The missus had to work this weekend, and there was nothing exciting going on in NUE, so I decided to go for an overnight trip to MUC. Besides capturing airplanes, my plan was to field test my "meal kit" consisting of a Trek'n Eat main course for dinner and The Brew Company coffee brewer along with RUF porridge for...

I'm done with cloud storage, NAS appliances, RAID arrays, and whatnot. I want a solution that's simple, inexpensive, local-only, and easy to maintain. Allow me to introduce you to my new data storage setup that I jokingly refer to as data fridge.

Once again, thanks to strategically placed days off, I managed to have a 5-day weekend. Here's a brief list of my accomplishments:

I readily admit that I'm nothing but a (clueless) weekend coder. While this doesn't prevent me from enjoying cobbling together home-grown tools, my limited skills can also be a source of frustration. Often, a task that would take a decent developer only minutes to solve takes hours for yours truly. And sometimes, an...

Displaying METAR data in a human-readable format has long been at the top of my "Features I want in Sky scraper" list. But my previous attempts to implement this feature failed miserably, because parsing raw METAR data in PHP wasn't trivial (as in, far beyond my feeble coding skills). Somehow, I’d missed that the...

Last Sunday, NUE celebrated its 70th anniversary with a huge party featuring a handful of aircraft and specialized vehicles on display, booths, and of course food. Despite the drizzling rain, the place was packed. Though we spent most of our time waiting in line, it was a lot of fun. The highlight for me was seeing...

When I started working on the ADS-B station project, I only used its name as a working title. I kept it for so long simply because I couldn't come up with a better name.

When I woke up and checked Flightradar24 this morning, I almost jumped out of bed; an Airbus A330-200 operated by the French Air Force was scheduled to depart in the afternoon. I promptly requested a half-day off, and raced to NUE on my bike (on a sidenote: oiling the bike's chain made a huge difference).

The map feature in ADS-B station is nowhere near as good as tar1090. But that doesn't stop me from trying to make it more useful: partly because I enjoy finding my own simple solutions and learning new techniques in the process, and partly because why not?

Last Saturday was a wonderful day in NUE in every respect. I had to get up earlier than usual, because I wanted to catch a Boeing 737-800 operated by SunExpress (reg. TC-SPY) featuring the Schlumpfe livery. The weather was absolutely lovely, so it was a very pleasant bike ride to my new spot.

My ADS-B station instance uses rclone to back up its data to MEGA. It works well, but I thought it would be even better if it created a separate backup copy for each day of the week. This suggestion was exactly what I had in mind. I tweaked the existing rclone command so it looks now like this: