forcebwithu

No vehicles allowed, but Xmas trees welcome.

I probably lead a sheltered life, so this isn't something I've seen before. Transparent, plastic kegs. These kegs had Stowford Press on the label.

Just came across this very useful guide to registering and insuring a drone in Thailand.

How to write plural possessive nouns is a common English grammar thing. Same as capitalizing the first letter in a sentence. https://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/plural-possessive-nouns

I wonder if this is a support structure for a ground display for the upcoming Fireworks Festival. Closer to home; It boggles the mind that someone thought it would be a good idea to position their clothes rack so it takes up half a lane of an already very narrow soi.

On this morning's rideabout I thought I'd use my PM 2.5 detector to check the accuracy of the mobile AQI station they have on the beach footpath. My monitor had the AQI at 6. As they say, "close enough for govt work". My monitor was showing a temp 36.3, but not surprised it registered a higher temp as it was sitting on the black splash guard.

We were there on a group ride back in 2020. Some good views of Pattaya and Laem Chabang from the incomplete temple.

After a third reminder email to the agent, I finally got my CAAT login credentials this morning. Turns out they submitted the CAAT registration a day after they did the submission to NBTC. Guess it was too much work to get-r-done at the same time. I also had a closer look at the approved registration docs. Interestingly the CAAT registration is good for two years. The NBTC registration expiration looks to be tied to my extension to stay through date as it's for slightly more than one year, expiring the day after my extension to stay.

Got some good drone video of yesterday's H3 run. I'm trusting more and more the awesomeness of the drone's collision avoidance system and its ability to range far and wide and still come home to papa when called.

I'm thinking the structure they're building at the pump house will be used for removing and reinstalling pumps for maintenance. Probably took a fair bit of work and time to put up this bamboo scaffolding.

I finally got the last of my drone registration docs yesterday. The insurance policy came back quick enough. Had that on the 4th, only five business days after I submitted all the requested docs and photos. For the NBTC registration they used the account I created to submit the application, so I could login and track when that was done. Even though the insurance was completed on the 4th, they didn't submit the NBTC application until the 9th. No idea why the delay, but it was only submitted after a couple of emails to the agent asking when they were going to complete that step. Once submitted I had the NBTC registration two business days later. I don't know when they submitted the CAAT registration as the agent created an account in my name and have yet to give me the login credentials. That was the last of the registration docs I received. So I'm now legal to fly if anyone should ever bother to ask.

Unfortunately it's that time of year again. Time to turn on my air purifier.

I suspect the reason for no cheese dates back to September when the authorities started clamping down on places that would sell food products that were packaged in non-FDA approved facilities. Siamburi’s had to temporarily close for that reason. The cheese they were selling was bought in bulk and then repackaged into smaller packages for sale, thus the reason the Thai FDA got involved.

A few selected stills from the drone video of Mabprachan.

A few weeks ago Mabprachan was looking low for this time of year, the end of rainy season. Today levels looked normal for this time of year.

I have my own story tell about an incompetent swim teacher, but one that ended up listening to reason. A few years later after I ended my teenage career as a swim instructor the roles were reversed and I was the one in the pool with my 6 month old. I was gobsmacked when the instructor told the parents he wanted them to pass their babies back and forth with the stranger next to them. I told my wife, no way we're doing that, the babies are going to go in full panic mode when they're handed off to a stranger. We then quietly moved to the side of the pool and started doing what I used to teach the parents to do, passing the baby through the water to each other. The goal being to get the baby comfortable in the water. The instructor noticed we weren't participating and came over to us to ask us to rejoin the group. What I wanted to say is sorry, but I can't hear you over the howling of panicked babies in the background. Instead what I did is explain I used to teach the class he now led and what he was doing was far removed from getting the babies comfortable in the water with their respective parents. To his credit he did listen as it was obvious from the babies crying in the background his method was having the opposite effect. Of the age ranges I taught I most enjoyed the infant classes and adult classes. With the adults they were motivated to be there, and for the most part easy to instruct. The infants and babies were fun to teach as they quickly overcame their fear of water and had a ball playing around in the water with their parents. The coolest part was watching babies 6 months to 1 year old, once they were comfortable in the water, getting pushed along gently underwater between their mother and father. With infants that young the mammalian diving reflex is still strong and they naturally hold their breath when underwater. Back OT, it's sad what happened to Glitterman's fiancé. Too often we hear of tragic outcomes like this due to children not being not taught basic swimming and drownproofing techniques.

I'm puzzled as to why you disagree as what I taught for drownproofing was for situations unlike the one you described. And even in the case of falling into water with a current, if you fell out of a boat you'll have time to turn around and grab the boat before drifting away. Just as we learn to crawl before we walk, teaching basic drownproofing skills is step 1 on the path of learning to swim.

Big yes on that. I used to teach swimming from 6 months up to adults. From 6 months to 2 years it was about the children, and their parents being comfortable in the water. 2 years on up the first lesson was on drownproofing. All that entailed was to teach the toddler if he/she fell into the water to immediately turn around and grab whatever it was they fell out of or off of.

I can see that as well, after all the red dot in the middle of an orange disc is just screaming "hit me". Motorists are annoyed enough with bicyclists, don't see why one would want to annoy them more by sticking a horizontal pole on their bike. Until now I never saw this type of thing in my years of riding here and in the US. I would never put that type of pole on my bike as it would hinder my ability to maneuver past stalled or slow moving traffic. I would also be annoyed if I was stuck in traffic behind that guy that had to stop because the silly pole sticking out prevents him from slipping past backed up traffic.

If you're on two wheels, keep an eye out on Soi 15 for the major cracks and holes in the concrete that was put down only a few months ago. I'm not so sure this guy's idea of a safety feature for his bike is a good idea. I understand he probably thinks its a good warning device for passing traffic to steer clear of him, but he's also increasing the chance a passing vehicle will hit him via the pole sticking out into their lane.

I caught the drone bug back in June and purchased my first drone, the Potensic ATOM during my trip back to the States. For those interested in an entry level drone, the ATOM is a great drone that sells for around $380 USD. A few C&P posts about my experience flying the ATOM. June 28 Had fun flying my new Potensic Atom drone today. I've never flown a drone before, so let my son give me a quick demo flight with him at the controls on how it works. Much faster and easier learning to pilot a drone having him doing a demo flight first. After that quick demo I did a couple of practice flights and found it very easy to pilot the drone. Video below from the first flight. My first attempt at video is a stutter start/stop pan around my son's neighborhood while in a hoover a couple hundred feet up. At the time it was pretty windy out, so pretty amazing how stable the image is. I also played around with the gimbal mounted camera to tilt the camera down and grab a still photo of the beginner at the controls. July 2 I had a chance to get out yesterday for a few more test flights. If you don't count crashing into the side of my brother's house and having my son's dog snatch the drone mid-air with his mouth, I had several good flights. Shame I wasn't recording those flights as it would be entertaining to watch the replays. What's impressive is in both instances the drone came through unscathed. I thought for sure I would be getting unexpected practice replacing broken or out of balance propellers. I tried out a couple of the different Quick Shot features. The most interesting were the visual tracking and boomerang options. Both of the videos below were shot with the drone software controlling the flight. July 10 I used my new drone to shoot video of the Hash run yesterday. To edit the video I used DaVinci Resolve, which for the amatuer stuff I'm doing the free version is more than adequate. Still too jerky on the controls, but hopefully I'll get the hang of it soon enough. BTW, that's Mabprachan Reservoir in the background of some of the shots. It's looking pretty low. August 14 Here's a handy site, UAV Forecast, for checking current and forecasted flight weather conditions. October 24 (and what led me to decide I needed to upgrade to a drone with a collision avoidance system) Whatever my next drone is, I want something with a collision avoidance system. Another nice feature to have would be a follow me mode. From the few videos I've shot of hash runs, I realize now how difficult it can be to keep runners in a close up shot while avoiding obstacles. A good example of that was a month ago I used the Potensic to video a hash run. At one point I set up on a rise of land overlooking a nearby road that was the final part of the trail. As a group was running/walking towards the drone, I slowly backed the drone up to keep them in the shot. It was looking pretty good, until it wasn't. What I neglected to account for was a tree that had branched out over the road. The video below is cued to start at that point. Unfortunately while the last thing I saw on my phone screen was twigs and leaves as the drone plummeted to the ground, the video saved just cuts out at that point. It would have been cool if what I saw had been captured on the SD card. But my bad luck didn't end there. As I made my way down from the rise of land back to the a-site, I managed to walk into and through a ground nest of wasps. Before I could say oh shit, the swarm rose up and nailed me six times as I ran, screaming like a little girl, "bees, bees, bees!". One of the hashers did recover the drone before passing traffic squashed it. And amazingly it seemed none the worse from the crash. I did discover the next time I took it out for a flight the controller screen was showing an "opticflow error" message. A search online didn't come up with any definite answers as to what the error meant, but even with that error it still flew fine until I landed the drone. When landed the drone didn't shut down and the propellers continued to spin making it dangerous to pick up the drone and manually turn it off. My guess is the opticflow error had something to do with the underside sensors were damaged from the fall and could no longer determine when the drone had landed. Fortunately I remembered a trick my son showed me with his DJI and my drone. That is setting it to hover at head height, then grab the drone from underneath and turn it upside down. When the drone senses it has gone inverted, it turns itself off. October 28 So, here I was on my morning rideabout. I was riding by Central when I suddenly felt this burning sensation in the hip area. I parked my bike and made my way into Central thinking the A/C might help, but if anything the burning sensation increased. I remembered there was a clinic on the 3rd floor so I made my way up the escalators. As the floor numbers increased so did the burning sensation. I finally made it into the clinic, explained the problem and the kind lady understood immediately what was happening, rushed off to the backroom and came back with the medication I needed for my condition. She then explained the money I had was burning a hole in my pocket and I needed to immediately empty my wallet in exchange for the box of medication she was holding. And damned if she wasn't right. As soon as I had emptied my wallet the burning sensation was gone and I was the proud owner of a brand new...

For those interested, I resurrected the drone topic below with a reply.

I had the drone out for a couple of training/test flights this morning. It was a breezy morning and I was impressed with how stable the drone was, even at 50m high. I did notice though on reviewing the video the pan shots were a bit jerky in spots, probably because of the drone moving slightly to compensate for a wind gust. Another feature I tested out was focus track using both the POI auto follow me mode and tracking using a predescribed flight path around the object of interest. Again the onboard collision avoidance system worked great. The only negative I would give it is the baked in 2m avoidance distance is too much on the conservative side for how I would like to use the drone. That is following a runner down a jungle trail that quite often doesn't have at least 2m of width. The other feature that is really impressive is auto land. In this vid, which the flight is completely hands off the controller after touching the return to home button, I purposely positioned the drone with trees between the drone and the landing spot, which was very close to overhanging palm fronds. The drone flew to a spot over the palm trees and then dropped down until its collision avoidance system detected the tree. It then paused and the onboard AI worked out an alternative flight path that would avoid the tree. Very, very cool. BTW, the orange landing pad is used to protect the propellers from dust and debris on take offs and landings. It's not used by the drone to identify the return to home point, that's done via GPS coordinates. This flight I judged the gap in the structure to probably be the minimum distance between objects I could fly the drone without the collision avoidance system kicking in. The test flight proved that, so now I know what I can get away with when recording H3 runs in the jungle. In addition to the panorama shot I posted in the Pattaya Pics topic, here's a couple of still shots I took to check the resolution (4k x 3k) and sharpness of the pics.

I'll C&P a couple of other posts I made on another forum on the subject of drones. Thought I'd add to this topic with my own experience as a new drone pilot. Back in May I bought my first drone, the Potensic ATOM. At only $380 USD it's a great entry level drone with some cool subject tracking features. What it lacks though is any kind of collision avoidance system which I really could have used about a month ago when I backed the drone into a tree branch. Fortunately the drone survived the fall to earth largely unscathed. What did get damaged though is the underside sensor that tells the drone to turn off once its landed. Not a big deal as drones have another mechanism for turning off. That is set it to hover in front of you, grab the underside of the drone and turn it upside down. When the drone senses it's gone inverted it will automatically turn itself off. While I've been really happy flying the ATOM, DJI announced two weeks ago the release of the Air 3S. While the price tag is quite a bit higher at $1,599 USD, it's packed with features that I'd been salivating over trying to decide if it was worth the hit to my bank balance to have. On Saturday I could resist no more and bought myself a brand new DJI Air 3S at the Central DJI store. What was nice is the blow to bank balance was somewhat softened as the price in Thailand is 49,900B, which at today's exchange rate is $1,476 USD. It seems gone are the days when electronics were much more expensive here than in the US. After studying up on how to fly the new drone I took it out for a test flight late yesterday. One concern I had was at 724g how much louder the 3S would be compared to my 249g Potensic ATOM. Turns out while it's about as loud as the ATOM, it's at a lower frequency. So rather than sounding like a bee, it's more like a buzz sound which is easier on the ears. Another plus for the 3S is the RC 2 controller with the built in screen. It's larger and much brighter than my mobile which is used as the controller screen for the ATOM. For the test flight I tried out focus tracking and active track features. I also tested the obstacle avoidance system which worked as advertised. It never let the drone get within about 2m of any obstacle. That's a godsend as I intend to use the drone for following H3 runners through jungle trail. Here's a couple of raw, unedited videos of the Pattaya area. In the first I played around with switching from the wild angle lens to the 3X telephoto lens. The 2nd video I had a go at using the 9x digital zoom while trying to manually track a motorbike on Sukhumvit. A side note to that is I was surprised how many motorbikes ignore the no motorbikes in the underpass restriction. IRRC, there was a news report about a month ago they were going to put a stop to that, real soon now.