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HELI-X RC Simulator - for planes The idea was straightforward: focus on drones and steadily push my personal limits at my own learning pace. I joined a local club in my area that primarily focuses on RC planes and helicopters. There, I made initial contact with several fixed-wing pilots. Some of them also owned drones, though most used DJI drones mainly to locate their planes after emergency landings. As is often the case, there was one individual who seems capable of flying almost anything—give him a broomstick and he would probably get it airborne. He also flies a 3-inch drone and was very supportive, sharing broad knowledge about RC flying in general. He eventually pointed me to a specific aircraft, the Sky Surfer X8, which he knew could be an excellent entry point into fixed-wing flying. And crashing it would’t cost me a fortune. ...

AOS 3v5 Build

HDZero Box Pro+ - Converting ts files to mp4 The HDZero Box Pro+ Goggles record your flight footage in a Transport Stream (.ts) format. While this format is great for capturing video reliably during a race or freestyle session, many video-editing tools don’t accept .ts files directly. The good news: you can convert these files into a more editor-friendly format without re-encoding and therefore without losing any quality. HDZero uses the Transport Stream (TS) format because it is far more robust and reliable than MP4, especially in environments where data may be incomplete or arrive irregularly — which is exactly what happens in real-time FPV video recording. TS is designed for broadcast use and handles dropped packets, unstable bitrates, and unexpected interruptions without corrupting the entire file. MP4, on the other hand, relies on structured metadata and final indexing written at the end of the file. If recording is interrupted or the device loses power, the MP4 file can easily become unreadable. TS requires far less processing power, is easier for embedded hardware to write safely, and ensures that even if something goes wrong mid-flight, most or all of the footage remains usable. ...

HDZero Box Pro+ - Wireless access to SDCard The HDZero GoxPro+ Goggles unfortunately provide only a very limited subset of Linux commands. The entire device runs on OpenWRT, which is impressive for such a small unit, but it comes with significant limitations. For example, we cannot transfer files from the goggles to a computer using SSH with rsync, because the SSH server (normally Dropbear under OpenWRT) is missing. scp is also unavailable. As a result, we are restricted to older, more primitive Unix-style methods for moving files — but it is still possible. ...

Tiny BSD-make Pipeline to Turn Org Files into PDFs I keep a lot of course material in Org mode, and I wanted a one-liner to turn everything in a directory into PDFs. The result is a tiny BSD make file that I wrote on macOS and that works on any BSD-compatible make. Under the hood it uses Pandoc to convert .org → LaTeX and XeLaTeX (xelatex) to render the PDF. ...