The Network under the Bright-Bright Sky

I like playing flight simulator, although never ever invested a whole lot of time into it. Anyway, playing without joystick is hard, real hard.

Especially with Jet, it’s very difficult to control the engine output precisely with the F1-F4 key, and easily end up with overspeed or underspeed or even stalling if not paying enough attention, but using mouse would be a real waste of time. Landing a Jet with keyboard without Autopilot? It’s barely manageable.

Though I know in the next few weeks I will be playing another game again, I don’t want to spend a buck on joystick.

But there is solution…ha, after all i got quite a number of human-interface devices around me.

By using Glovepie and PPJoy, I converted my MIDI keyboard and Wiimote nunchuk signal into a virtual joystick. With some fine tuning in the FS’s input settings, finally here is the poorman’s joystick! Only downside is that radio tuning and autopilot settings still require the use of mouse, but for control surface and engine control, I could finally say goodbye with the keyboard!

Here is the GlovePIE Script customized for my set. I mapped the MIDI Keyboard controls to MIDI ControlChange event.

My cockpit controls.

The autopilot panel, it’s far lot easier to disconnect autopilot while landing and flaring the plane…

The engine quadrant, completed with spoiler and flap control. The TOGA button is on the left hand side of the keyboard.

P.S. I never knew why in the world there is a elevator trim control…but when I take off with the poorman’s joystick for first time, I finally feel the immediate urge for having this control within finger reach.

P.P.S. I am running all these on Windows Vista with Microsoft Flight Simulator X SP2 without a single glitch.

If the harddrive growing speed is strictly sticking with the Moore’s Law (so far that’s pretty much the case), and that my data is growing slower than what’s Moore’s Law has predicted, then my server could still hold my data at anytime in the future.

A big assumption: I have to keep forking out money in purchasing new harddrive.

In the Q1 of 2007, I spent a whole lot in buying a 500GB, and it was full for quite some time. I have to stop my data from growing for a while also. While the 1TB harddrive price dropped to HKD $1300 from HKD $3000 when it was released, it’s still pretty expensive. Besides, it looks like my data doesn’t grow as fast (because I watched less Anime recently? who knows-), so I bought a new one the day before and settled with a 640GB.

The old 500GB is then transferred to the backup server. The backup server now have 2*250GB+1*500GB=1TB space available. Comparing with my 100MB  installed in a 386 desktop 19 years ago, it is 10000 times bigger. (That’s about doubling for every 17.1 months, that’s not apple to apple comparison, but anyway). The 320GB from the backup is also offlined so I colud use it to backup my desktop now.

It took 1 day to re-sync the existing 4xxGB through the 100Mbps ethernet. Looks like I must upgrade it to GE next time.