Category: Business

Over the past 5 years there has great interest in drones for two main reasons – first as a transportation alternative and secondly for delivering goods. 

When it comes to transportation, the flying car or now a personal drone has been envisioned as the utopia for many to avoid traffic, however, I think that there are too many factors that will make this not a reality in the near future. 

For delivering packages the drones have also been seen as an easy solution and Amazon and other services have showcased and announced drone services for deliveries.

Drones have common problems that make them unviable for delivery and transport in the current environment.

1 Noise 
The amount of noise that drones create from the motor and the turbines is about 75-85db about some level as an alarm clock, snow or leaf blower. Imagine in a dense area with 5-10 drones making deliveries in the space of an hour, you would tire of the noise quickly.

2 Regulations 
The current regulations in many countries create restrictions such as no built-up area, not within 25m of people, not with a flight zone (including helipads), stay at a low height. These regulations are due to concerns about safety and people. 

3 Weather Conditions
Delivery services and transportation are required to be on time and now. Imagine many cities in the world and their weather, if you have ever watched some vlogs of helicopter pilots or read the disclaimers on heli sightseeing tour you will soon learn that they are grounded for extended periods due to weather including dense fog or low clouds, lightning, extremely gusty winds, or heavy rain or snow. For many cities, this would include many days per year and that is for a heavy helicopter with an expert trained pilot. For a drone that has less power and lighter weight I could see that there could be issues

4 Safety
There are many issues with drones especially used as transport and what always springs to mind is the building helipads that were dotted across cities such as New York and how one incident in 1977 when the helicopter accident killed 5 people including someone on the street. I think this will be the main reason that many cities will be cautious in allowing drones to land in the city. They may alternatively land on the helipads or designated places near rivers or open areas with safety arrangements and instant emergency equipment.

I think that there is a place for drones and their current uses including surveillance for wild fires,  landmine detetion, police and rescue efforts, farming (livestock and crops), urban planning, construction, property management,  however, the days of getting an share or personal drone ride are still in the future and will require a great deal of planning and regulation to ensure that residents don’t have to worry about drone noise and safety. 

WordPress 5.0 is officially out. WordPress is the editor and backend system that I use for all my websites that I build and maintain. The latest was released on December 6 with many new features including a new editor and blocks(parts of the posts/articles). 

I have trialed the new WordPress by using the Gutenberg plugin in the previous version of WordPress, so I knew what the new version would bring. I am impressed that the interface is clean but it will take some time to become acquainted with the ins and outs of the new editor. I quickly adapted to the Editor as it felt similar to the UI and workflow of Medium and a Email Service (Aweber/MailChimp) 

New tools in the Editor includes the ability to insert blocks and move them up and down the post (similar to Medium/Aweber/MailChimp) which is great as previously, it was tedious importing/uploading the images, inserting and then moving the images around then formatting the which sometimes never quite working. The new editor is easy to use with the adding blocks or just tapping enter twice for new block/paragraph. 

***TIP – Recently learnt that the best way to insert multiple images in WordPress 5 is to insert a gallery through media library and then convert to images using the block configuration menu (3 dots in top right of a block)

For some of my sites, I will stick to the old editor and that is for one reason, the themes that I use are based and customised to the previous version so when you create a new post/article in the new editor it sometimes has issues with sizing images and text. I think that many bloggers will wait until there are themes that have been tested and optimised for WordPress 5 before fully utilising the functions of the update tools and blocks. I am going to trail and test WordPress 5 on this blog to see how I best utilise the new functions/tools and editing style, I am hoping that it will actually speed up my workflows.  

Overall the layout and the way that the UI works is very reminiscent of Medium and a Email Service (Aweber/MailChimp) in terms of the adding a cover image, title and then clicking a plus to add elements and also moving around blocks(similar to Email Service). 

There is also the new Twenty-Nineteen theme from what I can see (I made it active for this website) doesn’t have a sidebar only a footer, so it pushes all the sidebar widgets into the footer.