I was a international customer at Swan until they stopped providing services for non US people. I must say coming from Swan Robosats was flawless. Particularly so if you use USD as a currency.

Happy to hear that, you're welcome

Interesting, it reminds me gas from Russia. I have heard that in Europe, gas from Russia is called gas from India. As people say in English you can't make this up.

It is the French version of DJI, with drones made for people who just want to see around and take pictures. A French neighbor I had said his father had used Parrot drones until it was taken by a bird (in the air, eagles for example tend to protect their territory).

I guess it is a good choice if your goal is just to fly around without adrenaline or feeling to fly. I knew someone who was flying DJI for his work but the videos were very slow, and it looked boring. But in his case it was for work anyway so it didn't really matter.

So I guess the drawbacks of Parrot are if you crash unless you know how to repair you may have to wait some time, and videos look slow and boring. The advantage is you have nothing to do by yourself, no particular know-how required.

The drawbacks of FPV drones is to repair you do it yourself, and it is harder to fly at first. The advantages are that you are totally free to fly like a bird, and you don't have to fear birds as you can just escape from them by changing quickly your path.

For quick kits, if you want quick recommendations for the later I recommend you this site and buy at first the cheapest drone until you don't crash anymore: https://www.fpvknowitall.com/fpv-shopping-list-tiny-whoop/ If you want to support a US company there is newbeedrone. The batteries are cheap also so you can buy many. In my case I went with the Chinese manufacturer Happy model because I was racing and it was the cheapest with the longest fly time.

In the US you can buy with Racedayquad: https://www.racedayquads.com/collections/all-pre-built-quads-wings/products/pre-order-happymodel-mobula6-whoop-hd-w-hdzero-eco-elrs-2-4ghz-racing

For digital signals of videos you will have to buy separately the goggles. For HDZero you can buy their goggles from their website: https://www.hd-zero.com/product-page/hdzero-goggle I don't know why it is not on Racedayquad as I fly only with analog images (I fly with other people around me and to avoid overlapping with the frequency of people surrounding me in my case analog worked better, but nowadays it seems digital systems have improved a lot).

Here you can buy the transmitter module: https://www.racedayquads.com/collections/transmitter-modules TBS transmitters is made by an Austrian who loves the hobby but it is closed source. ELRS is the open source system, any transmitter with a fan should work well. There is also this radio transmitter with good gimbals: https://www.racedayquads.com/products/radiomaster-tx16s-mkii-max-ag01-red-webleedfpv-edition?keyword=radiomaster

I am not in the US so I never bought anything on Racedayquad but I have heard they were sueing the US government for their new law to impose on people the necessity to buy chips to be constantly monitored, so I like them.

But I don't know, maybe you would prefer to test first and try one of these RTF kits which cost less: https://www.racedayquads.com/collections/all-ready-to-fly-quad-combos

In my opinion you're good to go with Parrot just that when you're used to FPV it looks boring. But maybe for you it won't be boring if it is your first time flying a drone. Maybe you could also go to a racing club for drones near your home to ask for advice and asked to try. If you crash their drone they won't be to upset I think because people who race are used to repair.

Nice! You can even do this in Machu Picchu!

Indeed, this is a really a great hobby. Governments make it more and more a nightmare for newcomers with licenses, new weight restriction rules, new chips to add to be monitored while flying, but I highly recommend to try! Flying and doing loops with drones is a great experience!

Basically Betaflight is the de facto open source standard I believe for flight controllers. For the receiver, ExpressLRS (open source firmware for receivers) is pretty good. I essentially fly drones with ELRS as I have to comply with strict rules in my country of residence. I have the 2.4GHZ antenna so I can't tell you everything about 900mhz and I didn't try to fly behind big metal obstacles but behind trees I never had a problem of signal. If you live in a country where using 900mhz is not a problem, I would say it is likely the way to go.

If you are uncomfortable with DIY drones, I suggest "RTF" (ready to fly) drones. I suggest to avoid the last hype and to go with a radio command compatible with EdgeTX (open source firmware more unstable than OpenTX) with good gimbals (very important). You can download also nice voices in many languages and heavily customize your radio with this open source firmware. An example which blew my mind: with a custom switch you can program your drone to take over you to avoid crashing (basically by changing the mode you fly).

Lastly for the firmware to spin the motors, the ESC firmware, BLheli32 was the way to go but because of European politicians favoring war over business the company which was behind it stopped and now you should look for ESCs with the AM32 firmware. As far as I know it is a fork which should remain open source.

If you want to use a drone in the wind I recommend 7inch propellers, and I recommend you to first try with cheap shitty chinese drones using open source software to not throw all your money while you crash and have to buy again parts.

And speaking about the parts, there is digital imaging system now which as far as I know is open source but never tried, manufactured by HDZero. I have heard there were bugs 1 year ago, and depending on your country the government may forbid the use of digital signals based on the rational it is a form of encoding (but in all countries the police doesn't really care and doesn't know).

Also, nobody will tell you officially that but if you use DJI be aware you may be leaking images to China and it is not open source... This is second hand information from knowledgeable people, I didn't verify if DJI actually sends videos to China and if yes how.

Fonda Henry Nakadai Tatsuya

Interesting, hope you get this sorted out. I really like this kind of projects. Since I am using the seedsigner I have heard also the fud around it from Coinkite, although not enough time to see everything. Capitalism is about competition, so for me it is fair game. However I can understand that he could get pissed off if you reversed engineered his clock and didn't put credits. But according to you this is not the case, so I would just write "inspired from Coinkite" and put a link. Sometimes I do the same for algorithms, if I had troubles and found a good algorithm from someone else I put a link to Stack overflow in a comment haha.

In the Bitcoin community I have heard also unjustified fud about Ledger too, sometimes Trezor also, and seedsigner as written above, so I guess it may be a problem with how people react on social networks. In my case, I just ignore it. In this regard, Blockstream is a very good company, they produce hardware and tell us how to replicate it and don't get upset about it. It is purely open source.

Haha, nice!

Thanks! I will take note of Stardust, I didn't know this movie. To be honest I don't particularly like Robert de Niro but since people recommended Taxi driver I watched it and didn't particularly enjoy it. The best movie I watched with him was The Deer Hunter. It is about post-Vietnam war trauma. It was really a good movie, not science fiction though

Nice! Yes, he was. I could hardly recognize him though with the clothes.

Brazil was a very good science fiction movie like big brother in a dystopia but it is a comedy as well. There are even messages like those of the United Nations with the corona virus, "we are all in this together". In the movie it was "Happiness, we are all in this together ". With this kind of messages and other scenes it feels like the movie sometimes is a parody of our everyday lives (and yet it was released in 1985). I highly recommend it.

I didn't know, I thought the peg broke more recently, and I didn't know it was because of the SNB either. I checked the exchange rate chart just out of curiosity and I see that it was not in Jan 2014 but in Jan 2015, from 1.2 to 1.0 EUR/CHF.

Interesting story, I didn't know that Austrians were advised to get loans in CHF. In hindsight and particularly in 2024, it looks obvious it was not a good idea. But indeed how could an uninformed person (or misinformed to use propaganda terms) have known?

I still advise to buy gold if I talk with someone uncomfortable with technology, and I would rather look at prices in terms of gold. But in terms of possibilities, I deeply think Bitcoin gives us the best way to be the pessimistic and not the optimistic jew who will go to Auschwitz and unable to choose because too much is at stake to move. In terms of freedom of movement Bitcoin wins hands down.

I am always thinking this in particular when I am filling in a form in an airplane or airport to notify how much gold I am bringing in the country. With Bitcoin I can lie at will and go to airports with peace of mind. Same for capital control, we are not anymore terrorists and child rapists, we are anyone who just want to send money.

I am planning to buy a one year subscription to Kagi, the search engine. But I would have subscribed whatever the price is, I was just waiting for a discount.

Oh, a big one, nice car!

Just out of curiosity, what kind of car and transmission type? As a beginner driver who got his driving license this year I must say I am highly biased towards manual transmissions and highly enjoy using the engine brake in mountain roads.

I would accelerate my switch from a general software engineering job to a job focused on image processing or signal processing and would send my resume to the team behind OpenCV.

The only one which didn't work (the buttons didn't work) for me was the Trezor model one...but most likely a bad batch. Jade also didn't work well but it is a diy so let us say it is because of myself if I had connections problems. And for the official one I use Nixos so I had other problems to get it recognized, but this is also because of myself as I was not good enough to solve the problem specific to Nixos.

The hardware wallet which worked best for me without tinkering has been Ledger wallets.