geoffeg

Just a note that the Heaven's Gate website is still up. It's a wonderful snapshot of 90s web design. https://www.heavensgate.com/

I thought a recent downtime was contributed to rolling out the initial prep for IPv6 support.

There have been many times I just decided to come back to the airport a bit later. Or circle well above the airport and watch the chaos below.

Most aircraft have a GPS on the panel that can show you the airspace around you and along your flight path, but it's not a required instrument. It's more of a 2D depiction of the airspaces, but there are three dimensional depictions on them. There's also apps like ForeFlight and Garmin Pilot that you can run on a tablet or phone.

Before those electronic methods became ubiquitous pilots used paper charts and references and used ground references, pilotage and navigation aids to determine their position on that paper map. For instance, here's the complex airspace around the aircraft owner's home airport. https://skyvector.com/?ll=33.897663018511054,-117.6024627647...

> I'm leaning towards it being some extremely cheeky DCS/flightsim nerd because of the shortness and randomness of the flights. It screams "do it because I can and report back to the boys" to me.

It's not so easy to land a plane in real life, even if you have a lot of flightsim experience. It is definitely possible and there are people who have done it, but I don't think it's the norm. A lot of flying, especially landing, involves sensory inputs. Additionally, replacing the battery in that Cessna probably requires taking the cowling off. Not properly securing the battery or cowling may result in a bad time if something comes loose. Once again, doable, but you can do as quickly as you can with a car.

> I know literally nothing about flying. How does this work? Wouldn't the air traffic controllers see it on radar and try to radio it then call in the military (I've probably watched too many movies.)? Always blows my mind when I hear this kind of stuff in this day and age.

If you takeoff from an uncontrolled airport and stay clear of controlled and restricted airspace you don't have to say a single thing on any radio and no one will care about you. The controllers would see the blip on their radars but there's no requirements to check in with them (although it's generally a good idea) so they'll mostly keep other aircraft who they are talking to away from you.

Now, if you do fly into controlled airspace near an airport with a tower without talking to anyone, things will change. A slight excursion into the controlled airspace for a short time may go unnoticed, but the more blatant and prolonged the deviation, the larger the response will be. Fly into LAX's airspace and get in the way of their flights and you'll eventually get a visit from some friendly fighter jets. (There are some exceptions. For instance, there's a few narrow corridors through LAX's airspace that don't require talking to ATC. One of those corridors even goes directly over LAX's runways at a few thousand feet.)

> everyone announces what they're doing

Well, most people. :)

There's no "requirement" that pilots announce their intentions on the common frequency at uncontrolled airports, some aircraft may not even have radios.

Some smaller airports are pretty sleepy. There's no control tower at his home airport (Corona Municipal Airport) and it doesn't look like there's an FBO there. There's probably generally no one at the airport unless someone is there to take their plane up. Even if there is someone there running out to the ramp every time they hear a plane startup would get tedious very quickly.

I imagine it's someone that doesn't have the monetary means to rent or buy a plane combined with a bit of mental health issues.

At the uncontrolled community airport I got my PPL at there were a few pilots who were known to have expired medical certificates and long expired flight reviews flying planes that they owned that hadn't had an annual inspection in years. All older guys who had nothing to lose if the FAA found out and grounded them.

I'm not sure why the owner of that aircraft doesn't setup an alert for it's tail number on one of the many aviation tracking sites. Call the airport management, police or local FBO once he sees it on approach to land at some airport.

Starlink still has infrastructure outside the satellites to run normal company stuff. If they screwed up something in their core routing system, or DNS, etc it could affect everything.

I love that we're rediscovering server side rendering. It's impressive to me how quickly the industry moved away from it as the default and is now an interesting, new technique to many.

> would be more productive to bang your head on the keyboard and expect to write the code for anything.

There's gotta be a joke about AI vibe coding there...

https://solar.w5mmw.net/ is also nice for a quick overview.

I looked into it once, I think the script or system that built the larger dumps broke and no one fixed it. I started working on it but other stuff got in the way.

That's a lot of JS for a static site. For some reason it hijacked my keyboard shortcuts for back and forward.

Because it links away from their site. They want to keep you on the site, clicking more links that can generate revenue for them.

I've seen the XB-70 at the Dayton Air Force Museum and each time it seems both massive and relatively svelte. Like some kind of shape that I can't quite fully understand. Really cool plane to see, especially among all the other aircraft from that era of aviation.

https://www.faa.gov is up

That hasn't been my experience at large corporations. They usually have a corporate proxy which only speaks HTTP 1.1, intercepts all HTTPS, and doesn't support websockets (unless you ask for an exception) and other more modern HTTP features.

I worked with a team of developers tasked with creating a few 100% static websites. Single page, no interactivity, nothing dynamic. They were talking about which React components to use, server APIs to build, etc when I asked why they didn't just write HTML or use a static site generator and host the page in S3. They didn't know how to write vanilla HTML, they had never used it for more than bootstrapping a React app.

I assume something like this https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd/?tab=readme-ov-file#grid-mod...

A good soldering iron, a magnifying glass (I have an articulating lamp with a built-in magnifying glass) and a basic multimeter is all that’s needed, but a clamp or “helping hands” to hold the circuit board would be helpful.

I recently got into Parks on the Air, where you go to parks with radio equipment and try to make 10 contacts. It's fun, gets me out of the house and can be an interesting challenge depending on atmospheric conditions. I built a small kit radio (https://qrp-labs.com/qmx.html) for use when visiting some of the parks that have longer hikes to interesting areas. Building the radio was a great lesson in electronics and exposed how horrible my soldering skills were. My curiosity about how the SDR stuff worked, especially the transmitting side, led me to reading lots of great posts and information about RF, modulation, etc.

The emergency preparedness side of things is an important side of amateur radio, but learning is an equally if not larger part of it.

I have been thinking about getting an old IPC or IPX and swapping out the internals with a modern PC motherboard and components, but only if I can do it cleanly. I haven't done it due to not having enough free time and... it just feels wrong to me in some way.

I miss Sun hardware, especially in the sun4c era. Everything was so solidly built and well thought out compared to a lot of PC hardware. The IPC/IPX is still one of my favorite form factors.

I'm always surprised at how many non-tech people don't know about their browser's ability to search in the page. I've been on multiple calls at work with researchers who have been in the field for more than a decade and they'll read the entire page instead of hitting ctrl-f.

I've watched a few review videos on the Maverick and while it does seem like the closest replacement for my (now totaled) Ford Ranger, I still wish it was a plugin/range extended drive train. It's nice not having to stop at a gas station except for when I'm on road trips 2-3 times a year.

I have a Chevy Volt (second gen). It looks like a normal car, has a 50-mile range on the battery and also has a gas engine. The passenger and luggage area are pretty normal, maybe the center rear seat isn't usable, but it isn't really usable in most sedans. I really want a previous-gen sized Ford Ranger or current Ford Maverick with the same battery range.

> Maybe this is Boeing's way of slowing down Dragon capsule dockings?

I'm gonna go with Hanlon's razor here. The Starliner team seems to have enough trouble just getting a single Starliner to the ISS without issues, I can't imagine they're capable of devising a malicious plan to interfere with a competitor.

For those wondering, this refers to Chesterton's Fence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

What are you using to generate album.json?