Dave Ambrose

I've sent you a couple of email messages. Are they coming through?

I'm standing in for Larry today. We're making progress! Thanks to a lot of hard work, the draft magazine is now in its final form, and will be heading to the printer shortly. We're grateful for all who contributed content, effort, and expertise. We're looking forward to mailing this out. Here's the cover. I think the issue looks good. The magazine will definitely be shipped to hobby shops and mailed to current subscribers. We don't know about other distribution channels just yet, but we'll keep you informed. Many thanks to everyone for their support.

While you're correct about the text itself, but the information required to keep that text organized is big. Our current post count is somewhere around 2.2 million. Images get down-sampled before delivery. I'm fine with the extra disk space. It's cheap, and makes our content more or less future proof. Even before we removed the image limits, we were running north of 200GB per backup. Now, we're at about 260GB/snapshot. Interesting thing about phone and tablet images is that they get zoomed into a lot. Typical strategy is to download a high resolution, low compression quality image. At the end of the day, this is all readily handled with our present infrastructure. The one big downside is that maintenance sessions take longer because it takes a couple of hours to back up the site.

And the amount of activity is increasing. We get 7GB of new content every month. I'm having to upgrade the backup drives to accommodate both the content backups, and server logs, which are kept indefinitely. I don't get to read or comment nearly as much as I'd like to. There's so much good stuff going on. Long term, it's a good thing.

Jerry, we're still working out those details. We will do our best to ensure that everyone gets a chance at the magazine. -- Dave

PM me if you want to edit your posts.

Airplanes are a fun change from cars. I seem to bounce between cars, imaginary flying machines, and submarines named Nautilus. I have a few airplanes in my stash that I want to build sooner rather than later. One is an F-4U Corsair armed with the shaped charge warheads. My dad worked on those as a recent college grad, as did my uncle.

I love this build and will be following.

Me too. Got Mary to agree to a few days, at least.

I did a plank yesterday. First time in a long time, and the first indication that I've finally healed from my surgeries.

We normally don't allow sale events, but this one is significant enough that we're making an exception. If you can't make this event, I'm told there will be future sales, as on-premise capacity is limited due to COVID-19. Please follow this topic for future updates. I understand there are some controversies surrounding this estate. Please keep comments civil and pertinent.

There's a teeny little icon inside the ads for reporting those. I suggest you do that. I'll go in an block them from our side, but that will be temporary relief at best.

My prayers are with both of you. I hope they are able to treat her. Please keep us posted.

I haven't tried uploading from a URL. Are you able to just straight upload the picture? Also the size limit for avatars is pretty low. Is the source image under 150 pixels on a side?

To address Mike's question -- The content in any existing layouts has gone stale, and needs a lot of updating. There are kit reviews, new products, and ads that all need to be placed with their current content. Plus, the pandemic has influenced our editorial direction. This often causes major layout changes, and that layout takes a lot of effort to do it right. We've also been putting a lot of effort into building the kind of infrastructure and processes that will allow our squad to work across 6 time zones. All things considered, we're making good progress, but these things have to get done right. It's a case of choose your ruts carefully, you're going to be in them for a while.

Any resin casters out there? Make this. I love this car.

Congratulations! I'm a cat guy, but he's adorable. Sounds like he's got himself a nice home.

I'm so sorry. My condolences and prayers for you and your family.

Those pictures need to be downsized. You can use Irfanview, which is a free image utility program to do the downsizing.

Please bear with me. I'm going to restructure our ads so they aren't so obnoxious.

The board software will resize the photos down for display. We used to have limits on the size of photos you could post, but I removed those a few years ago to make it easier to post pictures to the board itself. That has some ramifications that y'all don't see, but it's manageable. But, you should be able to see the full detail when you go view the photo at full size.

Yes, there is big news on this front. Please do not discuss it here. It falls under political topics. Thanks, Dave Ambrose

It doesn't help that ISPs sometimes hijack the ad slot and deliver their own ads. Neither of those ads came from us. I can't find them anywhere in our ad pool and we don't serve adult-oriented ads. It doesn't help that a lot of advertisers game the system by misclassifying their ads. I'm looking at alternatives and hope to pick one shortly. If anyone has any experience there, I'd love to hear it.

My apologies. Those are explicitly prohibited in our settings too.

Seems like every week, there's something new and obnoxious. Google seems to hate the people who pay the bills. I'll try tweaking the settings tonight.