stibbons

I bought BetterTouchTool just for the middle-click functionality - it's currently mapped to a three-finger click. Very useful for emacs and some of the CAD software I use. Apparently also good for Whack-a-Kerbal.

*shrug* If not having the original assets available is enough to put you off working on it, then that's your concern.

Not really accurate; the license in the source is pretty clear that derivative works are fine as long as it's clear that it's a derivative and the original work is acknowledged.

It was always with O'Reilly, but that's not important right now. Also vaguely surprised nobody knows any of the authors.

Only half agree - O'Reilly are a reputable publisher, and you can be sure it'll appear eventually. Only beware of preordering if you care about timeframes.

Answered in a stickied thread at the very top of the 1.2 modding discussion forum.

Interesting. That does indeed seem to indicate problems with the way the original Arduino driver plays with the current serial library. I do have one more thing I want to try - recompiling the serial library on a Windows 10 system. And I'm currently standing up Visual Studio Community on my Windows install to try it out. But apart from that I don't have any suggestions apart from just trying another serial interface.

Reckon. I gave up trying to keep a printer at home for the same reason. On the few occasions I do need to print anything it happens either at work or a friend's place.

For what it's worth, those transparent sheets usually work OK in an inkjet printer - you could just draw a design with white lettering on a black background and print it.

For what it's worth, I'm at least able to reproduce this in my unit tests now. And it's broken for any number of zeroes after the decimal point; 1.002 is returned as 1.200 for example.

Glad you like it! I wrote it to optimise for using the LedControl library to write numbers to a seven segment display. That library requires a function call for each digit, and when you write a digit you need to specify whether the decimal point after the digit should be turned on. So my code to initialise a LedControl object, create an EngNum object and write it to the display literally looks like this: LedControl displays = LedControl(14, 16, 10, 1); // 1x MAX7219 drivers using pins 14, 16 and 10. EngNumber periapsis; floatToEng(VData.PE, &periapsis); // Draw the number starting at the first position of the driver at address 0 for (int i=0; i<4; i++) { displays.setChar(0, i, periapsis.digits[i], periapsis.dp == i); } Keeping the index of the decimal point separate from the digits made it a lot simpler for me to iterate through the digits, as well as checking if the current digit is the one that needs a decimal point after it. That said, you're doing some double handling that wouldn't be necessary if the library knew how to format a string in the first place. I'm pretty sure I can add a new object with a formatted output string. Will spend a little time on that this week. I'd noticed my displays doing the same thing. Pretty sure it's because I was trying to be tricky and round small numbers down to 0, and the broken code to do that ended up in the library when I carved it out of the rest of my sketch. I've been putting up with it, but you've given me incentive to do something about it. Will poke it this week as well.

Minor point of order, it's only the Teensy 3.1 and 3.2 that are 5V tolerant. The 3.0 is not. I'm using a 3.2 on an I2C bus with a 5V master with no problems. The new boards also have an FPU. The only mild downside is that the 180MHz version loses the 5V tolerance. I've backed the kickstarter, looking forward to trying the new boards out.

$59.98?

Real time wisecracks and bad puns. That's definitely important.

I just remembered this may not be entirely accurate. A few pages back somebody claimed to have gotten this plugin working properly in Windows 10 using Arduino compatible boards with a different serial chipset, therefore a different driver. See So it might be something like a weird interaction between the C# library and the standard Arduino serial driver. If you happen to have some spare cash it might be worth tracking down an Arduino board with a WCH340 chip on them. But, again, I have no idea if it'll actually work or not sorry.

It's not a driver issue. Short version is that the plugin is able to marshal data out the serial connection, but packets inbound are never processed. The plugin registers a handler for the System.IO.Ports.SerialPort.DataReceived event but since Windows 10 that event just... doesn't seem to fire. For what it's worth, it's never, ever worked on Linux or OS X. This is probably exacerbated by the fact that KSP doesn't include the Unity libraries for serial comms so we're relying on assorted third party C# implementations. But seeing as Unity uses a pretty crusty version of mono I'm not quite convinced building KSP with the full .NET suite will help. I've got a fork of this plugin that works fairly well on Linux and OS X by doing two things: It replaces the old serial library zitronen used with PsimaxSerial, which is a slightly modified rip of the current mono serial libraries made by forum user Mulbin. It replaces the SerialPort.DataReceived callback with asynchronous serial reads via the BaseStream property of the serial port, happening in a separate thread (see http://www.sparxeng.com/blog/software/must-use-net-system-io-ports-serialport) I've stress-tested my fork pretty heavily on Linux (it ran for a solid eight hours of constant launches during the maker faire in Sydney last month without crashing), and I've run it for short periods on OS X, but I don't really test it in Windows at all. @Mattew, you could give my fork a try at http://spacedock.info/mod/850/KSP Serial IO (cross platform). But I honestly have no idea if it'll work for you or not. Sure would be interested to see somebody try it out though. And for what it's worth, I half suspect this is because your arduino code is assuming it's disconnected because it never gets a successful handshake. If you're basing your code on zitronen's example sketch, it's probably worth making sure you've disabled any conditionals that check for a connection.

I'm impressed this thread has stretched in to a second page of speculating on whether you're allowed to publish a KSP book, without anybody acknowledging the fact that a KSP book is about to be published. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035138.do

It has more primary sources than you, for a start.

One paper about a lab test doesn't really quantify any of your statements. Try and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster for the current status.

[citation needed]

I dabble in Dwarf Fortress. As far as micro management sims go, it's well worth the effort of learning your way around the esoteric UI. I've been playing a really hardcore start recently, where your starting expedition has completely unskilled dwarves, and absolutely no equipment. You dismantle your cart, which gives you enough wood to make a carpenter's shop and a training axe, then build a wooden above ground village until you can trade for an anvil and supplies to make a pick. My current fortress was doing OK, had survived for a year above ground and was just starting to delve when a wererat got in (I'd walled off my little village, but hadn't figured out a way to protect the entrance, so it was wide open). The outbreak was horrific. Many died, many more were infected. By the time I got a handle on it my fortress was down to a single dwarf, traumatised by the horror of seeing his friends and family killed and numbed by a daily routine trying to single-handedly survive while surrounded by their dismembered remains (and later also their ghosts). It took a full year for that dwarf to get things back on track, build enough coffins and inter two dozen bodies. And even longer before traders and settlers were brave enough to go anywhere near the place. But the fortress is back up to about ten dwarves, and is starting to run with some semblance of efficiency again. And I've put a draw bridge at the entrance.

I love the format, but I think a significant part of the problem is that it's poorly communicated. There's nothing obvious telling users that this part of the forum behaves differently to others, or that these posts aren't supposed to be conversation starters, rather specific questions. One reason for this, and my personal bugbear, is that long-running threads have been shoehorned in to this format. The Linux support threads, for example, aren't questions that have a single answer to be voted on. They're long term threads that should be treated like the rest of the forum. So this is only a partial answer. Draw a clear line between specific questions and broader discussion. Move the discussion out of the Q&A forum. Make it clear that the Q&A forum is for very specific questions, and what we expect from askers and answerers. Those last bits are where I get hazy, because it's hard. :-(

I had a pretty cheap embossing label maker, which broke a while ago. So I had to drive all over Sydney trying to get a new one on the weekend. Finally succeeded! And don't worry, LUDICROUS SPEED will soon be returning.

Thanks @Freshmeat. Last week I started to re-do some of the perspex panels. Some of them have always looked kinda gross, and others have slowly accumulated battle scars from being carried all over the place. So I picked up a couple of small sheets of new perspex, on Saturday I painted them and got the cutting templates ready (rearranged some parts, recreated the missing text), and last night I quickly cut replacements. My technique for making these has evolved a fair bit over the last couple of years, and the equipment is currently in much better shape (the laser cutter got a new laser tube recently), so the difference in quality really is remarkable. The stage panel, especially, looks SO MUCH BETTER NOW. Much happier with the new text placement, and moving the button up a little bit makes it look a lot better to my eye. The other ones show similar improvements: Was going to call it a day here, but after seeing the replacements in action I'm convinced I'm going to have to re-do the rest of the panels as well. Will almost certainly rearrange the display controls while I'm at it, there's a few changes I'd like to make that have been accumulating over the last little while.

The local network would look exactly the same as it does here. Although I hope we've stopped using IPv4 on most of the public Internet since then. The interplanetary link is interesting - TCP/IP wasn't designed to deal with the long delays involved, and NASA and others have started researching how to augment existing protocols to deal with it. Looking forward to the day space agencies standardise on using nearly identical protocols to the rest of the world for their comms. But you seem to only be concerned about the application layer, so: It'll mostly come down to frontend sharding, with UI enhancements to better communicate to users when content was published. To use Facebook as an example, they'll have a local Web presence everywhere that matters, and all of the long-range content syncing will happen behind the scenes. But I'd expect the user experience to more accurately convey that there's a significant difference between when somebody posted something and when you received it. As for your specific example, I hope it would finally be the death of Web forum software. There's literally nothing a forum does that isn't better handled by email and/or usenet, with the added benefit of better threading and handling of asynchronous comms. Boo to webifying everything.