We are all in constant search of the perfect chat app. Myself, I thought I had things settled with my beloved Facebook Messenger. Little did I know it would break my heart.

Messenger was a minor player in my text life till recently. I was happy with Telegram back then. Telegram is the perfect app. Not the perfect chat app. The perfect app. Stable, fast, very good native apps for phones AND computers, bots, etc. Everything that Telegram implements is well thought through and stable on release. The problem is that Telegram is not something that most of my friends would bother to meet. So in my quest for a minimalistic communications strategy, Telegram had to go.

So here I am searching on what to use next. I evaluated WhatsApp, Viber and even Signal. Every one of those had huge deal breakers. Poor gif support was the main one and the second was poor clients. The only one that was convenient and feature full was Facebook Messenger. And the best part, is that everyone has it on their phones since Facebook made it mandatory if you want to use it’ s chat function on your mobile device to annoy people on the go.

Because annoying on the go is like a cherished dream for most, today except from email if one must have an app for sending text around, this app would be Facebook Messenger. That reality caries a certain responsibility for Facebook. It is the same responsibility that Google has to fulfill when they provide email apps (I did not mention Apple because everyone knows their email apps are rubbish). Let’s see how these two great entities compare when they deal with their responsibilities.

Recently a bunch of equipment made its way to my workbench and I’m invigorated! So I figured it’s high time we continued our trip.

The vertical take-off and landing aircraft I am building, will use a quadcopter or X8 (like a quadcopter with double motors) configuration to successfully justify the vertical part of it’s title.

Quadcopters you are likely familiar with. If not, the word derives from the words Quadrotor Helicopter. They are more commercial than ever and you can buy them really easy. In movies they are being used more and more and if you are into YouTube or Instagram, all the big stars have one (or many).

Anyway, it’ s that contraption:

I have not said anything about it here but my thesis is about a VTOL aircraft. That stands for Vertical Take Off and Landing aircraft. If this is nonsense to you, don’t worry. You can just watch Jeremy Clarkson explain it in TopGear fashion in the video bellow.

Basically it combines a copter and a plane allowing to take off and land without the need for an airstrip like a copter but cruise at the speed of a plane providing autonomy. It’s a rad concept.

But how does one design and build a thing like that?

Remember when my camera had the worst swim ever?

Well, I figured I could use the old film camera my grandfather bought on one of his trips. It is a Pentax camera from the 60s, very advanced for it’s age and relatively new as they mostly used it for family pictures. It has only manual controls, it looks cool and I could learn a thing or two from the absence of any automation.

So I picked up a film cartridge from Kodak and threw the camera in my backpack before a daytrip to Patras where I had some chores to run for my thesis.

OK, Marvel Entertainment, LLC or whatever your full name is. What you are doing to music, it has to… Continue!

I just finished the latest Marvel superhero series. It’s about the indestructible black man named Luke Cage. He lives in Harlem, NY and wants to be left alone but personal reasons convince him to fight the mafia leaving me once again astonished by the selection of music made by the producers.

On that note (when you see it), I want to make a recap of the music Marvel brought to my attention. Some of this was really new to me and some of this was really old to me. I will give you the link for the song that stuck in your head and you couldn’t Shazam but first let’s get some things straight for the uninitiated.

It all started with Guardians of the Galaxy and the Awesome Mix Vol 1:

Today I got the news. Maria is officially dead.

Maria was my camera. I changed the name to Maria from CAMERA #1 about a week ago when she was baptised in the waters of Naxos. By accident of course.

What's in a name, really?

A photo posted by Ryan Hudson (@ryankhudson) on Jul 24, 2016 at 3:28pm PDT

I was watching Citizenfour the other day so you may understand my confusion.

I can say that I am privacy aware. On a high level, I understand how things work. I use a different strong password for everything, I have a GPG key and I opt for using open source services that make security a priority.

However I still use services that are not so privacy centric. I use Facebook and nearly all Google Services (Search, Gmail, Drive, Photos, etc.). These two alone can show you everything about me.

According to Edward Snowden’s revelations everything is busted. Dropbox, Google, Apple. You are not safe.

On the road

Simos beach

Simos is a the biggest beach in Elafonisos. It consists of Big Simos and Small Simos. There is sand everywhere and the water is mesmerising.

Just yesterday I finished reading The Martian. I wont lie, this book is not for eveyone but I really liked it.

Mark Whitney, an engineer and botanist, was left on Mars by accident and he has to survive some years since he has even a chance to get back to Earth.

While he is at the same time the luckiest and unluckiest person on Mars he manages to crack jokes all the time.

It was a rough and fast week. From the announcement of the Greek referendum to the announcement of the final and big No.

That was little time to think about many things for me and for everyone.

However the million (Euro?) question was the following:

That was me checking twitter two nights ago while getting ready for an exam.

I jumped from my study and fired up the TV.

Alexis Tsipras announced that there will be a referendum next Sunday on whether to accept a deal made by the three institutions or not.

The government asked people to answer no while not explaining what that means. Most experts however agree that this will lead to a Grexit.

This is a response to “Is College Dead? Class From A Student’s Perspective” and it was originally posted on Medium__.

As you have learned by now, college is not a must to start a business. There are people who own successful businesses and have not finished high-school. They learned by experience what you have learned in class (and in life).

That goes both ways. The fact that someone finishes college does not mean he/she is entitled to a great job. Education is actually slowly but steadily evolving. More and more companies are getting into that game and also students demand it. This evolution though is slow for the better I believe. Imagine if a whole system that involves students, professors, staff, companies and governments changed every year. There would be chaos. It is better to change small stuff in a slow and reliable manner than to jump to the newer trend all the time. The same happens with law by the way.

There is actually a say:

Google’s project Soli is the future of wearable interaction.

Project Soli is basically a miniaturised radar implementation of the LEAP Motion sensor.

It can track precise finger gestures and at the same time is very compact as there is no combination of cameras and IR sensors.

I recently watched The Gambler movie.

I liked it but most I liked the music!

Enjoy! :)

Women contribute massively in all technological fields. They are an active part of the engineering community.

But they should contribute more.

Why they don’t? Because of numbers.

Jessie is not a person.

Jessie is the new stable release of Debian. And maybe it will get Debian to be my Linux operating system of choice.

As you may know I use a MacBook Air and I am happy with OS X.

Recently we had the chance to show some kids what Electrical and Computer Science Engineers do and challenge them to tackle a problem in their school.

And boy that was awesome!

I am a board member at the IEEE Student Branch of the University of Patrasand with some other members we decided to implement an IEEE program called TISP. And we believe we nailed it!

We contacted a lyceum close to our uni. They heard us and they decided they would like to work with us.

I’ve been a competition Ju Jitsu athlete for my entire life until the combination of an injury and the start of my University life pointed that I will never be in my full game again while studying Electrical Engineering.

If sports and mostly the competition did not exist I would not have been the individual I am today.

Competition in biology, ecology, and sociology, is a contest between organisms, animals, individuals, groups, etc., for territory, a niche, or a location of resources,for resources and goods, mates, for prestige, recognition, awards, or group or social status, for leadership.

This is one of the most important and motivating TED talks I’ve seen.

I promise, it worths your time:

I’ve been in a mode of getting more stable and reliable in the last months but when I saw this 3 or 4 days ago, it was like the random thoughts in my head strengthen and got in order. I try to avoid the emergency brake in any situation. Of course it fails some times but the rest of them are very satisfying.

Change is hard and you are never gonna feel like it. The more you force yourself, the more you are going to feel like it.