Elon’s drone ship, “Short Fall Of Gravitas”

Good old Elon is up to Elon things again, when people doubt him because he is fashionably late on a product, it is hilarious. Elon has been stirring the rumor mill about his robotic drone ship since 2019. Dubbed the “Short Fall Of Gravitas”, the ship looks like something straight out of the movies.

The Short Fall Of Gravitas has garnered some distinct attention in the last couple of weeks. It was able to successfully recover a rocket at sea in late August, marking its first mission completion. In typical Elon fashion the ship looks just as science-fiction as one would imagine. (Pictured below)

Not only does this ship look completely wild, but it is also fully autonomous! Elon caught the first stage of the Falcon-9 rocket that had successfully launched more than 50 Starlink satellites into space! Elon said he was going to bring internet to the world, well good on you Elon keep it up! I do wonder though will this drone ship be able to handle the Raptor engines that are supposed to bring life as we know it to Mars one day?!?!?! I am sure that Elon has already thought through this…. or he’ll just build another ship. Anyway, I found this tidbit super interesting, and I hope you do too!

Why my 2017 Silverado will be my last Silverado?

In 2017 I found myself between a rock and a hard spot. I had a 2014 Honda Civic SI, which buying was a complete mistake. I bought the car brand new and with less than 500 miles on it, I got rear-ended by another vehicle at highway speeds. This accident caused $14,000 worth of damage to the vehicle but the insurance company decided to fix it. Fast forward to 2017 and another accident under the books, my Civic SI which I was complete upside down on was becoming a burden. I took the car to a dealer who offered to pay off the loan if I leased a brand new Z71. Well, I did just that, payments per month came down and as long as I bought the truck at the end of the lease, mileage wasn’t something to worry about.

It’s the end of 2017, I got my dream truck, and life couldn’t be better at this point. At first the truck was a gem, nothing it did could be wrong and I was in love with my truck. A few months later my brother traded in his truck which was a carbon copy of mine because of ridiculous shaking in the wheels, even the dealer mechanics couldn’t figure it out. They tried changing tires, adjusting the balancing of the tires, and went through the entire front suspension nothing was wrong. But at speed that Silverado would shake so hard your coffee cup would bounce out of the cup holder. Now enough about his truck, onto mine and why I’m keeping it old school on the next one.

2017 Silverado has a great little infotainment system with a big display in the dash with everything a person could wish for. Well in 2019, this awesome screen of mine, decided that it had a mind of its own, it would hang up Bluetooth calls, change the station, turn off when it felt like it and the buttons stopped working. So, like any person with some electrical understanding would, I went through every ground in the truck and cleaned them up, in hopes it was bad ground somewhere causing the issue. All this work was a waste of time because it didn’t fix the issue with the truck. So, i did the right thing and ignored it. About six months after that my battery died leaving me stranded, with my dad yelling at me saying, ” There is no F#$%^ng way that battery died already”. Well pops it did. So, I replace the battery and life goes back to normal. Infotainment is still a wreck but oh well, the truck runs. Now on to the drivetrain…….

In the 2017 Silverado, they paired a Vortec 5.3L engine, which is a great engine by all accounts, to an 8-speed transmission. But……. this Vortec motor has the emissions meeting, drop cylinder technology. This means at cruising speeds the truck drops to 4-cylinder to reduce fuel usage. It all sounds great on paper, trust me, I thought so too. Well, it’s not, the transmission and engine are sluggish to throttle response. You step on the gas and give it about 3-5 seconds for the truck to respond to the go-fast button on the floor. This drives me insane, if I need to get on it, I need that power and I need it now. I consider myself a pretty conservative driver, so I am not stomping on it unless I need to. Well, when I need it, the truck is slow to respond. This little feature drives me nuts on a daily basis.

At this time, I still have this truck that gives me headaches. I plan on driving it till the wheels fall off, as I have become accustomed to its lackluster qualities. But I plan on buying something a little bit older with an old LS motor and rebuilding it to replace this truck. Knowing EVs are on their way and wouldn’t have these issues I still love the roar of an old big or small block revving up.

Why every person should start learning containers.

As a person who has been working in IT for 12 years now, I have seen a significant shift in the way business is conducted. Everyone in today’s world talks about cloud computing and containers. When I first started in the field, the big enchilada was using hypervisors to create virtual machines. This dynamic has been all but forgotten as the world is moving to containerization. As a typical blue-collar type of guy, I’ll explain the differences between the two in laments terms.

The use of virtual machines utilizing a hypervisor is what a lot of people in the industry would consider being a “heavy load”. When utilizing a hypervisor, the end user is giving resources of the hardware (I.E. CPU, memory, Storage) directly to that machine. This takes a significant amount of management from the system administrator. Additionally building this out takes a significant amount of time depending on the complexity of said network! How do we fix this and increase efficiency you ask? Let me introduce you to containerization.

Containerization, originally implemented at scale by google, addresses the need for both speed and efficiency. So, what’s the difference? Well, containers remove the need for a hypervisor living between the operating system and the hardware. Let’s say I want to start multiple instances of Linux boxes. I simply install a Linux instance on my hardware and then download the software required to run containers. An example of these would be docker or Kubernetes.

Docker, in my honest opinion, for users who are new to containers provides a great resource for getting started. It’s so lightweight that you can run it on a Raspberry Pi4, which will cost you about $100. Utilizing DockerHub will give you access to images to run almost everything you could think of running in your mind. Kubernetes, at its most basic level, allows a user to deploy multiple containers at once, further increasing efficiency!

I hope that you find this quick write-up useful!

Why being a nerd is good!?

Everyone in today’s world has seen the movies where the nerdy kid in the class is constantly being picked on. The word nerd has become a derogatory term in the view of many people. Oxford defines nerd as, “a foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious.” In my opinion, society needs to stop putting nerds in a box.

The outlook that I carry for nerds is they are extremely talented and driven individuals who are dedicated to a craft until mastering it. If a person likes rebuilding engines, well they are a nerd in the field of automotive. Just as much as the kid who sits in the basement and develops the next great thing with coding and computers.

The goal of this blog is to have a site where people can come nerd out on their passions. I plan to post articles about everything, ranging across all landscapes. I have not found many sites where I can go in depth about construction, automotive, and coding all in one place. I hope to foster that environment for people and allow nerds to be nerds!

The Sun Rises in the East

The Sun is not the only object that may appear less blue in the atmosphere. Distant clouds or snowy mountaintops may appear yellowish. The effect is not very obvious on clear days but is very pronounced when clouds cover the line of sight, reducing the blue hue from scattered sunlight.