I wanted a DJI Neo 2 case that could disappear into a backpack without the drone getting crushed by everything piled on top of it. The result is a 3D-printed case measuring 163 × 185 × 47 mm, including room for the drone and the small spares I actually need. It may be the smallest crush-proof case for the Neo 2 out there.
The flexible radio-module antennas remain outside, avoiding the empty case volume that enclosing them would require.
I’ve posted enough scattered AI tips on Slack that it’s time to put them in one place. These are operating principles, not commandments. Nothing applies everywhere; don’t blindly follow any of this.
ChargerLAB only provides a Windows app for the Power-Z KM003C. I wasn’t going to install a whole separate operating system just to use one USB power meter, so I built PowerScope. It graphs live voltage, signed current, power, temperature and USB rails at up to 100 samples per second; records sessions; exports CSV and JSON; and captures and decodes USB Power Delivery traffic and cable E-Markers.
PowerScope reading a KM003C directly from the browser — it’s my iPhone charging
Everything runs locally in the browser. WebUSB talks to the meter, Web Serial provides its separate control channel, Go/Wasm parses measurements and USB-PD traffic, and IndexedDB stores recordings. The site serves static assets; device data stays in the browser.
Try the web app in Chrome or Chromium.
The DJI‘s Neo 2‘s onboard speaker is one obnoxiously loud piece. So I opened it up, unplugged the speaker cable from the main board, and snipped off the loose wire and now it’s blissfully silent (except the little startup music that plays out of the motors!).
Speaker connector location.
Gotcha: preserve the blue thermal putty. It is a soft gap filler, not ordinary CPU paste: it bridges uneven power electronics to the shell, whereas paste is too thin and a fixed-thickness pad may not contact everything. Keep it clean and press any displaced material back into its original footprint with a clean plastic tool before closing the shell. If any is lost or contaminated, do not fly until the same coverage has been restored with a soft, electrically insulating putty such as iFixit Thermal Putty (the exact DJI material is not documented); poor contact can overheat the motor controller and cause loss of propulsion.
If you like this sort of quieting hack, Visual Beep is a similar one with an IKEA clock.
TL;DR List of best health insurers in Australia based on publicly available statistics.
I recently decided to up my health insurance from the bare minimum required by the government here in Australia. It proved quite difficult to find which insurer is the best for my state. Now the “best” insurer is a loaded term. It depends on your needs, your age and so on (and for that, you should see other resources.). But that’s the matter of coverage. I wanted to know which insurer was the easiest to deal with and actually cared about making members’ lives easier. You may be thinking how naive I must be to think any insurance company cares about their members, or any business for that matter. If that’s you, this is not the post for you.
I decided to look at publicly available statistics instead of relying on anecdotal reviews from people I know and those online. That’s because they are usually biased towards the negative as happy people don’t usually go out of their way to write a review (except me). I also wanted to know which insurer is the best for my particular area. The result is in a Github repo which I plan to add to over time as I learn more about various related stats.
As a summary, here are your best options per state:
Over the past two years, I have gradually increased my use of home automation in our small city apartment. I started with an IKEA TRÅDFRI light and a button, and today have over 40 devices doing useful things, saving electricity and making our living more pleasant. I won’t lie: I have done a lot of this just for fun and learnt quite a bit in the process. But if it doesn’t eventually result in utility or aesthetics, then I get rid of it. I can’t stand keeping frivolous stuff in the long run.
In this post, I’d like to describe the architecture of our home automation and specifically talk about how a graceful degradation of capabilities is crucial to the reliable operation of devices at home, which itself has important safety implications. Unfortunately, most people do not have access to a setup like mine, and it takes an industry and perhaps regulation to streamline these fundamental capabilities into smart home devices. On the other hand, if you have the time and the skills, this post should have some useful tips.
I worked on a project where I dived deep into understanding how modern color management works, including things like color spaces, ICC profiles and more. As I learnt here and there, I decided to write this post, both for my future self, and others who may struggle with some of the concepts as well.
Color management deals with translating between representations of colors across a variety of devices. Throughout this post, we’ll use natural language as an analogy to describe various terms and concepts.
Just as with language, one’s notion of the color “orange” can be different to someone else’s. One person could be referring to the color of a highlighter, while another can think of the skin of the orange fruit. Extending this analogy further, not everyone speaks the same language. Therefore, being able to translate is essential for a shared understanding.
This post is about a GUI tool called pdfrankenstein that fills a gap on mostly Linux machines where a powerful and easy to use PDF annotator does not exist.
Adobe Acrobat® on Windows and Mac allow you to add text, drawings and signatures to PDF documents. This is useful when filling forms or marking notes to send back to someone. Such a tool with similar capabilities and easy of use does not exist on Linux. The reason that’s often cited is that PDF is a complex format and creating a general purpose PDF editing tool requires far too much effort than can be expected from an open source project.
A bunch of disorganized tips and product recommendations for when traveling abroad:
Some of the sincerity slimed up on me
Cards wrote themselves and rifled me
Rigging the blast door to explore didn’t pan out this time
Rushed in, gobbled up and left me bottled up, that monstrous cub
To tell you the truth, I snort mousse
Rust seeps into cereals I produce
Rum may run rampantly down the drain, so let me think
I’ll leave a limb in the pipes to entice a drink