A Geek Goes Flying

Okay, as a fan of Disneyland, I feel like I kinda have to visit Marceline, Missouri, Walt Disney's home town and the inspiration for Main Street: Marceline used to have an airport , but apparently no more . (How can the town that hosts the Walt Disney Hometown Museum , not have an airport?!) Looks like the nearest is the  North Central Missouri Regional Airport  in Brookfield (5000x75' runway, with instrument approaches; ~130 nm from Spirit of St. Louis Airport , less than an hour’s flight). It’s about 7 miles by road to the museum. Might be a good application for folding bicycles ? Also, I still need the Rohde ears (I tried to get them when they went on sale, but they sold out before I could complete the purchase!).

I’ve dabbled in simulator flying for years, always with X-Plane. I built the below setup over Christmas 2019, never imagining my PP-AMEL add-on checkride would get constantly pushed out by a global pandemic. As it happened, I was able to practice instrument approaches and emergency procedure flows (including setting a MTBF for the engines, so I’d lose an engine when I wasn’t expecting it), and it was helpful during the months I was away from flying waiting for my checkride. (I did go up with my MEI for three intense sessions in the days before the finally scheduled practical exam, of course.) My setup: CH Products Throttle Quadrant USB (really only necessary for multi-engine simulation) (and now that it’s out, I really wish I had the Bravo Throttle Quadrant ( Amazon link )), but not that much) Honeycomb Alpha yoke  (sold out on the Alpha site; Amazon link ) (note, mine came with a discount coupon for X-Plane that I couldn’t take advantage of, since I’d already bought X-Plane). I orig

Fscking finally , Apple has (re)embraced the matte display. The Pro Display XDR introduced their new “nano-texture glass,” and now the 27" iMac can be so equipped (a $500 option, but still). That used to be a dividing line between their MacBook and MacBook Pro (which, until 2011 or so, could be equipped with a glossy or a matte screen). For a long while now I’ve been using Dell monitors (UltraSharp 2007WFP ,   U2311H , U2412M ) hooked up to Apple hardware (Mac Pro, laptops, mini), just to avoid having to use a glossy display as much as possible. (Wish my circa-2006 Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro wasn’t essentially unusable nowadays, with a toasted ATI x1600. Thanks, StarCraft 2. OTOH, it’s 14(?) years old, capped at 3GB of RAM, limited to OS X Lion, and otherwise totally obsolete, so...) Anyway. I really, really hate glossy displays. This comparison is an HP All-in-One circa 2011, and one of my Dells (I think the U2311H): (And man, I’d forgotten about that old Ione Scorpius M10 keyboar

 We used the free, open-source, Slirp on our Linux box (which, bonus, also supported PPP). But the “official” campus dial-up Internet access system was a paid ($495 for a site license? Sounds about right) copy of The Internet Adapter . Hard to find any information about that obsolete piece of tech 25 years later, but, Wired to the rescue ... (Why, yes, I am cleaning out my open tabs, why do you ask?)

About two years ago, I swapped out a bunch of CFLs and other light bulbs, replacing them with AmazonBasics LED bulbs. In the front office, two of the five “60 Watt Equivalent, Daylight, Non-Dimmable, 15,000 Hour Lifetime, A19 LED Light Bulbs” ( link ) have conked out, about 2.5 years later. (If we assume 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, a 15,000 hour bulb should have lasted almost 6 years.) So, going to try a new bulb. The specs for the AmazonBasics: A19 shape, 10.5W, 5000° (daylight) color temperature, 800 lumen, 3 year warranty, 15,000 hour lifetime. CREE alternative: TA19-08050MDFH25-12DE26-1-E1 , A19, 60 watt equivalent (10W actual), Daylight color, 815 lumen, 10 year warranty, 25,000 hour lifetime. They’re significantly more expensive (about $13/bulb; the AmazonBasics are about $3/bulb), but if you get what you pay for ... We’ll see.

I recently added an airplane multiengine land rating to my pilot certificate, and the school I trained at rents their Duchess (and another operator on the field has another BE76, albeit not quite as nice). My single engine currency had lapsed, and I don’t want to go too long with no SEL time logged (insurance renews in the spring), and a local flight school - where I did my PPL years ago - has a retractable Mooney M20B on the line that’s actually a pretty nice little cruiser. So, the past couple of days was getting back into shape. Monday, I headed out to the Inland Empire to do a couple of trips around the pattern with an instructor; the school has mostly stopped renting to anyone , but because I’ve driven Mooneys (including a bunch of hours in this plane in particular) and well known there, the owner okay’d renting to me, but wanted me to demonstrate I still knew how to swing the Johnson bar gear. My first landing wasn’t pretty (it was gentle, but a bit long, and a little to the side

Okay, this is cool: A Macintosh SE/30 running Mac OS 8 and surfing the modern internet via Raspberry Pi & WRP . And now I need to investigate WRP (would it work with Arachnid, or any browser, on the IIgs?).

When I was 18, I stumbled into stewardship of a server running Novell UnixWare 1.1. It was an i486DX2/66 with a then-reasonable 32MB of RAM and a 2GB SCSI hard drive, and it supported a collection of surplus DEC VT220 terminals through dozens of Digi serial ports, hardware that looked more or less like this: The system had been built by others who came before me, who had wired up a second floor dorm room for those terminals, and had also strung cable down to the first floor to put terminals in some faculty offices and one or two study lounges: I don’t think I have a picture of “original EBHON,” but here it is (next to Paradigm, the server I built my first Interim (January) semester, to learn enough about Linux / UNIX to be not completely useless; I eventually merged the two machines with IP aliasing, Apache virtual hosts, etc): The old XT-looking thing on the right was a 386 with a floppy drive, an Ethernet NIC, and a serial port, connected via a  19.2 Kbps ROLM dataphone  to a local s

Update on my “ quest to find the most perfect minimalist bicycle commute friendly iPad mini .” I grabbed a Timbuk2 Zip Kit cross-body bag; at $35, even if it didn’t work out, it was worth a shot. It’s almost perfect . Fits an iPad mini (203.2mm tall (8 inches), 134.8mm wide (5.3 inches), and 6.1mm thick (0.24 inches)), Logitech Canvas  or Focus keyboard case (8.1 x 5.51 x 0.71 inches), and a large Moleskine journal (13X21 cm / 5X8.25 inches) (lightly chewed by a certain Labrador puppy) in the main section (like a glove), with a zippered front pocket that can accommodate a wallet and keys (with a keyring keeper). Two pen loops on the front, plus two more open pockets, and a bike light clip strap at the bottom, round it out. The only thing I wish it had was an available stabilizer cross-strap that would keep it in place when bike commuting - but so far it hasn’t been too obnoxious (probably because it’s so small and relatively light, vs. the messenger bags I used to sling over my sho