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Quad Flying Practice

Nothing beats actually flying a quad but charging, even 30 minutes in the case of the Cheerson CX-10, is sometimes just seems too long. And picking up the quad to right it after crashes, although good exercise, can get tiring. So the next best thing? Simulators.

I have a Steelseries Stratus lying around and it’s just a little bit smaller than the CX-10’s controller. Unfortunately, it can’t be used on the MacBook Pro so I have to find something for the iPad mini that supports MFI controllers.

After some searching I found RealFlight Mobile. It’s the mobile version of RealFlight, supposedly the most detailed and powerful simulator on the market

It’s free but unfortunately, it initially comes only with fixed wing aircraft so I had to in-app purchase a quadcopter model (looks suspiciously looks like a DJI Phantom).

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Pimped My Quad

I broke 5 of the propeller blades of my Cheerson CX-10 leaving me with only 3 so I wasn’t able to fly it for a while. I ordered some extra propellers and propeller guards from eBay and they finally arrived today. I quickly installed the new propellers and guard. I trimmed some plastic bits from the guard to make it lighter and then it was fun time!

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Speed Up Your Mac

Apparently, I’ve been using the MacBook with crippled fan for over a year. I have noticed a kernel_task using up all processing time. I found out that it was the operating system throttling performance to stop overheating. It does this by running a non-processor intensive task. This task has higher priority than user tasks including the processor-intensive tasks that are heating up the processor. The effect is that the processor temperature is lowered. But also poor system responsiveness and overall performance.

When I found out about this, I concluded that the fan was faulty and opening  up the Mac confirmed it. I ordered a replacement fan and today it finallly arrived. I immediately installed it and the Mac promptly sped up. It felt like the same huge speed improvement when I upgraded to 8GB RAM and SSD. A fan is officially the third best upgrade for speeding up your Mac.

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Cheerson CX-10

This tiny guy is LOADS of fun!

The Cheerson CX-10 is a toy quadcopter. It’s so small, it fits the palm of your hand! It comes in a variety of fun colors (pink, green, orange, blue). As you can see, I got an orange. The battery is built-in (good for 3-5 minutes flying) but the USB charger recharges it in just 30 minutes. It also comes with 4 extra propellers which is handy since you WILL break propellers. Finally, there’s a basic user manual. Yeah, you should RTFM!

Thanks Cez and Euge!