Computers IRL #10
The Athletic, the online sports section for the New York Times, posted a long article about John Harbaugh's first thirty days as the coach of the New York Giants. The…
Computers IRL #9
From The Independent: United Airlines warns of a planned system outage. United is upgrading (upgraded?) their reservation system, which included (I believe) moving data centers, requiring an outage during which…
Backend Graph DB for Custom File System
This post is based on what I learned implementing Neo4Jfs, a customized Java file system built with a graph database (Neo4J) backend. In this post, I'll identify the challenges in…
AI Learning
No question, I am a library nerd: I'll wander through the shelves, grabbing, random seemingly interesting bound periodicals or journals to glance. The truly interesting finds are taken to a…
ADS-B Feeder Attempt 2
Hosting an ADS-B feeder has intrigued me for some time but only did so in September 2025. My first feeder was a Raspberry Pi with an RTL-SDR v4 dongle running…
Computers IRL #8
A major nuisance of modern browsers is videos auto-playing, often unmuted, catching you off-guard. Auto-play is potentially a security issue if a bad actor learned how to embed malware or…
ADS-B Notes
I recently joined the ranks of those voluntarily feeding ADS-B data to various plane sites. This post will be updated with my experiences. Registering With FlightRadar24 FlightRadar24 provides the Raspberry…
FlightRadar24 Contributor
Discovery and First Attempt I first learned of software-defined radio attending a Devoxx UK session where the presenter showed how a consumer SDR dongle could receive digital messages from airplanes…
Computers IRL #7
As seen on Antwerp's Tram #1: the screens showing route and upcoming stops is in a startup loop. ERROR: SIM not inserted. Repeated every ten seconds. Guessing the SIM card…
Weinberg’s Second Law
If builders constructed buildings the way programmers write software, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. Gerald Weinberg, an early computer science professor and practitioner, may have made…