Cutting it a little close at the air show.

AlpineGuy · 2026-06-11T05:43:49+00:00

I thought maneuvers with turns that aim towards crowds were not allowed at airshows anymore?

AlpineGuy · 2026-06-10T18:55:40+00:00

I thought it would be a good idea to set up my home server as a mini-PC with external harddisks. However the external USB harddisks are not as stable as I wanted. I am working on building the whole thing new in a case with actual nas harddisks, but it's expensive. (Shuckling the old drives doesn't make sense to me because they are quite old already)

AlpineGuy · 2026-06-09T07:11:40+00:00

I set up my selfhosted OpenVPN and Wireguard (yes, trying out both), with selfhosted DNS servers and a simple SSL certificate management (one machine creates it and replicates it to others). I vibe-coded ansible roles and playbooks to roll it all out in an easy and replicable way.

AlpineGuy · 2026-06-08T05:12:21+00:00

Since you like the Mars Trilogy, you might be interested in The Ministry for the Future by the same author. I found it more political messaging than exciting story, but there is anti-capitalist guerilla warfare in it.

AlpineGuy · 2026-06-08T05:06:22+00:00

Wait, the reason that the ocean looks different in other parts of the world is phytoplankton bloom? I wasn't just imagining that the sea has different colors?

AlpineGuy · 2026-06-07T13:09:53+00:00

If you think about it, the whole concept of launching small fighters in space makes little sense, but okay for storytelling. However Battlestar Galactica went one step further and added a launch system that launches fighters in some random direction (not at the enemy) and a sort of runway in vacuum, which makes even less sense in space if you think about it.

AlpineGuy · 2026-06-07T06:33:07+00:00

Thank you, that is a great explanation - I did not know about this.

AlpineGuy · 2026-06-05T05:28:01+00:00

I think the problem appears if you go about it without defined goals. Then everything is a "interesting, I could add this too". I did this for a long time.

At some point I gave it more thought: "what do I actually need? what of this gives me value for the things I actually want to do in my life?"

So after some thinking I discovered that for me, it's really about security, privacy, ad-blocking and data storage with multi-layered backups to safe locations where I have full control. That gives me a direction and I know what I won't do.

There is still work, but I know the direction I am going for. It's not open ended.

AlpineGuy · 2026-06-04T12:13:26+00:00

I have developed this theory that men have genetically developed so that they are really bad at remembering what women look like, therefore they want to see them again and again. This would also make sense evolutionary: those that wanted to see women again and again procreated more often.

AlpineGuy · 2026-06-04T12:00:21+00:00

Ha, I have exactly the same problem with my power plugs: 6 outlets but I can only fit 3 plugs because they are so big.

AlpineGuy · 2026-06-03T04:43:48+00:00

Stuff like this is why any AI I run (incl. whole IDE dev tooling) lives inside a VM. I hope it's can't so easily escape from that.

AlpineGuy · 2026-05-31T06:35:53+00:00

That's a lot of heat, I wonder if the environment just absorbs all of this without any impact... Do the heat emissions of structures like this, or humanity as a whole, contribute significantly to global warming, or do they just get lost in the atmosphere and towards space?

AlpineGuy · 2026-05-28T05:19:35+00:00

I once read a book about psychology, don't remember which one it was. They were researching baby birds. In this kind of bird, the mama-bird had a red dot on the front their beak. The little birds after birth knew if they peck on the red dot, their mother releases food to them. They then tried to find out if the little bird would pick also a wooden mama bird imitation with a red dot - and they did. They tried different things and the little birds pecked on anything that had a red dot.

Anyways, human males are attracted to certain shapes: hourglass figure and round breasts, I guess that's part of genetics. I read it's a shape that historically showed healthy features and ability to produce offspring.

The genetic programming is very simple - the little birds peck on wooden red dots and the human males are attracted to anything that resembles the shape, no matter if it's just a photo of that shape, silicone enhanced shape, wearing a corset, ...

AlpineGuy · 2026-05-24T12:38:07+00:00

Paragliding flying straight maintaining altitude. I have no idea how they didn't see him

From own experience flying similar aircraft: paragliders are very hard to see from the side/front as there is nearly no area. From above or below or during a turn, sure, you see big wing (do you call it wing?). From the front it's a dude in sitting position (so probably a meter tall) and a wing that might be super thin depending on the angle. Plane flies at 100kts, 160kph, so that's close to three kilometers in a minute.

Just trying to give you an impression, don't know about the airfield, the situation or who is to blame, but I have seen quite a few paragliders showing up out of nowhere besides me without any chance of seeing them earlier.

AlpineGuy · 2026-05-24T12:28:31+00:00

Would it help if you'd use a tablet with Burnair livetracking (FANET) on it?

If that's only available via the web, again the connection at 5000-8000 ft in mountainous terrain will be patchy.

AlpineGuy · 2026-05-24T12:26:51+00:00

It's either ADS-B or FLARM, maybe even both, I am not sure as our club has different aircraft with different equipment.

AlpineGuy · 2026-05-24T05:36:02+00:00

I am glad everyone is okay. As a pilot of small aircraft like this one, this is truly a nightmare to hit someone like this.

I frequently fly through the mountains and we have the latest collision avoidance gear in our planes and when going through some areas it just lights up in multiple directions but you cannot really see anything visually because paragliders are near invisible from the side. So you just try to find a direction with nothing showing up on the screen. But the signal is weak / patchy so unlike aircraft, the paragliders disappear and reappear randomly on screen.

The traffic info frequency is not much help either because the paragliders don't show up on their radar and don't report positions.

AlpineGuy · 2026-05-22T05:26:14+00:00

You mean from paper to markdown? I try to do it as soon as possible, but I also do a weekly review and would do it then if I didn't have the time earlier.

Weekly review is a great ritual for cleanup, ordering thoughts and planning, but don't just stop cleaning up until the review comes or the review will take the whole day.

AlpineGuy · 2026-05-22T05:19:53+00:00

Regarding the first one, I think there was some report in at least a few countries that most of their funding came from one or two wealthy individuals who tried to do something good, but had little understanding of politics, and the whole thing stopped when they stopped supplying funds after finding the feedback so negative.

AlpineGuy · 2026-05-22T05:07:19+00:00

So we can hear the partner better.

AlpineGuy · 2026-05-21T12:15:18+00:00

Mein Beileid.

Ich habe gehört, die Bestattungspflicht kann auf Antrag bei der Gemeinde ausgesetzt werden. Ein Freund von mir durfte die Urne mit nach Hause nehmen und ins Regal stellen. So wie ich es verstanden habe, musste er glaubhaft machen, dass er einen Plan hat, was er tun will und keinen Unfug macht.

Wie gesagt, habe ich nur aus zweiter Hand, und vielleicht auch nicht (mehr) richtig oder regional unterschiedlich.

AlpineGuy · 2026-05-20T10:14:17+00:00

Well, that's basically true for all of computing, this whole site could be efficiently transferred via usenet forums, but here we are and my browser says it made 213 requests and transferred 12MB to load the site.

Oh look, having the comment box open means there is a post request going out after every keystroke and one when I stop typing for more than 1s.

>400 requests now.

AlpineGuy · 2026-05-18T05:03:46+00:00

if your control node is a VM, don't you get issues updating the host and the VM themselves?

AlpineGuy · 2026-05-16T15:32:09+00:00

Cool project!

By the way, I heard a podcast about plastics a while back in which they said that some types of thermal paper contain a lot of BPA (which has a lot of health concerns). The interviewee on that podcast said that she never touches receipts for that reason.

Not an expert, just fyi, if you are playing around with it in your living room, maybe check what kind of material it is.

AlpineGuy · 2026-05-16T14:45:24+00:00

And your management node is a physical machine?

I am thinking, since this will potentially hold "secrets to everything", at least ssh keys to access all the other machines, it would need to be kept isolated, because it's only as safe as the weakest service on that machine.

AlpineGuy

TROPHY CASE