A Geek Goes Flying

I feel like we need an updated version of Knoll’s Law of Media Accuracy ‡ for the Age of Memes. For the record, I’m not a fan of the Trump administration, or what they’re doing to the government. That said, I was recently sent this and wanted to clarify (from my limited, but somewhat greater than the average bear, knowledge of aviation): Trump didn’t cause these crashes. Meme incorrectly linking Trump’s antics to recent aviation accidents. 1/20: Trump guts the FAA. I can’t find a source for this? I don’t see anything here , for instance. 1/22: Trump disbands the Aviation Security Advisory Committee [?], declares he has ended DEI [?] and restored “excellence and safety” in air travel [?]. Here’s a White House “ fact sheet .” (I guess we’re back to “ alternate facts .” (Example: The “[a]lmost unbelievably, as a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiative, the Biden FAA specifically recruited and hired individuals with “severe intellectual” disabilities, psychiatric issues, and com...

Trying to import the CSV files supplied by the FAA as the Releasable Aircraft Database Download into PostgreSQL using the COPY command. PostgreSQL was barfing with the error message: character with byte sequence 0xef 0xbb 0xbf in encoding "UTF8" has no equivalent in encoding "LATIN9" Turns out those three bytes are the Byte Order Mark , which somehow I’ve never encountered in a “plain text” file before. Removing those bytes was pretty straightforward in 0xED : Screenshot of 0xED editor The same thing can be accomplished by using the terminal, if 0xED is not available (it’s apparently been discontinued by the developer, so it’s only a matter of time before Apple’s relentless march forward leaves it behind): % tail -c +4 DEREG.txt > DEREG_no_BOM.txt Will do the same thing (strip the first three bytes from, e.g., DEREG.txt, creating the new file DEREG_no_BOM.txt). This process took about 12 seconds on a MacBook Pro M1 Pro 14" base model, FWIW. The other thing ...