Inspired by an incident at the dog park

Jun 02, 2014 14:58

What is the actual difference between a drone and a remote-control device?

At the dog park I saw a couple with a flying object a bit over a foot in every dimension, which had four rotors (horizontal blades) and a payload that looked like a video camera. They were controlling it with a rig that one of them was wearing which looked like it had a video camera on it also. I didn't know what to call the thing and this raised this question.

I didn't go talk to them because I had the dog with me (dog park, right?) and it seemed like more than I could handle to get their attention and talk to them.

Meanwhile, barbie pink laptop just got turned into a brick by a short in its cord and I'm borrowing this slow Windows 8 machine while I'm shopping for the laptop of my dreams. My prejudices have been confirmed. I want a windows 7 machine, with CPU of 2.7 GHz or more, a small, textured touchpad, a smallish laptop-style keyboard without all the redundancies, a gamer's dedicated graphics card (I have lists of what will work for my needs), and not a wide screen. Also its fan shouldn't be loud and weird and get louder and weirder when I press the shift and tab keys. Seriously, that sounds frightening. Also what is this function called that keeps zooming in and out on the screen when you're trying to line up the cursor you can do things? I want to turn it off and maybe not even have it on my new laptop. I think I know how it's supposed to work but I can only get it to work properly on purpose a quarter of the time so I keep having to simply accept giant text and having to scroll to see it. Like, just now I seem to have temporarily fixed the zoom by accident after having tried to do ikt on purpose for several minutes.

Tomorrow K and I both go to work at the polls. He's an inspector at the University and I'm electronics voting specialist at my neighborhood voting center (which generally has either two or three precincts at it).  So today I intend to cook us food to take with, and also go to bed early.

windows 8, keith, computer crisis, election, laptop, drones

Previous post Next post
Up