Author: dssstrkl

Storage

One of the memes about the iPad that’s both common and irritatingly stupid is the notion that the only good iPad is the most expensive one: 64 GB and 3G. Well, the second most irritating. The iPad = tampon is worse and makes me want to punch anyone who says that in the teeth. Anyway, back to storage. I’m not really sure where people got the idea that everyone has this huge library and so HAS to get the most storage possible on every single device they have. Its my contention that the 16GB version, and the wifi-only one at that, is good enough for most people.

Honestly, most people don’t have huge iTunes libraries. My mom and Claudia’s parents have tiny libraries. They didn’t catch the digital bug as much as I did, and have huge libraries of CDs and vinyl. Hell, my mom still has literally hundreds of Beta tapes that she never bothered to replace. My mom uses her iPod mainly as a mobile stereo to use around the house. Neither she nor Claudia’s parents were ever really into mobile music, and didn’t use Walkmans, Discmans and still don’t really see the need for an iPod, although Claudia’s mom bought an iPod Shuffle. That she doesn’t use. Claudia’s and my brothers have small libraries that are each around 10 GB.

That’s the thing. Most people only bother to collect or digitize the music that they really like and so have small libraries. Its only geeks and music junkies who have huge libraries. They simply don’t need a huge amount of storage. Here’s the other thing. I’m two feet in the digital packrat camp. I’m still interested in the 16GB iPad.

Why? Its simple. Apple doesn’t make an iPad that has enough storage for all my stuff. If I had my music, movies, audiobooks, iTunesU and podcasts, I have an iTunes library that approaches 200GB! My music alone is around 60GB for over 10,000 files. The only thing Apple makes that can hold all of that is (drum roll) a computer! I would go for the smaller iPad for the same reason why I went for the 16GB iPhone. If I can’t fit everything, then I’m just going to go for what I’ll need until I can hit my laptop again.

This is just my own anecdote, so YMMV. I listen to a lot of podcasts and barely catch up to all of them throughout the week. There’s a lot of music on my phone that I don’t listen to. I can usually get through the day with my podcasts and one or two playlists. I doubt that having an iPad will change my habit. The same is true for video.

How many movies can you watch in a day? I mean, in an average day, how much time is there to watch one, let alone several 90+ minutes movies? For me, its not too many, and honestly, its usually when I’m at home where my large TV and comfy chair live.

Then there’s the issue of the use case. The iPad is not going to replace my iPhone for the simple reason that one fits in my pocket and the other doesn’t. I’m not going to carry an iPad with me to the mall or on errands. When I take it out, its more likely than not going to be in my bag with my laptop anyway. So I don’t need to have the same stuff on each device. Nor do I have to take it all with me all the time. Apple knows this, which is why they’ve positioned the iPad the way they have.

Use Cases

There have been more than a few good and thoughtful articles about the iPad over the weekend (along with a lot of stupid garbage). I wasn’t planning on adding anything else until I actually got my hands on one, but something interesting happened: everyone asked me if they should get one. I remain the sole tech person for two extended families, so that question wasn’t as straightforward as one might think. This is why there are so many reactions to the iPad and why so many “alpha geeks” hate it and swear they’ll never buy one, and why there are so many who like it. The question lies entirely in how the individual uses their computer. For the sake of brevity, I’m just going to present the use cases of a few people and then my own.

My Fiance

Current Gear: My old 2002-era 12″ Powerbook, iPhone 3G, 80GB iPod Classic

That Powerbook is a hell of a workhorse. It got me through the end of college and two years into my first professional job until I got the first-gen Macbook Pro that I’m using now. Since I gave it to my fiance, she used it through grad school and wrote her 900+ page master’s thesis on it. Its still going, but its time to move on. I told to wait until the Core i5 Macbooks come out before upgrading.

Despite not being a power user in the traditional sense, when she’s working, she is most definitely a power user. She really has no use for an iPad that I can think of. When she’s working, she spreads out all of her reference materials around her, so a single e-reader really isn’t going to cut it. The rest of the time, she’s happy to either use her iPhone or just grab my laptop instead of digging hers out of its bag (since mine’s always out anyway).

Verdict: She doesn’t need (or want) an iPad.

My Mom

Current Gear: Last-gen 15″Powerbook G4, Original iPhone

I would tell my mom to get an iPad in a cold second if not for two things. First and foremost, she’s a writer. She writes every day and has two published novels, and is working on numbers three and four, as well as a screenplay. She also wants to start podcasting her novels and blogging. The iPad simply doesn’t have enough content creation chops yet to pull that off.

The other reason is that she’s learning the more geeky parts of computer use. While the whole point of the iPad is that its for people who don’t care to tinker, the fact that both my dad and myself are such tinkerers always made her feel a little left out. Since he died, she’s had to learn to figure things out, and every time she learns something new or fixes some problem, she feels great about it. She spent her entire adult life thinking that she was too dumb to use computers, but now she knows what we all do: We’re not dumb, computers are, and we need to beat them into shape. She’s really enjoying herself, and I’m not about to take that away from her.

Verdict: She needs a new computer right now, that Powerbook is ancient. She wants a new laptop, but I think a 21″ iMac would be a better fit. Maybe an iPad for Christmas…

The In-Laws

Current Gear: Original Macbook, Blackberry Curve, Moto dumbphone

Not only did I suggest that they get an iPad, I suggested that they each get one and just use the Macbook to sync them. They need to use email and the web, but simply aren’t that interested in using the computer. There really isn’t all that much to sync, either. They don’t have any videos, audiobooks, apps, or anything beyond a few hundred music files. A single 16GB WiFi-only iPad is almost overkill, let alone two. In fact, the only reason why I suggested two is so I can set up each one with their own email accounts and avoid that bit of confusion. Depending on how powerful the maps app is, they might even be able to use it to plan directions. Or just use the web app’s printable directions. Assuming that the iPad really is able to send print jobs, they would almost never need to use the Macbook at all beyond firmware updates.

Verdict: Hell yeah, get two!

There are others, like my brother who should get one or my fiance’s brother, who doesn’t need one. It really all depends on the usage. So, what about mine? Like I said, I like my workstation setup the same basic way wherever I am.

Like this:

And this:

And so on.

Basically, I like using the Macbook Pro as my main screen and use the secondary display for supporting tasks, like Mail, Omnifocus, iTunes and Preview. The main display gets Safari, Excel, Pixelmator, Scrivener, Lightwave, Xcode and the like. While I might move stuff around in the process of working, that’s the basic setup. Even the shot with the microscope is like that. In that case, the main work was counting hundreds of vials, so the laptop became the secondary display.

I was at a coffee shop on Saturday, trying to get some work done. While I was waiting for our latte, Claudia moved our stuff from our first table to a better one by the window. She mentioned that by bag was pretty heavy, and you know what? She was right. My bag is pretty heavy. I have the MBP, a Wacom graphics tablet and a book. I really don’t need to carry the tablet around, but I realized that I could really use an iPad as my secondary display there. I actually have a lot of ebooks and pdf’s already, but moving my active windows out of the way is a real good way to destroy my workflow. I can use iBooks, Stanza, Papers as reference when I’m writing or coding, and I can use the Photos app for visual reference when I’m using Lightwave. Additionally, I can use the browser, email and whatever else on the iPad instead of the laptop. The question there is do I want the 3G version, or can I stick with WiFi only? I suppose that depends on whether or not I can get on AT&T’s WiFi network without buying a 3G plan. There are an assload of Starbucks in San Francisco, and it would keep some strain off the cell network, but I seriously doubt that it’ll work that way.

Anyway, there is no way that an iPad could be a laptop replacement for me. But as a portable second screen that will replace a bunch of heavy stuff in my bag? And all I need to carry is something like this?That’s tempting, very tempting. And that’s just for doing work on the run. Like I mentioned earlier, my laptop is pretty much always on and out. Sometimes that’s because I’m working, but a lot of times, its also just because I’m browsing the web. I don’t need my laptop for that. An iPad would be perfect for the times when I just want to sit back and read. Or when Claudia takes my laptop out of my hands again.

I don’t really understand all of the anger about the iPad. Once you think about it, there really is a niche for it. Its just that its a different niche for different people. For some people, there’s no need for it, for others, it really is a laptop replacement for other people, its a nifty supplement. For me, its both of those. I’m keeping my iPhone, I’m keeping my laptop (at least until I can get a Core i5!!!) and I’ll be using an iPad as my second monitor when I’m out and about.

Apple lab

iPad

Post author By dssstrkl
Post date January 28, 2010
No Comments on iPad

So The Tablet is out, and its the iPad. (Sigh.) I haven’t been blown away, but I also managed not to lose my fucking mind over it. What’s interesting about the iPad is that basically nothing on my wishlist came to be. What’s even more interesting is why. Now, I’m a registered iPhone dev and have already downloaded the new beta SDK, but I haven’t had time to do much with it yet, so I’m not going to be breaking the NDA, because I haven’t seen anything official. Its amazing when you have to go out and do stuff.

So first of all, I didn’t get what I wanted. So am I angry, bitter, or disappointed? Not at all. What I wanted was iPhone OS 4. I was actually surprised when people were talking about 4.0 coming out today, since I was expecting an announcement in March. Well, none of the 4.0 features that I wanted were announced today, and that’s mainly because the iPad is running iPhone OS 3.2. And that’s the other thing: it doesn’t get its own OS. As far as I know (without running the new Xcode), I assume that iPad apps get their own starting point when starting a new project (just like the various iPhone and Mac options) and build option in Xcode. None of this is shocking or unexpected. The other thing to remember is that this thing doesn’t come out for another two months.

In March.

When iPhone OS 4 gets announced.

So maybe I’ll get what I want out of the OS then. As to the iPad itself, the question is, who’s going to buy it? I’m not, but not for the reasons that the haters are claiming. I had to think about it for a while. Its certainly a nice device and is well thought out. But what is it? What is its role in my workflow, or day to day life? Yes, it lies between my phone and my laptop, but what does that mean?

What is a laptop’s role? A laptop is a portable general purpose computer. It does everything you want a computer to do, and you can take it with you. What is a smartphone’s role? Fundamentally, its a communications device. You use it for phone calls, email, web browsing, twitter, IM, texts, and all sorts of other stuff. So, what’s the role of the iPad? According to Apple, its a media consumption device. You listen to music, watch movies, read books and browse the web. Sure, it has a lot of overlap with PC’s and smartphones, but the functionality really isn’t the point. The feature list isn’t the point.

According to Apple, the form factor itself is not only the point, but the defining characteristic. You decide which device to do based on what you want to do and where. Laptops are portable, but they’re not really mobile. I might be weird, but I find that I need to set up some kind of workstation in order to be really effective with a laptop. I don’t mean just looking at the web or checking email, I mean really working. If I’m pounding a spreadsheet, working on my novel, writing code or doing graphics, I need a workstation. I need to be sitting at a desk with all my stuff arranged in a way that’s conducive to getting things done. The main benefit of a laptop for me is that I can take my work anywhere and get stuff done. Generally, my desk at work is arranged basically the same way as my desk at home, and I carry enough stuff in my bag to easily set up anywhere.

The iPhone is truly mobile. It lives in my pocket, so I can check Twitter, do email, use Omnifocus on the bus, in line at the coffee shop, while out shopping or in between tasks in the lab. But its small. Due to nothing more than the size of the screen, I can read emails on my Mac at least twice as fast as on my iPhone. I can see a hell of a lot more tasks in Omnifocus. There’s no comparison between how fast I can type on a real keyboard compared to a tiny smartphone keyboard (any smartphone keyboard).

The iPad takes what’s good about the iPhone and adds a lot of what’s good about the Macbook. The bigger screen and higher resolution makes reading, writing and watching better. What remains to be seen is whether or not I can carry this thing around without having to throw it in my laptop bag.

So, while I”m not going to buy an iPad instead of that Core i5 Macbook Pro I’m waiting for, I can see its appeal. I’m going to wait. Next year’s base model will have more memory, probably enough to hold my entire iTunes audio library, plus a bunch of movies. I want to see just how reliable that A4 chip is. And my bank account needs to grow back. But I will buy one eventually. Apple’s clearly in this for the long haul, so I don’t see any rush.

But here’s the rub: that’s about me buying one with my own money for my own use. I would have killed to have this thing in my last two jobs. Working in the lab means taking lots of notes in lots of bench sheets. In an aquatic toxicology lab, you have to take daily water qualities, with lots of fields, daily animal observations, and other stuff. In a pre-clinical lab, you have to do daily observations, regular animal weights, track mortality, all across various groups in multiple experiments. This all leads to hours upon hours of tedious manual data entry where we have to copy enough numbers from a benchsheet to a spreadsheet to make your eyes cross. And it needs to be done perfectly, every time.

We actually tried using a tablet PC years ago, but it sucked. The Excel sheet had tiny cells, required lots of scrolling and the tablet never connected to the network properly. It was such a pain in the ass that we just gave up and went back to the sheets. Having a handful of iPads in the lab would have made it worth my while to convert the Excel sheet to Numbers just to save on the headaches. I would have pushed and pushed until we got some in. And $499 is not at all expensive for lab equipment. I regularly spent $1000 on sterile plastic tubes. I spent $1100 on a digital scale and $1300 on a homogenizer. And those were both bargains. Mark my words: this thing is going to kill in the lab and in the hospital. A lot of scientists are already die-hard Apple users. They are going to be first in line to buy iPads just for iWork, and I would be shocked if benchsheet apps didn’t hit the App Store real soon.

Apple hardware iPhone

The Tablet

So, tomorrow brings us The Tablet. The mythical gadget that people have been hyping for years, and more recently, losing their fucking minds over, is real. I don’t care. Really, I just don’t see the need for a 10″ tablet in my life. I’m only willing to accept the limitations of my iPhone (or any modern smartphone) because it lives in my pocket. Once I have to toss something in my bag, its competing with my 15″ Macbook Pro. I’m assuming that those laptops are going to be upgraded with Core i5 chips soon, so that’s some serious competition for my money.

But I’m not here to sit back and chuckle smugly at the Appletards who’re going to be lining up to buy this thing. Quite the contrary. I’ll be following the liveblogs and am fully prepared to be blown away. I just don’t see the need right now. The thing that I’m excited about is the software. Tablets have been around forever. There’s not going to be anything surprising about Apple’s hardware. It’ll look slick as hell, probably have an iPod dock connector and probably have the first PA Semi silicon. Its not going to run Mac OS X. Microsoft has done that for years and it sucks. Its not going to run the iPhone OS, because its not a one-handed device. So logic dictates that it will be something in between. The fact that the top Apple execs are openly talking about how great it is leads me to believe that its going to be damn good.

Like other people, I’m pretty sure that the Tablet OS is going to be more iPhone than Mac. What has me more excited is the fact that Apple doesn’t like to duplicate effort, which means that a lot the Tablet OS is going to make its way into the iPhone OS. I’ve been complaining about the philosophy of the iPhone OS since at least 2.0. I have 117 apps sitting in iTunes (but many of those aren’t installed on my phone). If an app is beyond the second homescreen, I just search for it. Likewise, if a contact isn’t in my favorites list, I search. Its just not worth expending the mental effort to recall where all this crap is. Having an app-centric homescreen is no longer tenable. The homescreen needs to be favorite-centric with the apps moved to their own area. Android gets this very, very right. I don’t use more than 10 or so apps on a daily basis. Likewise, I don’t call more than 3 numbers daily (and only have nine favorites). I want these to live in my homescreen, everything else can live in a searchable database elsewhere.

The same is true for notifications. Modal notifications suck. You can only see one at a time, and only the most recent one. They interrupt what I’m doing and force me to ignore them or leave my current app to take care of them. There’s no way around it, and Apple must know it. Android has a much better way of dealing with notifications with its shelf. WebOS has an even better implementation than Android’s. Both the iPhone and Tablet OS’s need multitasking. The Tablet is not going to get away with running one full screen app at a time, especially with the hardware that I suspect its going to be sporting. Honestly, the same is true of the iPhone. Apple’s rationale of battery life and memory doesn’t really hold water with the 3GS. I’ve been running Backgrounder and Pro Switcher on my 3GS for months now and I have to say that having Tweetie, Instapaper, GV Mobile and whatever doesn’t harm the battery. In fact, the thing that was impacting my battery the most was push Gmail. When I went back to regular IMAP, I was shocked at how much that positively impacted my daily battery life. As much as that says about Google’s inability to run a mobile push server, it says that much more for the 3GS to have backgrounding turned on.

Make no mistake: the 3GS has the hardware chops to run full, native backgrounding.

With that being said, both the iPhone and Tablet need a graceful and intuitive way to kill apps. While I’m at it, neither OS should allow third party apps to run in the background in the first place without being explicitly told to do so by the user. Not everything needs to run in the background all the time, or even at all. Palm has a really good thing going in WebOS with the card metaphor. Pro Switcher stole the idea and it works really well.

So, yeah, that’s really all I want out of tomorrow: a useful homescreen, backgrounding added to the SDK and a non-shitty notification system. I won’t mind if Steve blows my fucking mind with the MOST IMPORTANT THING HE’S EVER DONE, but that would just be gravy.

On the other hand, if Apple releases a Core i5 Macbook Pro with Lightpeak wrapped with hookers and blow as one more thing…

personal politics

Once Again

What’s good for Wall Street and huge corporations isn’t good enough for us plebes. From the HuffPo:

Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson once said: “And let me emphasize, any homeowner who can afford his mortgage payment but chooses to walk away from an underwater property is simply a speculator – and one who is not honoring his obligations.”

The head of the Mortgage Bankers Association, John Courson, played up the moral argument against walking away, telling the Wall Street Journal last month: “What about the message they will send to their family and their kids and their friends?

But corporations and businesses don’t play by those rules. Like CalPERS’s McKinley said, “You come to a point where you write it off or stay in the game. If you want to stay in you got to put in more capital. We reached our limit on that. It was not a prudent thing to put more money into it.

“You get to a point where you can’t keep throwing good money after bad,” he said. “These are illiquid investments. You gotta fish or cut bait.”

As for homeowners walking away en masse — perhaps lenders’ biggest housing-related fear — McKinley added: “We’re hopeful that won’t happen.”

I just love how that works.

In any case, Wednesday is going to be interesting. What’s sad is that at this point, I’m so jaded that I’m pretty sure that whatever comes out of Steve Jobs’ mouth is going to be far more important and world-changing than what comes out of Obama’s mouth.

Uncategorized

Simple

Both Gruber and Marco have some good pieces up regarding the Apple tablet. Both of them spill a lot of ink to basically say that no one knows what The Tablet is, does or how it works. I haven’t bothered to write anything about it other than to complain on Twitter about how stupid this whole thing is and to express my hope that the whole thing would just go away. That’s because, like Gruber and Marco, I not only have no idea what this thing would look like or be like, I also have no idea what it would have to be like in order to blow my mind.

Back in late 2006, everyone “knew” that Apple would be releasing a phone. No one knew what it would look like. At all. My own hope was that it would be a Treo mashed together with an iPod Nano, but good. (For the record, if the iPhone hadn’t happened, I would’ve been rocking a Treo 680.) The original iPhone was, in fact, very much like a Treo mashed together with a Nano, but good. The iPhone OS is very much a child of the UI conventions of Palm OS and the Newton, but wholly modern.

Its very simple for me to say that Apple should glue two very different devices together to come up with a great product. Delivering the actual iPhone was nothing of the sort. Its similarly easy for people to say that The Tablet has to be unexpected, completely new and amazing to succeed. Apple’s had more than ten years to see what doesn’t work with portable and mobile devices. They are not going to come up with a tablet PC, a giant iPod Touch or a JooJoo.

The other, more profound reason why I haven’t bothered myself too much is because I don’t have any pressing need for it. Every cellphone I had before the iPhone was a total piece of shit. My house is surrounded by wires that basically made it impossible to get a call on the street or anywhere but a single corner towards the back. Then there’s the contacts issue, and all the other stupid problems of dumbphones and pre-iPhone era smartphones. I don’t have that problem with computers. I’ve been living out of laptops since 2002. I want more power and more capability out of my portable machine, not less. I want Nehelem, USB 3, lightpeak and all the other goodies. I don’t see how Apple can impress me to the point that I’m willing to give up a next-gen MacBook Pro for a The Tablet and an iMac.

This is the simple question that no one has been able to answer yet: If I need to take my laptop bag with me anyway, why would I choose a The Tablet over a MacBook Pro? Weight is not an issue, usability is. One of the big arguments for netbooks is their small size and weight (and cost). But having used several of them, I can’t get over the less than full-sized keyboards and the tiny trackpads, especially compared to the large, multitouch pad of my current MBP and the huge one of my next MBP. People want to use tablets because all they do is use the web and consume media. I do that, but I also write. A lot. I also do coding, photography, light video, digital drawing and painting and 3D modelling and animation. That’s a lot to give up.

I might just be outside of the target for The Tablet, but somehow, I don’t think so. Whatever it is, it needs to be something that solves a problem that I and normal people have. The problem is, I don’t know what that need is. Its not that simple.

Uncategorized

Yes, That is The Reason

IO9 asks: The failure of Jennifer’s Body at the box office punctured the myth of Megan Fox, but in doing so left Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen’s epic success even more inexplicable. You mean that everyone who went to see that genuinely wanted to see giant robots fighting for the right to appear in a story that made sense instead of Megan Fox’s ass? Really?

To answer that: yes. I went to see Transformers 2 despite Megan Fox, not because of her. I went for no other reason than to watch a bunch of giant robots beating the shit out of each other. I contend that there was too much story and not enough robot on robot violence.

The takeaway? Fighting robots are fun and Megan Fox is not hot. At all.

personal stoopid

Seems to Me the Answer is Obvious

Post author By dssstrkl
Post date December 21, 2009
No Comments on Seems to Me the Answer is Obvious

The Gray Lady poses a question: How does privacy jibe with employer-owned computers and smartphones?

Seems to me it doesn’t. If you don’t want your private messages read, keep them the hell off of your boss’ machines. Simple as that. If that means you have a work Blackberry and a personal iPhone, so be it. There’s a reason why I use my own, personal laptop at work. Well, several reasons, most having to do with the fact that I like to actually get my work done without our jackass IT department getting in the way, but still.

Yes, its less convenient to have two phones and to juggle a personal laptop with a corporate Windows tower (after all, most corporate drones, myself included, get assigned some ancient Windows box, not a shiny new laptop). But seriously, is it really that big a deal? And, if we’re really going to be that paranoid, use strong passwords on your accounts (not including the corporate accounts with the retarded rules that you have to change every quarter anyway. Fuck that account.), password-protect your computer and phone, and encrypt your fucking email. That shit gets subpoenaed, yo!

Art Creative

Some More Concept Art

Just a (not so) quick update. Here are some 3D sketches for a helium 3 refinery station, an orbital colony and a new Lobo.

The H3 refineries are small manned outposts in low Jupiter orbit. They’re effectively skyhooks that suck helium 3 out of Jupiter’s atmosphere through a thousands of kilometer-long hose and store it for use in fusion reactors. The Jupiter refineries compete with H3 mines on Luna and asteroids. They’re quite a bit farther away from Earth and the colonies than the asteroid belt, but they have the advantage of not having to refine tons of regolith for kilos of H3.

The operation is largely automated, so the crew doesn’t need to be that large. The crew lives in the rotating wheel and supervise and maintain the operation. The spiderweb structure that surrounds the station generates a powerful magnetic field that protects the crew from Jupiter’s own highly energetic field, which produces an impressive aurora.

I’m still figuring out where to put the H3 storage tanks and the docking collar. Smaller boats like the Lobo need to dock directly with the station in order to transfer crew and supplies, but the tankers do not. I need to decide if its better to transfer the actual tanks or to use a pump and nozzle system to transfer the gas. The tanks don’t need to be all that large, since most fusion reactors don’t really need to produce insane amounts of electricity. The reactors on Earth, Mars and the orbital colonies largely supplement solar power generation, so a little fuel goes a long way.

The orbital colonies are of the type imagined by Gerard O’Neill as the Island Three type. It’s basically a long spinning tube with a habitable interior. This style has two counter-rotating sections that keep the colony from spinning out of control. (Smaller rotating stations like the refineries can use gyroscopes to hold position.) O’Neill himself imagined a pair of counter-rotating Island Three stations attached at their tips to keep station, but somehow that seems even more complicated that what I have.

he rings at the end of the hab section are for agriculture. The usual Island Three illustrations show tend to have a single huge ring, but that seems like a terrible design to me. Unless it rotated separately, it would have crushing gravity, not to mention a hell of a time getting goods to and from the main station. My solution is to have a series of agriculture rings directly attached to and rotating at the same rate of the rest of the colony. The large disk at the end is a solar collector that uses fiber optics to pump the sunlight to the interior of the agriculture rings. I haven’t done the math yet to determine how big the collector needs to be to equal the interior surface of the rings, so it might get bigger or smaller.

There are also going to be three mirrors on the main hab section that direct sunlight into the interior. I need to do math again to figure out how long the mirrors need to be to illuminate the whole thing. This also means I get to build big-ass windows into the mesh and model the interior space. Power is generated through a combination of solar, fusion and thermal (as heat gets “pushed” from the sun-facing tip to the farthest tip).

The counter-rotating section includes heavy industry, manufacturing, the fusion reactors and the docking bay. The dock is at the extreme end of the station. I need to figure out how big it is and how large a ship can dock there. It needs detail on the sides, so a large, non-rotating dock should fit in nicely there, as well as the heat radiators. These need to be out of the sunlight.

And here’s a quick shot of both of these guys together, just to give a sense of scale.

That’s a huge bitch!

And last but not least, some more Lobo. I took the same mesh as before and moved the wings to the top, and changed the spine from an innie to an outie. I am so not going to be able to use this geometry, but it gives me ideas of where I want to go.

I’m going with a blended wing, hypersonic, Osprey-in-space thing for this boat. The nose, spine, wings and tail are all going to be one piece, with the modular cargo section “hanging” from the spine underneath and aft of the wings. The bigger, “go fast” grav pods are still attached to the wingtips, and the plasma jets get stuck to the tail. The hump will be a bit more pronounced than here and I think I’ll angle the wings more downward.

All in all, I think I had a successful Sunday evening!

Uncategorized

Enough Already

I’ve been hearing stories like this for what seems like years now. The problem isn’t that we like to listen to music, or even to sing ~~badly~~ along with our favorites. The problem is that the corporate music industry appears to be of the opinion that no one should listen to their music.
At all.
That’s why corporate music should be dead to us all. We should all just keep to public domain and CC music. If the record labels don’t want us listening to their shit, we should honor their wishes.