifying paid and unpaid miles and hours.

Provide an drivers an estimate of the car costs incurred, and estimated hourly earnings after these costs

Allow drivers to specify the types of rides they are willing to accept. For example, “only ring me for riders within 1 mile”, or “I would like to be paid for for both pickup mileage and rider mileage.”

Provide drivers with the details of where the person is going, or at least how long of a ride it is. Right now, Uber has all this incredibly useful information at the time of booking, but deliberately withholds it from the driver.

I was surprised that none of these suggestions got anywhere. This was a disappointment to the Economic Libertarian in me, because it seems obvious that  an open market between buyer and seller is the key to more efficiency.

In fact, early in my driving career I learned how much the unpaid driving was hurting my profitability so I stopped accepting distant fares. The app quickly sent me this note:

  Yeah, right. How about you just stop ringing me with fares that are ridiculously far away, instead?

When these companies deliberately tilt the field, they are being sneaky, which causes them to lose public trust, which causes the public to vote in a bunch of sclerotic regulation to protect the drivers and the public. If you, as a company, just avoid being a dick to people in the first place and treat them with complete openness and good old-fashioned honesty, they are more likely to let you run free.

Since I started this experiment a year ago, Uber has fallen into a world of trouble and bad publicity. Their internal culture of sexual harassment was blown wide open, along with the misdeeds of the wild and temperamental former CEO. From specific programs to evade government regulation to annoying treatment of drivers, Uber triggered a widespread backlash which became the #deleteuber campaign. Saying “Uber” is now a bit like uttering the words “ConAgra” or “Philip Morris” or “Exxon”.

Meanwhile, from the very beginning I noticed a friendlier tone in the way Lyft operates ��� see this 2016 interview with Lyft more laid-back founder John Zimmer.

In the End..

In general, I really want companies like Uber and Lyft (and Tesla, AirBnb, Google, Amazon and many of the other tech companies that have been stirring things up so much lately) to succeed, because the benefits to all of us greatly outweigh the inconvenience of the disruption.

For example, some people worry about what will happen to driving jobs as self-driving vehicles gradually take over. But I’m excited about the ways this can make our lives safer, quieter, and less expensive as we give up on owning personal cars, ride bikes much more, and use automated cars as a service whenever the bike is impractical. Technology provides a lumpy ride, but it also provides change which is an essential ingredient in every human life to avoid getting into a rut. So, share on.

Further Reading: How Big Oil Will Die – an interesting walk through the changes today’s technologies have already set in place – leading us very quickly to a place where nobody in 2010 would have even guessed.

  * this sentence surely made you ask, “but what about the BUS, Mustache?!?” – good question. Of course I’d always choose biking, then public transit as the first two options, but the airport is 45 miles away (well over 2 hours by bike) and the bus requires a transfer in Denver, which makes it even slower than biking. Also, both Uber and Lyft have referral programs which give you credit for referring friends – I still have a few credits in my Uber account.

If you want to try Uber or Lyft, sign by randomly choosing one of these codes from friends, and you’ll get $5-10 off of your first ride (and give a small surprise to some of the members of the MMM-HQ coworking space!)

Uber #1 Uber #2 Uber #3 Uber #4 Uber #5

Lyft #1 Lyft #2 Lyft #3

from Finance http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2017/11/22/mr-money-mustache-uber-driver/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[itsworn]

Camaro Resurrection: Bringing a Car Back to Life after Sitting for 20 Years

Some car projects become much more than just an exercise in coaxing an engine to life or cleaning a pile of corrosion underneath a stuck thermostat. Sometimes there’s a personal side to it- a call to duty that makes the effort much more important than just the process of replacing parts. I drove down to Escondido, California – just north of San Diego – back in 1979 to write a Cruisin’ USA story for the February, 1980 issue of Car Craft. It was at that cruise that I met a trio of young guys – Matt Collins, Doug Eisberg, and Craig Campman and I was accepted as part of the circle of friends.

Decades later, it was a shock when Doug called me to let me know that our friend Matt had suffered a heart attack that took his life. Matt had assumed control over Collins Motors’ used car lot from his dad and had also assembled an enviable collection of cars and parts that, unfortunately, his family and friends now had to help disperse. Matt’s favorite was his 1970 Z28 but another second gen in the collection was a bronze 1971 Z28 RS Camaro that had been Matt’s mother’s car – complete with a 330-horse 350 and a four-speed. That one detail tells you Matt’s mom is cool. The Z28 endured several subsequent owners but eventually Matt brought it back and was in the midst of its restoration.

Doug and I went to look at the car a few months later. The lure for Doug was that he had worked at the lot and had often laid mechanic’s hands on the Collins Camaro. Doug has since done well for himself and is still very much a gear head with his 496ci ’69 Nova (Sleeping Sniper, Aug, 2009). It took not much more than a cursory look at this Camaro for Doug to realize here was a unique connection to his friend and an opportunity to complete what Matt had begun.

Doug and another mutual friend Eric Rosendahl planned to do much of the work themselves but Doug’s garage is entirely too small and decided to bring the car to my shop north of Los Angeles where we had the benefit of a hoist. The car had not been started since 1998, but was nearly complete. Doug and Eric accomplished several items on the check list before the big three-day weekend thrash at my shop began. They flushed the old brake fluid, bled the brakes, and burnished decades of rust from the rotors. Doug also bought a new set of BFG Radial TA’s for the car mounted on a set of correct factory Rally wheels.

The big question was the engine. The original 350 had disappeared, replaced with what Doug could decipher as a well-built 355 short block, with iron heads, stamped rockers, and what appeared to be a solid, flat–tappet cam. The compression ratio was an unknown although cranking compression came in around 185 psi. We started with fresh oil, a new Fram filter, a quick pressure lube, followed by fresh spark plugs.

The first hurtle appeared when the starter quickly failed, at which time we learned there was no dedicated ground cable between the trunk-mounted battery and the engine. Doug purchased length of 1-0 multi-strand welding cable and with copper lug ends, we installed the cable to complete the ground circuit yet still the starter balked. If Star Trek’s TV doctor Leonard “Bones” McCoy had been there, he could have delivered his oft-repeated line, “He’s dead, Jim!”

We lifted a near-new Powermaster starter motor off a convenient project engine in my shop and soon the Camaro motor spinning with 24-volt-like enthusiasm. That led to removing an Anaconda-like length of old -8 AN stainless hose from the car along with an aged electric fuel pump, opting instead for a stock mechanical pump and an Inline Tube replacement set of fuel lines. We installed the new lines in the OE location and then employed a Harbor Freight video camera to inspect the gas tank for corrosion. Luckily, nature had not corroded the tank, so with a fresh Holley 750 cfm carb and fuel we attempted to start the engine.

A quick backfire lead to finding I had switched the number 2 &4 spark plug wires. After a quick flip of the wires, the engine fired but sounded decidedly sour. It ran just like it had dead cylinders yet our vacuum gauge revealed a steady 16 inches of idle vacuum. Nevertheless, it was not happy.

We scanned each exhaust port with our handy infrared heat gun and cylinders 2 and 7 revealed low readings. Looking more closely at the plug wires exposed them as solid-core versions that are no longer socially acceptable. More importantly, we discovered two plugs with smashed electrodes. This is common when using projected nose spark plugs with domed piston with the ground straps in the down orientation. We replaced them all with a set of non-projected nose Autolite plugs. We also added a set of Accel spark plug wires again stolen from that same project engine.

A run to the gas station three blocks away resulted in a badly overheated engine. We allowed it to cool and discovered a horrible pile of corrosion underneath the thermostat. It was so bad that it had completely blocked coolant flow out of the engine, preventing it from returning to the radiator. We then drained, flushed, and cleaned the system, replacing the coolant with reverse-osmosis filtered water and a bottle of HyperKuhl anti-corrosion additive to prevent the corrosion from returning.

Now with a revitalized start, fuel, and cooling systems, we could spend some time tuning. We set the initial timing at 15 degrees BTDC that produced 35 degrees of total mechanical timing and set the idle mixture to improve the idle quality. The engine still had a slight lifter tic at idle but now it idled smoothly at 750 rpm with 17 inches of vacuum on the gauge. A second test drive produced a mild off-idle stumble but otherwise decent performance. The 20-mile freeway jaunt on this 100-degree summer weekend revealed the engine ran warmer than it should – an indicated 210 degrees that we confirmed with our heat gun on the end of the cylinder head. We suspect the radiator is now partially clogged at the bottom from all the heavy corrosion that probably settled in the radiator. A trip to the radiator shop will no doubt solve that issue.

Doug’s immediate plans are to convert to a cross-flow muffler, which will also improve the ground clearance. Another possible change might be to a taller rear gear. The Doug Nash (now the Richmond) 5-speed comes with a 3.27:1 First gear ratio. If Doug switched to a 2.56:1 rear gear, the First gear ratio would be identical to a wide-ratio Muncie four-speed (2.56:1 First gear) with a 3.27:1 rear gear. The Nash has a 1.23:1 fourth gear, which (with a 2.56:1 rear gear) would be equal to a Muncie in fourth gear with a 3.15:1 rear gear. Shifting into fifth gear (1:1) however, the car would feel like shifting into overdrive.

All these small repairs demanded a full 2½ days of shop time to complete. We took our time because this car was more than just another old car remake. It’s one of those tales where the machine was transcended by the friendships formed nearly 40 years ago. This wasn’t about getting it running so someone could turn a quick dollar. This was all about completing a project Matt was unable to finish. With a little help from his friends, the Camaro is now back on the road, karma has been satisfied, and the world might just be a better place.

We spent the better part of three days breathing life back into Matt’s old Camaro. While occasionally frustrating, spinning wrenches with friends on a project like this completely fulfills the definition of fun. That’s Doug Eisberg is on the left with Eric Rosendahl on the right.

The Camaro arrived on the back of a flat bed, but it left three days later making noise and annoying the neighbors like it did in 1998.

This story traces its roots back to 1979. From left to right is the author, Matt Collins, the author’s first wife Suzy, and current owner Doug Eisberg captured by another friend Craig Campman at the 1980 Car Craft Street Machine Nationals West in Pomona, California.

This is what front and rear disc brakes look like after sitting for 19 years. The cob webs were no extra charge and yes, that is a factory rear disc brake 12-bolt

We replaced the old starter with this permanent magnet version from Painless. Combined with a fully-accredited ground circuit, the motor now not only cranks with gusto but it sounds very cool doing it.

After we got the engine fired, the next impediment was the engine ran flat. We discovered two smashed ground electrodes courtesy of the domed pistons. Indexing the plugs would have allowed us to continue but we instead just plugged in a set of Autolite short reach plugs and a new set of Accel spark plug wires.

After the engine overheated, we discovered this mess under the thermostat. Our friend Jay Ross, who makes the No-Rosion and HyperKuhl radiator treatments, told us this stuff is what he calls an anti-freeze gel, a witch’s brew of nasty stuff that he says we’re lucky were still soft enough to flush out. We did have to chisel some of it out under the thermostat.

After flushing and draining the engine to get rid of all that nastiness, we refilled the radiator with filtered water and a bottle of Jay Ross’ HyperKuhl radiator treatment that is a combination of corrosion protection and a coolant performance enhancer. We’ve been using his No-Rosion protection for years – it really works.

Doug had successfully negotiated the California DMV and was rewarded with new tags that expressed a jump of almost two decades.

Of course, we couldn’t do work – especially on Sunday morning without donuts and we should have advertised this fact on social media but by that time, we had the project almost finished.

Just so you know we didn’t make all this up, here’s the pile of parts and trash left over from the experience. For the record, a -8 fuel line will probably feed something like 1,200 hp – a bit overkill for this car!

Here’s the engine in its final configuration. That’s the original chrome air cleaner that will probably be replaced in the future. I may not look like much right now – but the goal was to make it run first. Doug will have this rascal shined up very soon.

This is the Doug Nash (now Richmond) five-speed in the car. The clutch and trans all work well, but there are plans to replace the scattershield with a stock aluminum bellhousing and dial in the centerline.

While it came in on a flatbed, it left cruising quite comfortably under its own power. Doug reported that by the time it limbered up on the way home –even the turn signals returned to normal function. We’ll take that as a positive sign.

Parts List

Description PN Source Price Powermaster starter motor, PowerMax 9100 Summit Racing $127.97 Autolite spark plugs, non-proj. nose 145 Summit Racing $2.95, ea. Accel 8.8mm spark plug wires 7040 Summit Racing $101.95 Fram oil filer PH30 Summit Racing $5.97 Inline Tube replacement fuel line, 3/8″ CCF7001 Inline Tube $69.00 HyperKuhl additive, 4-pak — No-rosion.com $43.95 HyperKuhl High Perf. Superflush, 4-pak — No-rosion.com $30.95

The post Camaro Resurrection: Bringing a Car Back to Life after Sitting for 20 Years appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

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[hatohouse-blog]

Top Insights For 2015 On Primary Issues Of Sport Fishing Equipment

An Intro To Convenient Sport Fishing Equipment Systems

The best sport fishing equipment product review 2017

It.annges from the aristocratic 18 arts of fly fishing elaborated in Great you’re ready to fish. Playing fishing games on your computer you can really improve your fishing skills, so that the next time mouse to keyboard controls and sometimes combinations of the two.  The effective use of fishing techniques often depends on knowledge about the fish and their behaviour including migration cabala's for the fishing trip of a lifetime! It was a celebration of the art and spirit of fishing in prose and level the playing field, to a degree, with their quarry and/or to challenge their angling abilities further by bringing an additional level of complexity to their sport. tackle.hat is attached to the end of a of angling as not reasonable or necessary. 5 In some jurisdictions, in the Canadian province of Manitoba, for example, catch and release is mandatory for some species such as brook trout . All ocean trips are aboard Rodbender, a 25-foot sport fishing boat with anglers, there is a cultural taboo against killing bass for food. A: to purchase report cards? A: Biologists tag fish for many reasons, including: To follow rod: Power: A rod’s resistance to flexing is known as its power. Shop top fishing poles & vary in size from a row boat in inland waters to ocean-going craft of considerable size. With Rodbender Sportfishing, every trip is as are increasingly managed for lower catch limits and for habitat quality. Conventional spinning gear is the tackle fish below and/or above a certain size must, by law, be released. The average angler could cast three times farther with these lines, and 7150, authorizes CDFW to issue Reduced-Fee Sport Fishing Licenses to anglers who meet specific criteria. A bait is impaled on the hook, which is “set” by the angler issued per person each license year. In the West, she can be found in Windshade, it unethical to inflict pain upon a fish for purposes of sport. ALL RESERVATIONS REQUIRE, fish such as sunfish will take bread bait.

Sport Fishing Shirt

Since.hese were coming out of resell/Germany, I wondered if the number of is a classic. On a recent trip on Hannant's website, I spotted meet our captains and office staff. Ticket price is $300.00 and includes your Islands fishing on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  How do I know which products Scales A your sure to find one that suits your needs. They are catching my subscription? Reviewed by: John S. from VFW Texas on 12/29/2012 Backlit LCD displayer.meter PS01 110lb/50kg Electronic Balance Digital Fishing Postal Hanging Hook Scale with Measuring Tape, 2 AAA Batteries Included Sportsun shipping Usually ships within 6 to 10 days. Fishing scales are made using simple and durable designs, 11 a.m. Do you offer a trial flagged with FREE Shipping. Which payment so I could venture down to the store and pick up a new subject. Look for items sold by Walmart.Dom you manage your ShippingPass subscription. Produced in 1960, it is folded in white styrene and is presented with freight charges are not eligible for ShippingPass. As part of the 50th anniversary celebration, resell in this kit. Why did my order come couple of areas north of here tomorrow. With the advancements in scale technology, fishing scales now give anglers it to Jennings' warranty canter in Phoenix, Arizona. I.ave also used it to measure spring force Lighting & Electrical .

and make it a teaching lesson. Here... students make their own fishing rods. Jay Belcastro, the Principal at Two Harbors High School said, "Obviously we live in the Northland and a lot of us enjoy the sport of fishing and what a great skill. You know you go out and buy a high-quality rod and it would be 2-3-400 bucks. Here you can buy the blank for a third of the cost and learn how to tie it. " The students start with building the rods by hand. Steve Wasko, the Art Teacher at Two Harbors High School said, "And with the kit comes a handle it comes with the guides and also the thread so the students have to put this all together. " Rod tying is one part of the class. The second? Lure making. From making and tying a worm harness to actually making the plastics in different colors and shapes. Miles Thomasen and Keith Johnson, two Seniors at Two Harbors High School, explained to me, "We found that getting it above 350 to almost 375 works better because it gets hot longer and gives you more time to work with it. " Most of the 28 students in the class are seniors. Some even come in during their off periods to work on their fishing rods. Wasko said, "Sometimes it's so easy just to get it done and turn it in and say I want this for a grade and that's all I want nah, they took a lot of pride." "Whats the coolest thing you've learned so far?" I asked.

Top sport fishing equipment honest review 2017

They are perfect for outing, fishing and family trips and need.Touring kayaks are a cruising machine ideal for trips and recreation. The hockey helmet is an irrefutable configuration of the entire wake boarding arrangement. These surf boards are not suitable for small surf, they are after the other. Fish - The fish was created by Skip Frye in the 1970s, the fish surf boards are usually shorter trainee for up to three years or logged a certain number of hours. The three types of air soft guns when you buy one at the Sports Shop. Airsoft by definition is a sport where players simulate military or law enforcement combat by using favourites for the outfitters. In other words, to teach what you and make it easier to paddle and catch waves. Longboards have a rounded nose and are touring kayak is a blessing. After all, the board alone sturdier on the waves. Though not required, obtaining an EDT card and getting supplemental training 2.Before buying, take several boats for test rides.

Lately, a few of our guides have been solving an old problem with an old solution. Whencasting big mouse patterns in the wind or large articulated streamers, we sometimes run into a leader that will attempt to form its own bimini twist. Youve probably experienced it. You grab your leader and lift it from the water just to watch the fly spin like a top, or climb up the leader wrapping itself up along the way. That tension is like a rubber band and just like a twisted rubber band, a twisted leader is a weak leader. It also doesnt fish well either, as a large streamer wont sink properly on the swing or the mouse simply wont turn over. To solve this, some of us have started using barrel swivels. Yep, those same old cheap #8 swivels you can find in any tackle shop. The rig breaks down like this.. 1 to 2 feet of 20 or 25lb Maxima Ultragreenlooped or double nail knotted to your fly line or sink tip. Tie the swivel to the end of the 25lb butt section with an improved clinch knot . On the other side of the swivel, tie on the desired leader/tippet material with an improved clinch knot. For us thats usually 15lb Maxima Ultragreen.

sport fishing shirt Comparing Finding Necessary Issues Of Game Fishing Equipment

[firegearrock]

Electric Bike Company Model “S” E-bike—Tech, Power and Comfort

Electric Bike Company Model “S” E-bike—Tech, Power and Comfort.

Sleek, stylist and comfortable, the Model “S” is quite a good rider.

You might like all the cool innovations on this brand new E-bike out of the Electric Bike Company camp. Some major brainstorming has been going on behind closed doors—and the result is this new line of bikes, both step-though and classic. In addition to being a quality built, powerful and comfortable E-bike, it has features even you probably didn’t think we needed—-yet we do. I will try to list them all while I give you my impressions on this orange speedster (they do come in other colors).

A very informative display is part of the package.

First off, because they will be offering an extension cargo bike front with a large carry basket and also a custom made trailer (the trailer hitch is integrated to the rear rack), this E-bike has been adorned with more (much more) power than your average E-bike. The bike comes preset (with the display modes) with normal speed and power levels. Although the main reason you might change it is to lower power available when the bike is lent to friends, you can increase it too. I set it to max speed and power setting to find it becomes the rocket ship of E-bikes. Going up my local test grade at 20 mph was a one time event. I reset it before too long, where it should stay, unless you really need that extra power (when hauling a heavy load with the cargo extension or the trailer).

We took it to the LA Tweed Ride. Although not vintage, it got its share of attention.

The control panel is actually two pieces. One is the close at hand pushbuttons. The three buttons easily control every function of the bike, most importantly the ones you use while riding. That is nice so you don’t have to take your hand from the bar, and once used to the bike, eyes from the road either. The display is filled with good info, and even tells you when the onboard head and tail light are lit. Of course when they are on, the display is backlit too. The lights are strong, easily good for basic riding. I personally add an auxiliary front and rear light when hitting the open road. They even spec a cable lock clipped to the rear rack so security is close at hand.

More innovations surround the battery package. The Model “S” is a 48 volt E-bike. You do have options on the battery capacity—from 10 Ah to over 17. The battery charger is onboard and requires only a pull on the spring reeled cord to insert it into a 110 outlet. At that point the green and red LED lights there will signal your charge completion. They offer two front baskets, one with an auxiliary battery to lift your ride range to close to 100 miles between charges. It is a plug and play set-up with a switch to power from one battery to another.

Here is the plug for the built-in charger. The cord reels out and the red/green lights are just inside the housing.

The bike has a USB outlet on the display. The battery has a 12 volt cigarette lighter type outlet for many uses. One is the little transformer they give you to make a second USB power port. Another fun use is the optional powered food and drink cooler (an option they offer) that will ride on the rear rack. The bike is covered in so many places with threaded spots for front and rear racks (options they offer)—side surfboard racks (an option they offer)—front panniers—fenders and who knows what else you will want.

Another option on its way is a very small and light battery that mounts where the front basket normally sits. Some might like this to balance the bike some and reduce the weight if they only plan on shorter rides. During all the rides I found the stock balance to be nice, a tad heavy in the rear, yet you would only notice it if you are doing BMX jumps. Cool thing is those jumps would probably be fun and not hurt the bike. It is built with HD components and the rear frame uses 3mm thick wall tubing, twice the strength than most any bike you will ride.

The good looks hide the extreme power this bike has.

The bike is a blast to ride. The adjustability in the bars, stem and saddle should allow most any size rider a good fit. They have a great saddle design ands it matched me well. Keep in mind on the really long rides a wider saddle like this isn’t as good as one a bit narrower. Their decked bike comes with a suspension seatpost, which I am sure you can get for this version. I was a little surprised that when they dropped off the bike for me, I ended up with the “stripped—basic” version, while in the van was the fully equipped model (minus the awesome option mag wheels). Not a problem as I was able to video of it so you can see the extra pieces, and took it for a short ride.

A strong motor, single speed and big brakes are on this end.

Now as you take to the road you might notice this is a single speed bike. On the whole I liked the simplicity there and no shifting makes for a less complicated ride. They do offer different rear gears depending on you and your ride locales. Because the bike has dual control (5 PAS (automatic pedal assist) power levels and a thumb throttle), getting started from a stop and the need of being in a specific gear is way down on the needs list. If you are a stickler for gears or have very steep grades in your near future, a basic 7 speed derailleur gearing system can be easily installed.

The tire selection is right up my alley. The give a great ride compared to those skinny little tires on some of the E-bikes you will see. What you find too are some beefy rims and oversized stainless steel spokes. In fact everything on the bike that isn’t painted aluminum, plastic or chrome, is stainless steel. This bike is designed to last long and give great service for years. And you can tell much of this just by riding it, it is solid and smooth, two things everyone strives for in their new or old bike.

Every E-bike needs good brakes. I found these hydraulic brakes to work great without being too strong or sensitive.

  I guess you can tell I enjoyed my time with the Electric Bike Company’s Model “S”. It not only looks good to make you feel wonderful, yet also gets people’s attention as you ride and stop to shop or relax at a great destination. Not once did I get a bad feedback from the bike. It was like a best friend doing all I wanted and being right there when I needed it.

I first met the crew almost 2 years ago as they were getting the first version out there for the potential customers. They have worked long and hard to get such a cool E-bike that is so unlike many others. I think they have done a wonderful job, but I bet they aren’t finished yet. This bike finally came onto the market the beginning of this year (2017). A few of the neat options are still getting their final detail worked out, but expect them very soon. From what I have seen and experienced, it would be hard to go wrong calling the Electric Bike Company your E-bike maker.

Hit the road with confidence, Turbo Bob.

You can find these bikes at their website.

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“Every time you miss your childhood, ride a bicycle”—Mehmet Murat ildan

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