Tomas Vykruta Data Daily

I'm a savvy business traveler. I spent 2 years working for Xbox, during which I would travel nearly 100,000 miles a year. On a monthly basis I'd be in Shanghai, Tokyo, Tapei, Soeul, London, Brisbane, and those were 2 day destinations. Today, I had to travel from New York to San Francisco on a routine business trip for Google. I decided to do a little experiment and track not only how long it actually takes to get from New York to San Franciso door-to-door, but where the time goes. I used 3 certified, scientific tools to write down exact times: An analog Diesel wrist watch A pen My hand My hand was not only a convenient place to write down times, it was also a reminder to keep writing down times.  The trip was simple: Take the NY Subway 1 stop to Penn Station. From there, the NJR direct to to Newark Airport. Direct flight w/ United to SFO. Rent car, drive to hotel in Palo Alto. End of trip. It's a 6.5 hour flight, so how long could the whole trip take? ...

1 coffee down. Early Friday morning I met who was to be my FAA Designated Pilot Examiner, Sherry Diamond at a small office in a flight school at KPAO (Palo Alto, CA) airport. It was the morning of my FAA checkride. If I pass this, I will walk out with a US pilot license usable virtually anywhere in the world. I didn't think I'd be nervous like the others, I'm not the nervous type, and I felt ready. But I was a bit nervous. The check ride involves a deep, 2 hour verbal exam, and a multi-hour flight exam where the examiner does fun things like suddenly shut off your engine - you must land the plane safely on a runway (with no engine) or you fail. It's a simulated engine failure landing. Sherry carefully examined my logbook . She looked puzzled. After a few minutes, she looked up and asked where the rest of my logbook is. I told her she's looking at it, and asked her what the problem was. She said the problem was it begins in December, and February has barely st...

Boom, you need to refile you income tax forms for IRS and the only copy you have is a PDF from h&r block or TurboTax.  The problem is, they are watermarked with giant 'DO NOT FILE, COPY ONLY' letters. Solution :  open up in any basic image editor (Gimp, photoshop).  Set contrast up to about 90%.  The watermark letters will magically disappear. Poof.  It causes some quality degradation in the rest of the text, so ideally you'll want to only change contrast in the area where the watermark exists.  Highlight with rectangle select tool. Quality is  good enough  to be readable by IRS agent.  Heck, drag that contrast all the way up to 100% and make them squint a bit.

An SR22 collided with a Cessna 152 midair, miraculously both pilots live to tell about it. Almost all mid-air collisions between planes lead to multiple fatalities, since almost all parts of an airplane are required to maintain lift. These guys were lucky - landing gear smashed the windshield of the other plane. Landing gear and windshield happen to be 2 components not required for flight. I just read some safety articles on midair collisions. Some of this is not so obvious. Worth sharing. Over 50% of collisions happen in: - sunny, vfr condiions (when you feel most comfortable) - below 5000', near airport - fast aircraft overtaking slow (if you're climbing at 73mph and he's flying at 300mph, you will only have a few minutes from moment of coming into your field of view, to him overtaking you) - fast aircraft collides with slow from behind (0-15 degrees): how often are you scanning BEHIND you while flying? - blossom effect: super counter-intuitive. an a...

Very annoying that Cessna doesn't make these available. I made my own PDF . Transfer to your kindle, ipad, etc. This includes the Cessna 1970K checklist as well as POH (Pilot Operating Handbook), or airplane ownership ForeFlight has a "documents" tab which is a perfect place to keep this.

This article explains how to get anything for free on Ebay. This is very simple, proven and guaranteed to work. You can get, for example, an IPhone 4, a 64GB IPad 2, or even a Macbook Pro laptop for free. 1. If the seller does not use delivery confirmation, you already won. Just tell ebay you never received the item. They will always side with you (bhe buyer) and refund your money, including shipping, AT THE SELLER'S EXPENSE. There is nothing the seller can do. Ebay will not investigate further, they close the case.  I have hard numerous reports of this happening.  See this facebook thread  and this article . The buyer now has no item, no money, and in addition he is out the cost of shipping. Totally screwed. 2. If you are dealing with a savvy seller, they will use delivery confirmation. Don't worry, you can still get your item for free. After you receive the item, open a case and claim the item broken. Let's use an IPhone 4 as an example. Open a claim and say the me...

 Download the hash file here:  http://www.mediafire.com/?n307hutksjstow3 ** Warning - if you had a stupid password like "linkedin" or "password" it's already been cracked and removed from teh file. You lose. Go here,  http://duckduckgo.com/?q=sha1+password  and replace the 'password' portion with your actual password.  This site doesn't know who you are, so this should be safe.  Copy the result, you'll need it.  The SHA1 hash for 'password' is  5baa61e4c9b93f3f0682250b6cf8331b7ee68fd8. Open the text file and search for the password.  Use your favorite tool for this.  If it's found, the good news is your password isn't cracked yet, but the bad news is it's been leaked and could get cracked soon, depending on complexity. bonus: Next, repeat steps 1 and 3, except prepend 00000  to your password.  So if your password was password , you would get the sha1 for 00000password.   If you get a positive match, your password has ...