A boring blog you don't want to read
Even though I use my Bambu Lab A1 mini printer regularly, and I occasionally design my own parts, I still haven't progressed beyond Tinkercad . And why would I? It's simple, and it gets the job done, so I see no reason to complicate my life. There is a fly in the ointment, though: Tinkercad is a proprietary tool, and that's a huge minus in my book. So I was thrilled ( thrilled , I tell you!) to…
Free and open-source system monitor that sits in the macOS menu bar. It looks good and offers plenty of customization options.
Here's a one-liner to generate PNG favicons in multiple sizes from the icon.svg file using Inkscape on macOS:
Last Friday, I woke up to the news that Codeberg is officially banning vibe-coded projects. And just like that, many of my personal tools have become homeless. So I took down my self-hosted instance of Forgejo because it was overkill for my needs, and I'm definitely not going back to GitHub. What to do? Use my own server to host Git repositories and let OpenCode+DeepSeek whip up a simple read-only…
I've had enough of using my Android smartphone for casual snapshotting , I said to myself one day. I climbed to the attic and, after rummaging through boxes of stuff, unearthed an Olympus PEN Lite E-PL7 camera. I won it a lifetime ago when I participated in a photo competition held by Olympus Danmark. It wasn't the camera I would have bought myself, but that didn't stop me from having fun using…
As any self-hoster would tell you, having a way to access servers running on your home network from the outside world is a must. This explains why services like Tailscale , Zerotier , et al. enjoy popularity with the self-hosting community. Most self-hosters would also tell you that while these and other similar solutions are useful, they are not without drawbacks. The most obvious one is the fact…
Wednesday in EKSN wasn't looking promising airplane-wise, but I decided to bike there anyway, because a) the weather was wonderful, and b) I wanted to test our new backup bicycle that we bought second-hand. But no sooner had I reached the airport than the airport manager (a great guy, I tell you) let me know that he was expecting a rather unusual airplane to make a refueling stop at EKSN.
Let me explain. First, greed-driven, shareholder value-focused businesses turn the web into a cesspool. Then we're offered an option to pay for a cleansed version of it. I don't have an issue with someone asking to be paid for their efforts to sift through garbage. What I do have an issue with is that only a fraction of users can afford access to the purified content. And the rest? This is not an…
The moment I bought my Bambu Lab A1 mini 3D printer, I went looking for photography-related designs I could print. I spent a lot of filament on things that looked promising in theory but quickly ended up in a drawer. However, several accessories have proved useful in my aviation photography pursuits.
When we moved to our new place not far from CNL, I hoped that I'd have occasional opportunities to photograph smaller private airplanes. What I didn't expect at all was to encounter military airlifters at our humble airport. Which explains my cautious optimism when I noticed that the latest NOTAM for CNL contained this particular morsel of information: AERODROME PPR DUE TO MILITARY EXERCISE ,…
Every last Sunday of the month, our flight club (now that I'm a paying member, I take particular pride in saying "our") arranges an open house event. My first one back in April as a guest was a slightly muted affair due to the less-than-perfect weather (I did have my very first flight in a Cessna airplane regardless).
The weather has been suspiciously good (albeit windy) lately, so I spent the last couple of days in CNL. Wednesday was pretty uneventful, and I spent most of it chatting with a fellow flight club member and digging through vintage aviation books (which the club has plenty of).
Last time I had a chance to photograph airliners was way back in February in AMS. And although I've been thoroughly enjoying capturing small airplanes in CNL, I did miss proper airports and big machines. So when an opportunity to spend an entire day in AAL presented itself, it was greeted with an enthusiastic Yes, please! by yours truly.
I host my open-source projects on Codeberg . But out of respect for this excellent service, I don't want to clutter it with one-off piles of code and stuff I don't take seriously. Also, I wanted to have my own "incubator" where I let my half-baked code sit until it matures into something usable before I share it on Codeberg. Long story short, I deployed a self-hosted Forgejo (a fork of Gitea )…
Whenever I'm traveling or photographing airplanes (or both), I use snapshots taken with my smartphone camera as a visual diary of my adventures. Normally, I'd dump them into my photo library and rarely revisit them, which is a shame really. Sure, it's not all champagne and fireworks, but there are many memorable (for me) moments that I'd like to relive once in a while.
I didn't quit my job per se — we moved to another country with higher living costs, and the company was unable (or unwilling, depending on how you look at it) to give me the required salary increase. It was a relief, really, because pretty much everything in this article resonates with me.
A lot happened this week aviation-wise. The most important news is that I've become a member of the Sindal Flight Club and its kind-of-official photographer. I spent every day this week — except Monday and Saturday — in the airport, enjoying the relatively good weather, equally good company of the club's members, and airplane photography. Here are a few photos for your viewing…
Ironically, the home-brewed application I use most is also the most neglected one. I’m talking about Tinble , the tiny blog engine that powers this very blog. At long last, I got my act together and spent some time tweaking and improving Tinble. Here’s what I managed to accomplish:
Say what you want about agentic coding, but thanks to the Zed editor paired with the MiniMax M2.5 model, I was finally able to build an application I've been dreaming about for as long as I have been using digiKam. It's a companion to digiKam (hence the name digiKampanion — because I'm very good at naming things) that makes it possible to access your photo library using a browser.
Today, I learned that my blog is on Bubbles . Normally, the fact that a random site — for reasons unknown — has picked up my blog wouldn’t excite me in the least. But a) Bubbles is actually pretty neat, and b) they do exercise editorial control. So I’m pretty pleased that my boring blog made the cut.
A while ago, I contacted Sindal Flight Club to inquire about its activities and perhaps joining it. I was about to give up hope of hearing back from them when, out of the blue, I got a reply thanking me for my interest and inviting me to an open house event on Sunday, April 12. The invitation promised an enticing mix of coffee, grilled sausages, and a chance to fly with the club's pilots.
This time it's a rather simple sketch running on my new favorite board — the ESP32-2432S028. It reads and displays a random line from the vocabulary.txt file on the SD card. I use it to brush up on my vocabulary. Auto-refresh is set to 120s, but it can be changed by editing the REFRESH_INTERVAL_MS variable in the sketch.
I've been obsessing with weather from the very moment we returned to Denmark. And how could I not? The weather is so abysmal and unpredictable, it's hard not to be obsessed with it. Which probably explains why I've been spending most of my spare time on improving and tweaking Aerowetter . Besides a new color scheme and other cosmetic tweaks, the application now features analog gauges and bar…
Yesterday, I woke up in the morning and decided to build myself a Bongo Cat .
Last week, I biked to CNL twice, and both times I lucked out. First, I enjoyed watching and capturing a tiny Evector EV-97 EuroStar practicing touch-and-go, and during the second visit, I was lucky to catch a brand new Cirrus SR22.
Two things happened last Saturday: 1) I finally had idle time, 2) the weather was perfect for riding a bike. So at long last, I decided to check out Sindal Airport (CNL/EKSN). Actually, it's more like an airfield, but whatever.
Now that my TERMINAL-1090 station and 5G router sit in the attic, I don't have them in line of sight. Not a problem per se , but I wouldn't mind checking up on them every now and then, without taking an arduous trip from the living room to the attic. I know, the struggle is real. Since I don't need my Logitech S920 USB web camera for video calls (ah, the joys of going back to freelancing), I…
Despite being super busy with practicalities of moving back to Denmark — unpacking, cleaning the house, and making it ours — I managed to spend a few hours working on TERMINAL-1090 . I've implemented a couple of minor improvements to the Map page. Now aircraft without heading data are displayed as blue dots, and a red marker indicates the current position as reported by readsb. There…
On my way from Germany to our new home in Denmark, I spent a couple of hours in AMS, capturing airplanes. This was my last airplane photography session in the foreseeable future, so it was a bittersweet experience. I've never had much luck photographing in AMS, mostly due to the abysmal weather every time I was there. It wasn't much better this time, but I tried to make the best of it.
Ironically, after almost ten years in Germany and countless Brezen, I had the best one on my very last day in the country.
It's quite possible that today was my last visit to NUE before our move to Denmark, and I'm happy that I'm ending my time there on a high note.
Moving to a small town in Northern Jutland means moving far away from all airplane photography opportunities I enjoyed in Germany. So I'll be getting my daily dose of aviation from other sources, such as YouTube live streams from my favorite airports.
Yesterday, I discovered Mole . Running this deep clean and optimization command-line tool for the fist time reclaimed ~25GB storage space and removed a lot of junk. I also like its system monitor. In short, it's definitely a keeper.
The weather forecast promised +4°C. But somehow I missed the fact that it was going to be rather windy. I realized my mistake when standing at the rooftop of P2, waiting for a Boeing 737-800 operated by Alba Star (reg. EC-NAB) to depart for Venice.
On Sunday, I went to NUE to capture a Lockheed Martin KC-130J Hercules, and all I got was this below-average photo.
For some reason, I'm obsessed with camera battery chargers. Maybe it's because I can't find a perfect one. The Nitecore UNK2 battery charger came very close to my ideal charger, but the poorly designed USB cable ruined it. Plus, it could only charge one battery at a time, which was less than ideal.
With all the packing and other back-to-Denmark-related tasks, spare time has become a precious commodity. So I try to spend it on soothing activities like tweaking TERMINAL-1090 . But instead of piling up new features, I'm simplifying the existing codebase.
We went to FRA for what is likely to be our last visit in the foreseeable future. The plan was to do some airplane photography on Saturday, and visit our favorite eateries afterwards.
My first visit of 2026 to NUE was a solid "meh" photography-wise. But the second visit last Friday didn't disappoint. My goal was to catch a rare visitor in our neck of the woods: an Airbus A320-200 operated by FLYONE Armenia (reg. no. ER-00007).
It's an adorable collectible trinket in its own right, but camera it ain't.
This most likely the last Aviationtag I bought while in Germany. It's also the nicest one in my collection. It's a GLARE edition, so it's a thick little sandwich. The color is more like mustard rather than gold, which I actually prefer.
I'm heavily relying on Breezy Weather for all my weather and forecasts needs. It's hands down the best weather app I've ever used. And I'd like to keep using, but Google's dumbfuckery makes it uncertain. You see, in its relentless pursuit of Verscheißung [1] Google has decided to make life harder for indie developers requiring them to go through bureaucratic hell and feed the corporation personal…
- check METAR and TAF instead of weather forecast
Promising not to do something ever again is a tall order, but at least I'm going to give it a try. So here's what I'll avoid buying in the future:
This is my 2025 report.
Guten Rutsch , NUE! Thank you for all good moments, nice surprises, iced coffee, and delicious Brezen !
Enabling an external USB Wi-Fi dongle on a Linux machine is a skill that is hardly in high demand these days -- until you have a Wi-Fi-deficient machine, and you want to add it to your wireless network. That was the exact problem I faced when I discovered an old Edimax EW-7811Un Wi-Fi dongle in a storage box, and I decided to use it with my Fujitsu Futro S720 home server. In the glorious Raspberry…
I don't know if bit rot can be a real problem, but I have zero desire to find out when it's too late. So I've tweaked and extended the Bash shell scripts I use to back up data to my data fridge . Now, instead of a single script, I have two.
I woke up on Monday, and while still not completely awake, reached for my smartphone to check Flightradar24 to see if there is anything interesting happening at NUE. And, boy, I was in for a nice surprise! A Boeing 777-200 operated by Eastern Airlines was scheduled to arrive at NUE at midday. It was only the second time an Eastern Airlines airplane was about to make an appearance at NUE in…
Even with everything that's going on in our lives right now, I quietly managed to work on Sky scraper. Firstly, I renamed it to TERMINAL-1090 . Why? Because while I liked the Sky scraper name, it felt a bit too generic. The new name is more closely related to aviation, and is in line with the main technologies it relies on: 1090MHz ADS-B frequency and tar1090 web UI.