Curt Olson

https://social.makerforums.info/@clolsonus

Cirrus Aircraft Engineer. FlightGear co-founder. Drone avionics and aerial mapping hobbyist, RC model airplane enthusiast. I can tuna file system but not a piano ... seriously, does anyone know a good piano tuner in the duluth/esko/cloquet area?

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Last Notes

2025-09-24 12:37:40 UTC

Threads is a last resort when there is no other way to adequately solve the problem.
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2025-09-10 11:56:46 UTC

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We should replace all road signage and road markings with Aruco tags so it's easier for Teslas drivers to get around.

2025-08-31 17:24:44 UTC

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Insider tip: I have reasons to believe the minnesota kicker will be attempting a /lot/ of field goals this season. It's not all about how good you are, it's also about how many chances you get!

2025-08-31 14:46:53 UTC

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I'm curious when Taylor Swift will get picked.

2025-08-25 14:19:35 UTC

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Sorry for dumb questions. Do you end up just recording a video and post processing it later, or is it all in real time on your phone ... like an app you wrote? Not trying to pry if you don't want to share details, just curious how things work is all.

2025-08-16 18:01:44 UTC

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2025-08-16 16:03:25 UTC

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It feels like in the current age everyone has completely stopped caring about wasting memory ... but yet they still sell laptops with 8Gb of RAM ... I don't know how they even boot any more. I am weaning myself off vscode becuase it literally reserves all the memory in my system. Simultaneously firefox is doing the same thing and eventually I lose and have to reboot.

2025-05-06 17:06:23 UTC

#thintrunktuesday Three years ago we had to relocate due to my job scenario, but we found a really wonderful semi-rural 5 acres in northern minnesota. However, I quickly discovered about 1/3 of it was covered in buckthorn which is really hard to get rid of. All these thin stalks are me going through the woods in a grid patter pulling the trees that are small enough to pull out, ignoring the ones that are too small and numerous (but spending some time on my actual hands and knees going through these areas.) And then the larger stuff chopping off waste/chest high and stripping all the green.
The problem is these things are amazingly good and sending new shoots out the sides and staying alive, so last fall I went through and stripped off all the new shoots ... and in the process found new plants and new areas where it has spread.
It seems overwhelming and impossible, but I think I gave this infestation a major setback last fall, and I'm hopeful that this spring many of these chopped off stalks won't send out new shoots again and will give up.
We have a lot of ground cover wild flowers in this area so I'm hoping the extra light to the forest floor will encourage a carpet of wild flowers in a few weeks. And then I plan to scatter some oak and maple seeds in and around here and maybe plant some more evergreens, and encourage and aspen/birch that want to take off and grow. I'd love to see some fall colors mixed in here in a couple years.
I'm playing the long game here, but I'm much better at brute forcing outdoor projects than doing any kind of indoor projects.
https://social.makerforums.info/system/media_attachments/files/114/461/951/593/080/148/original/331c6039574bbb75.png
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2025-05-06 15:19:52 UTC

I applied for my real id (USA) today. I blame my parents for making my life complicated for these sorts of things by birthing me outside the country. The poor rural DMV crew had never seen anything like my documents before and they didn't know how to enter them in the computer. And it all seems stupid to me anyway. Real id is required to board an airplane in the USA now, but I care about being safe on an airplane, I don't really give a hoot if someone's documentation is out of date or incomplete ... that has very little to do with aviation safety. I felt bad for the woman ahead of me in line. She had been divorced and remarried with associated name changes, so she needed a marriage certificate and divorce certificate for each name change ... some of those documents are the sort of thing a person might be tempted to burn. I was frustrated with the complexity of the documents I had to dig up for myself, but then for someone in her situation, it was already way worse. I can't solve all the misuse issues out there, but it sure doesn't seem like aviation safety is the top priority for the real id push. I don't know ... it all seems pretty stupid ... especially their stupid camera which took a picture of some old guy ... I don't think it looked anything like me. :-(

2025-05-03 01:03:05 UTC

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I mean, maybe? I could check the map ... ?

2025-05-03 00:57:06 UTC

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Nice! I saw a few flakes on the drive in to work this morning, but it was 99% rain here (Duluth, MN)

2025-03-30 13:14:15 UTC

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I just discovered/realized my other 4-bay enclosure (JBOD) doesn't carry through any of the smart commands ... only took me 5 years to figure that out. (It's also super super slow, but I mostly use it for archival / backup stuff ... my backuppc server writes to it.) Maybe I'll live with it for a while, or maybe think about upgrading that too at some point. I'm sort of in between ... I don't need (can't afford) to go crazy with a raid/nas system, but my jbod system is feeling pretty clunky and cumbersome and slow.

2025-03-29 14:45:12 UTC

Just figured out why my new 4tb external drive only presents as 2.2gb. My external usb drive enclosure is super old and doesn't support more than that ... ugh. Fedora 42 started flagging the old external 2tb drive as about to fail soon, so I figure replace the 2 with a 4tb ... easy ... just drop in the new drive and rsync the content over. Now I have to buy more things to run the 4 tb drive. #WeekEndSysAdminHeadaches

2025-03-29 13:20:22 UTC

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As far as I know, regular gangs don't do much kidnapping in the usa. But currently in the USA, rights and freedom and liberty and due process and good treatment are only afforded to citizens ... if you can prove you are one. Everyone else is a lesser level of human being and is subject to the Trump treatment.

2025-03-29 01:59:15 UTC

The secret police disappearing people at my alma mater now. :-( If you don't have proof of citizenship on you, or look or sound like you should be a citizen, you are now a 2nd class ... uhh .. whatever it is in the USA. With no rights, no recourse, no freedom, no liberty ... that is only for the select few. What a thing ... I don't even have words any more.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2025/03/28/university-of-minnesota-student-detained-by-ice

2025-03-22 13:26:17 UTC

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Yeah, every day looking at the news makes me sick to my stomach.

2025-03-19 01:30:57 UTC

I don't know, maybe? #Descartes
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2025-03-16 18:43:37 UTC

Whelp, our day just got a little bit more expensive ...
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2025-03-11 18:26:06 UTC

After my 5th attempt to plug in my USB-A cable, I finally realized my #CapsLock was on. (And it was an hdmi port)

2025-03-05 13:01:43 UTC

Requirements for clowns:
Clowns typically need training in a variety of skills, including physical theater, juggling, and magic. They should also have a good sense of rhythm and be able to improvise.
Training
**Clown schools**: Offer classes in physical skills, pantomime, improvisation, humor, makeup, and costuming
**Theater institutes**: Offer classes in physical theater, commedia dell'arte, and mime
**Universities**: Offer classes in theater and related subjects
**Acting classes**: Help clowns develop their acting skills
**Writing, drama, and public speaking classes**: Help clowns develop a verbally comedic routine
**Athletics classes**: Help clowns develop their physical fitness
Other requirements
Most employers prefer a high school education
Business skills are recommended, especially for self-employed clowns
Physical precision, emotional projection, and comprehensibility
Charisma and radiant stage presence
Talent for repartee
Additional information
Clowning is physically demanding
Many clowns cultivate their talents on their own or through training conventions
Clown education is often long, rigorous, and very physically demanding

2025-02-08 16:23:00 UTC

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Yeah, not to sound crass or flippant ... but those people that learned those lessons have all passed on. Every day 100's of thousands of new babies are born that have never even heard of these lessons.
The way I like to think about is that culture is a long-term, steady, low gain control loop that accumulates these lessons (and also noise and wrong information too.) Also, the older I get, the more I see that religion is also mostly culture in much the same way.
So as you would know if you watch a certain news channel every day, there is a culture war on! And the side that is winning doesn't seem to have any of these lessons cooked into their culture.
So yeah, we did learn all these lessons before ... you are 100% right.

2025-01-31 13:20:56 UTC

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There is something about music that tweaks brain cells that (for me) don't otherwise seem to get a lot of use. When we had our german shepherd he would always come down to the basement and hang out with me as soon as he heard the first notes being played. (Probably to remind me that we hadn't played fetch in the last 5 seconds, but I like to think there was something to the music part too.)

2025-01-31 04:02:38 UTC

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I can do Prelude in C ... used to be able to do it entirely from memory, now I need to refresh that a bit.

2025-01-31 03:28:17 UTC

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Very cool! We recently got our piano tuned after our move (so it was pretty out of whack). It's still kinda not quite there, but better than it was and ok enough to try to pull back some of the old brain cells and dust them off.

2025-01-25 15:25:18 UTC

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Well done! I just started watching season 2 ...

2025-01-21 02:33:23 UTC

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Lol, I am so far behind on all the good buzzwords. :-)

2025-01-21 02:16:21 UTC

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For a long time I have been wondering what dev ops is.

2025-01-18 14:22:47 UTC

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I bought a Creality K1 before Christmas never having owned a 3d printer before. There was /a lot/ of things I didn't know, nothing was documented, and had to puzzle out on myself. There are zillions of youtube videos of course, but sorting through the good vs. sketchy (or old) info is a pain. For someone who knows about 3d printing, I would say these printers 'just work' but for a complete newbie, there is still a lot to puzzle through and missteps to crash into. I had no idea how to change filament for example and ended up with a wad of congealed plastic inside my print head and had to figure out how to completely disassemble it, not knowing in advance what the problem really was.
Anyway, maybe my advice for casual newbies would be to buy one of the super cheap printers to learn the basics, and then after that, the higher end printers will feel like they just work.
But knowing how to avoid jamming up your printer, and how to clean it out when things do get fouled up ... that still seems to be part of the fun.

2025-01-02 01:55:48 UTC

Noodling away with #FreeCAD a bit on my day off. I've been starting to rough in the rudder shape, but still need to engineer the hinge.
https://social.makerforums.info/system/media_attachments/files/113/756/270/968/557/993/original/2bbc24a7e386fafc.png

2024-12-15 20:33:21 UTC

I have been trying to learn a bit about 3d cad so I can start designing some of my own custom parts. I had never really done this before so I started out imagining I was going to draw up some complete fabulous design and click print and be done! That just led me to several immediate face plants. So I took a step back and decided I'd approach this much more incrementally, almost like I would approach software. Do a simple hello world bezier curve airfoil-ish loft (1). Add a feature (2) printed in place hinge ... abort print 10% in to see if the first hinge had any hope of working (yes!). Did a more complete design (3) but my hinge pins were two thin and one side immediately broke (bug discovered!). Made the hinges more beefy (4) but found several ways to crash #FreeCAD trying to make further improvements (doesn't seem to like trimming from the middle of a bezier curve.) Stepped back and completely redesigned the part from scratch (5) using a different approach to avoid problems discovered in (4). And now (5) I'm pretty happy with. But I've already made a few tweaks in case I want to print a v6. I watch my coworkers (who are literal pros at this) actually do their whole massively complex design and get it right on the first print, but they have decades of experience doing this stuff.
https://social.makerforums.info/system/media_attachments/files/113/658/724/362/157/209/original/54402802b194eedc.png

2024-11-30 16:01:44 UTC

I have followed a tutorial and created a 3d part in FreeCAD! I could not feed my family with my 3d cad skillz, but maybe someday in the future I'll be able to create a few custom (simple) parts on my own to 3d print for my own little projects here.
https://social.makerforums.info/system/media_attachments/files/113/572/733/757/807/374/original/89ccc47910972c97.png

2024-11-25 13:13:00 UTC

#NorthStarUAS #RC #Model #Airplanes
This is the boring stuff, but after a successful flight I have been working on updating the log file processing pipeline. Looking back on the code with a fresh perspective there are so many things I want to clean up and change. And I am catching small misses in my data packet generation which I can see once I start plotting graphs. I can do things like look at GPS altitude versus EKF/filtered altitude, and plot the onboard wind estimate (which definitely has a small heading bias.) I didn't have a camera on this flight, but in the future if I have an action cam recording, Plots are great, but I can also sync/merge the video (in post process) with a hud-style overlay to help intuitively understand what the flight computer was thinking throughout all phases of the flight.
https://social.makerforums.info/system/media_attachments/files/113/543/756/855/235/903/original/2cd6313607a2bd76.png
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2024-11-16 20:23:46 UTC

#Mosstodon #Lichtodon
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2024-11-07 16:31:25 UTC

The yard is looking very #November, not much green left except for the pines (and the buckthorn which I am actively battling.) After rain over night everything is wet and drippy, but the sky is blue and the sun is up! Also, if you look closely, Luna is completing her morning security sweep of the yard. We sniffed where the deer walked through, and also sniffed where we met the skunk, but thankfully the skunk wasn't around. #Fall #Minnesota
Also I have been pondering asymmetry of power, character and moral failings of leadership, social implications of belief systems ... and wishing we could some how find a way to do better and avoid regressing into the same old traps and patterns we fall into throughout history. As crappy and maddening as things can be in the USA, we are still better off than a lot of systems historically, but we could do so much better if we could get past our thirst for disordered power and tribalism and all the other things that drag us down. And yet through it all we somehow manage to procreate just fine as a species so until we completely pollute and destroy the natural things we need to survive, I guess we are all doing pretty ok.
https://social.makerforums.info/system/media_attachments/files/113/442/596/499/291/222/original/d5f522d5604e92c5.png

2024-09-13 11:25:54 UTC

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My biggest gripe about many of the C++ extensions over the years is how unreadable (by humans) the code can become. I believe simple, concise, readable syntax is another dimension of coding safety.

2024-09-11 13:28:47 UTC

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Quite a few years ago they moved all their email services over to gmail because it was free for organizations like this. But I believe recently google decided to charge huge organizations like UMN an appropriate amount, and they couldn't or wouldn't pay it. To me it seems like email has moved past it's prime anyway ... there are so many other ways to communicate with people depending on purpose or context or project. Email still serves a critical purpose for sure, but my own inbox is a whole lot less busy than it used to be ... like down 90% or so from it's peak.