Category: Electronics

  • The Words of the Year 2023

    The Words of the Year 2023

    It’s time to wrap up the words of this year. As I do every year at the end of the year, I’m looking back at what has happened to me and what I have encountered over the past year, and I’m listing them up in a few short words.

    The words of 2023 are flight simulationfitnessTOEIC, and voice recognition.

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  • Flying an Airplane

    Flying an Airplane

    As I wrote in this entry of my blog, I became interested in flying an airplane last year; I had been interested in airplanes and aviation 20 years ago, but at that time, I was more fascinated by the women flight attendants who took care of the passengers in the cabins of airplanes than by flying itself. This time, I was seriously interested in piloting the plane itself.

    Of course, I don’t have the time, ability, or financial resources to attend flight school or have a flight instructor train me to get a certificate to fly an actual airplane. What I am trying to do is just a simulated flight using a flight simulator. Nevertheless, the 2020 version of Microsoft Flight Simulator is much closer to flying a real airplane than previous versions, so mastering how to fly in that simulator is enough for me. Most reassuringly, nobody will die or be injured if I make a mistake in the controls.

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  • The Words of the Year 2022

    The Words of the Year 2022

    The words of this year are: web3, Ford Focus, gout, and pilotage.

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  • Going Driverless

    I used to watch Knight Rider on TV when I was a junior high school student. Knight Rider is an American TV series where a hero, Michael Knight, together with a talking self-driven car, KITT, beats the evil and sometimes has romantic experiences with a heroine of each episode. I thought that such a car was just a pipe dream at that time, but the dream will probably come true in a decade or two.

    The development of autonomous cars, or driverless cars, is widespread. Google started testing of the developing autonomous cars on public roads as Nevada state law allowed to do it and issued license plates to them in 2011. Following Google, Audi obtained the road testing license as well from the state government of Nevada in 2013. In the same year, the United Kingdom also permitted road testing of automated cars. In China, Baidu is also planning similar testing.

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