Hot Air Balloons in Search of a Landing Site

Posted on December 17, 2016 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

2015_birds_in_hand_balloons_03_image-1_frdFlipping through pictures on my iPhone, I found a few interesting ones taken in August 2015. They were from an unexpected encounter with hot air balloons while I was visiting Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It turned out that they were from a balloon ride tour agency with a misleadingly official name, The United States Hot Air Balloon Team. Nonetheless, I found the ground crew to be professional, and the pilot to be knowledgeable and helpful. I uploaded some of these pictures to Wikimedia, as I often do with useful pictures taken in my free time.

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Winter Ice Skating at Mohonk Mountain House

Posted on December 13, 2016 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

Perhaps I should document every rink I visit. I guess I’d start with Mohonk Mountain House. This is a place my household of two has frequented since 2003, and we continue to go back there whenever we wanted a quick getaway from busy city life. I have in fact contributed most of the pictures seen on the above Wikipedia article, as well as almost everything found on Wikimedia Commons.

But I’ve never realized in these 13 years that there was an ice skating rink on the premises. Partly it’s because I’ve never been to the place in winter – the “pavilion” is used for other group activities during summer. Another reason is that I did not much care about ice skating in the past.

The Mohonk rink is comparable in size to the Winter Village rink at Bryant Park in NYC. This rink does expand greatly the variety of possible winter activities, at the mountain resort where TVs are conspicuously absent in guest rooms. A single rink alone provides three different types of activities. There is the traditional “I just want to skate” type of activity. More inspired folks try the role of chariot horses. But in this case they are more like mules than horses, and push chariots from behind. Less mobile folks may play chariot drivers, except they have little control over their destiny, and must rely on verbal signals which mules may or may not honor.

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Pictures of Planes Sighted at the Aerodrome in 2016

Posted on December 10, 2016 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

I have highlighted some pictures of main HHAMS events in HHAMS Pictures of the Year – 2016. But I have plenty additional pictures of planes, mostly taken at the field. Here is a complete list of all of them. You can click on each one to see the image at the resolution I uploaded them which is enough for most online viewing. But the majority of these were taken at 4 times the uploaded resolution. Ask me if you want a particular picture in its full resolution for other purposes.

hhams_planes_2016_img_5375

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HHAMS Pictures of the Year – 2016

Posted on December 8, 2016 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生
Ben's Glorious Ironman superplane

Ben’s Glorious Ironman superplane

It is December, and the weather has finally caught up with the season. Those unusually warm November weekends are a thing of the past now. I find it increasingly difficult to motivate myself to go out to fly. So instead I sorted through, in the comfort of my home, pictures I’ve taken related to model aviation in 2016 on my iPhone. All of them were about HHAMS (Hempstead Harbor Aero Modelers Society).

As “the” picture of the year, I nominate Ben’s Ironman plane. The picture quality is quite poor, and as a former photography enthusiast I am ashamed of it. I can defend technically why the picture quality is so bad. But I won’t. The subject matter is of the essence here. I don’t believe anyone present on that glorious maiden flight day would disagree with the nomination. In any case, it’s my blog. So Ben wins. Clever fellow. His story will be detailed further down this article.

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What Exactly is a Peeled Extreme Beef Tenderloin from Costco?

Posted on November 28, 2016 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

When I first got into Sous Vide cooking, I bought a whole beef tenderloin from Costco. I went home, and simply chopped it into thick steak slices. Then I proceeded to sous vide these, and then to pan-sear them. What turned out wasn’t exactly the filet mignon I was expecting. Parts of the steak were really tender. Parts of the steak were quite tough. Yet other parts had connected tissues that were impossible to chew on.

It was only after this experience that I spent some time researching tenderloin. And I realized that I bought a whole tenderloin that contained three different pieces of meat: psoas major, psoas minor and iliacus muscle. These pieces were surrounded and connected by fat and tough connective tissues including the dreaded “silver skin”. I didn’t know any of these, and just sliced the unhappy union into steaks. If you want to learn more about these, please visit how to butcher a whole beef tenderloin into filet mignon steaks.

This short article of mine is not about butchering a whole tenderloin. It’s about not having to bother with butchering a whole tenderloin. It turns out that Costco sells processed tenderloin, albeit at a much higher unit price. I found the increased price well worth paying for. This processed version is called “Peeled Extreme Beef Tenderloin”.

WARNING: if you are a vegetarian and do not wish to see more pictures of red meat, do not click on this article. Stop reading now.

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Oxtail Steak a la Sous Vide

Posted on November 27, 2016 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

I was talking to a friend about my oxtail steak I once plugged at r/sousvide. I was telling him how I got mostly negative feedback along the lines of “an oxtail is an oxtail is an oxtail – you stew it”. Retelling this story reminded me of pictures I took while undertaking that 24-hour endeavor. Here is one of these pictures.

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End product: oxtail steak

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Battlefield 1 Soldier Uniforms from all Factions

Posted on November 27, 2016 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

Not long after Battlefield 1 came out, DICE rolled out the first major server update on Nov 16th. Among other things, “hardcore” game modes are now supported (e.g. minimum HUD, no more 3D spotting, etc). Unlike previous hardcore modes in Battlefield 4 and earlier, the revamped hardcore mode in Battlefield 1 axed the permanent friendly markers. This lack of friendly markers, combined with the absence of 3D spotting, makes the hardcore mode extremely frustrating to play. Newbie players now often score more team kills than enemy kills, as evident here, here and here.

To avoid committing friendly fires, players now need to learn to tell friends from foes, based on mere fleeting glimpses. This is a herculean task, as most soldiers look alike on the screen, in tiny images and mostly shown in suboptimal lighting conditions. It does not help that online resources showing soldiers from all combat classes and all countries are nowhere to be found. I’ve been waiting for more than a week now, but no such resources have spontaneously spawned. So I decided to take matters into my own hands.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the first soldier uniform diagram for Battlefield 1!

Battlefield 1 Soldier Uniform Diagram

Battlefield 1 Soldier Uniform Diagram. Tell friends from foes, when playing hardcore.

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HHAMS Field Calendar for Smartphones

Posted on September 6, 2016 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

Field Calendar as app icon on iPhone home screenIn my time between two jobs, I wrote a calendar app for HHAMS (Hempstead Harbor Aero Modelers Society). Or, at least, members see it as an “app”, since  the calendar runs on smartphones, and can be set up as an icon on the home screen. It is really just a webpage served up by a Flask server.

The calendar allows safety officers and members alike to organize field activities as they unfold today, or to plan activities ahead of time. It works on all smart phones as well as desktop PCs. Information on the calendar is only visible to HHAMS members registered in the system. And only members can create entries on the calendar.

The calendar complements two existing communication systems in use: the Yahoo Groups mailing list for monthly newsletter and official communications, plus the field texting service used by safety officers to broadcast field open/close notifications.

If the field texting service were free, and members were extremely tolerant of daily text spams to the whole club inquiring and making plans to meet at the field and to keep it open, we would have no need for an online Field Calendar. But field texting is expensive, and people in general hate spams… except when they are the ones sending these spams.

Thus the Field Calendar.

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Custom RealFlight Airfields – Bethpage RC Model Airplane Field

Posted on August 7, 2016 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

This is another follow-up to the HHAMS airfields I made for RealFlight 7.5. This time I modeled the Bethpage state park on Long Island. The polo field at the state park serves as RC model airfield for various AMA clubs including Whitman Flyers and Cobra.

Here is a video capture of me flying a plane around this field using Windows 10’s built-in Game Bar (Xbox Game DVR). In order to demonstrate the tent and seating behind the pilot line, I had to fly the plane behind me. In real life this is obviously not allowed. I also demonstrated one landing gear being clipped by the wooden fence – most objects are represented by 3D models.

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Secret Recipe for Making Gigantic Bubbles

Posted on August 4, 2016 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

I heard about this big bubble thing people do, from a Radiolab podcast episode, “Bigger than Bacon” (jump to the section Bigger Better Bubbles at 23:13).  On a whim I bought the Bubble Thing (bubble-making wand) and the Big Bubble mix from David Stein featured in the podcast. This Bubble Thing became the highlight of a pool party. One thing led to another, and more big bubble demonstrations were demanded on other occasions. But it turned out that “bubble juice”, as the solution is affectionately called by bubble fanatics, was quite expensive to buy, and one could easily go through a gallon of juice in less than an hour. I did some research online for better and cheaper bubble juice. Then I experimented with a few different recipes. And after only a few iterations I hit the jackpot. Thus this article.

BigBubbles_2016_07_157Following is a video of gigantic bubbles in slow motion, at the Sands Point Preserve.

Following is a video of the 2018 Sands Point Preserve Village Day, where hundreds of screaming kids tried to pop gigantic bubbles for 4 hours non-stop.

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