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• Post #4424891

  I took my mother flying on Sunday to get brunch in Janesville, WI (KJVL). Since it was overcast there I also got to do an instrument approach which is fun. On our way back we flew over the Tornado damage in Menasha and it's not pretty. #tornado #severewx #wiwx #wx #avgeek #aviation #flying #generalAviation

• Post #4424890

  My internet just came back on! Almost 1 week exactly from when the Tornado took it out. I can be connected once again!

• Post #4424889

  I found a video that a worker helping clear my town posted showing some of the conditions here from the EF-3 Tornado last week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjhqBlxZ4hA #tornado #wiwx #wx

• Post #4380544

  I had a colleague deride me for refusing to use LLMs to generate code, instead referring to my process as "artisanal coding". Anyway, we don't talk anymore.

• Post #3901792

  A _few_ aircraft are trying to get into Oshkosh now that the field isn't IFR from fire smoke. I've seen a lot of very close calls from the map that I hope weren't actually that close. How wonderful for me I can take a 20 minute drive instead of all that. (If I was flying I'd get an IFR slot) #avgeek #osh36 #oshkosh #airventure

• Post #1589356

  I flew to Iron Mountain (KIMT) in Upper Michigan to take my mother to brunch today. Then we stopped by her cabin. #avgeek #aviation #flying #generalAviation

• Post #1411469

  Going on week 4 of being sick. I think I got a cold right after I had the flu. Regardless, I spent some time getting a mod for Command & Conquer: Yuri's Revenge to work on Linux and I've been having a lot of fun playing it. I miss the charm of these games, but it is super cool to play them again. I spent a lot of time in the early 2000s playing these games nonstop. I didn't think I'd be sitting here 26 years later playing them again and having just as much fun. https://menta...

• Post #1360487

  Flying out to Janesville (KJVL) to take my mother to Bessie's Diner for her Birthday today! She loves flying so this is like a two-for-one present. #avgeek #aviation #generalAviation #flying

• Post #1353304

  I'm going to be flying to Oklahoma for the next two days in my plane (with the family). Feel free to watch me go via https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=aace03 Departing here 10:00am central and traveling until sometime this evening. Then tomorrow, finishing the remaining leg of the journey to Oklahoma City. #avgeek #aviation #flying #generalAviation

• Post #1323014

  I got awarded by my EAA chapter for doing stuff. I hadn't even stopped to realize how I'm present at every function. I JUST LIKE AIRPLANES, YOU GUYS. #eaa #avgeek

• Post #1322560

  I parsed out the traffic alert flag from my stratux and when it is received my map now displays the target as flashing yellow. The nice part about using Godot is I have access to shaders so I get a lot of freedom in visual presentation. I plan on tweaking this a lot more but this is a usable start AND it grabs attention. I plan on having a banner as well to notify the pilot but one step at a time. This is from an actual flight I took when I was getting ready for takeoff I got a traffic alert....

• Post #1322559

  I needed an ownship icon for my application and I came up with this beauty (I am biased, I own this type). #inkscape #avgeek

• Post #1322558

  I got the "ownship" data working as expected and imported my icon. It isn't as readable as I would like so I'll have to modify it a bit but overall I'm happy I got to reuse a lot of my code. #godot #avgeek #aviation

• Post #1244558

  When generating one sectional it gets a little odd where the sectionals overlap depending what gets drawn first. Oshkosh had its info being cut in half and for such a well known airport that is kind of silly. So I messed with shape files for a while and eventually got a cutout that I think looks good for the area. I'm starting to work on the IFR charts. Since FAA charts are non-standard there is a lot of manual work to cut out the charts and stitch them together. #godot #avgeek

• Post #1176965

  I learned a thing. I'm messing around with a way of showing height of an aircraft without just reading the numbers. Lower the cognitive barrier for someone using the map. I tried drop shadows that change based on altitude but they read very poorly over the map so I'm scrapping that idea. I don't want to use color as I want high threat targets to be color coded for traffic alert info when flying. So these leaves perhaps shape / size to play with. Here is a picture of the map with dro...

• Post #1172469

  I discovered some things today while doing GDL90 message parsing: 1) I didn't understand CRC16, and I had a subtle error causing some messages to fail. Fixed now 2) Part of the GDL90 document says to refer to RTCA/DO-282, Section 2.2 for how a payload is specified. This document is not free, because of course it isn't. 3) Stratux was written in go. Reverse engineering parts of the source is challenging for me as I don't know go. 4) Staring a bitshifts and hex will make y...

• Post #1172467

  She is waiting for me to get out of bed. #cat

• Post #1160692

  After mucking about for a while I have managed to replay the GDL90 I captured off the Stratux (onto the network) and feed it into my Godot app map. In theory, this would work in in the cockpit off the Stratux. This live traffic replay is pretty slick. I think I'll integrate it into the app at some point. I watched my departure and getting vectored around some other aircraft on the map. I want to color code the aircraft by height (similar to adsb-exchange) too I think. It gives me an eas...

• Post #1153266

  I managed to get the FAA charts downloaded, stripped away the margins, combined into a big file which is then turned into various LOD tiles, and Godot can load at the given LOD for me. Now to get panning and zooming to work. #godot #avgeek

• Post #999110

  I got my Stratux today and assembled it. It didn't work at first so I flashed the SD card with the most recent version and it worked fine. Of course this meant I wanted to go flying right this moment but the weather looks like Tuesday is the earliest. I plan on doing the same thing I did with the Sentry and recording the network data on my laptop so hopefully I can integrate it into my EFB application and have good test data.

• Post #999106

  A pretty cool day but very light winds making for great flying. Mostly I wanted to test the Stratux and it works great. #avgeek #generalAviation #flying #airplane #stratux

• Post #999105

  I was playing back my Stratux capture and caught my own traffic report, which is cool. I should be able to get traffic showing on the map from this, which is cool. I'm still combing over the GDL90 specs and figuring out how to best structure it in my code. #godot #avgeek #stratux #aviation

• Post #487541

  So while getting familiar with the oddities of GDScript i noticed that it really doesn't have much in way of handling errors as a language feature. So while most languages I'm familiar with use try-catch statements, there just isn't anything. I hate returning nulls or sentinel values from functions so... I took a page from Rust's design and implemented `Result`. Now if I'm doing an operation where I would want to generate an error to notify the calling fu...

• Post #422859

  Being right about Private Equity never feels like a victory. Yesterday my entire team at ForeFlight was laid off. A lot of talented software types looking for roles now. I'm taking a sabbatical for a few months but then I'm in the very large pile of software devs looking for work.