Flying an Eaglercraft Server

Posted in Computing on January 23, 2025.

This is a brain-dump of what I ended up doing to setup an "Eaglercraft Server".  I've been running small Minecraft servers since around 2011.  It was just for myself and a few of my work colleagues.  I enjoyed experiencing MC coming out of beta and eventually growing up.  We ended up with two servers, the original that started in Beta1.3 became a creative server and a "newer" 1.4 server running in survival mode.  Over time, I eventually lost interest in the game but left the servers running.  Like so many kids over the past decade or so, mine inevitably got into MC in a big way and still spend time on the old servers with their friends from time to time.  I also stood up a third server for them to have a fresh start, since the old worlds are massive and had been generated using such old versions (there are some pretty weird chunk transitions in places).  One day, my youngest asked me if I could help him setup an "Eaglercraft Server".  Boy, what a rabbit hole that turned out to be...

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Still a Blog?

Posted in Computing on January 18, 2025.

Wow, so it's been almost a decade since I last posted here.  I've switched hosting situations multiple times in the intervening years and this site has suffered its fair share of bit-rot along the way.  I actually took it down at one point, as I assumed no one would notice.  It turns out there are a number of forums and whatnot that direct links to files in here, so I brought it back after receiving some frantic emails.  WordPress was hopelessly out of date and when I jumped to the latest release, it broke this ancient theme, a number of plugins, and there were also some problems with the DB due to its age (using a very old storage engine).  I thought all was lost, but somehow got it going again.  I'm sticking to my guns on this highly dated-looking theme and I absolutely hate the new WordPress editor, but I found this plugin called "Classic Editor" that has saved the day.

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MythTV and the Adesso Vista MCE Remote Control

Posted in Computing on August 16, 2023.

I am documenting here, for posterity, my journey while trying to maintain support for the Adesso Vista MCE remote control on my MythTV front ends.  Yes, I still use Myth and I believe I have had a backend running continuously since 2004, possibly earlier.  I've had plenty of misadventures with it over the years, but the one thorn that has always been in my side is IR remote control support.  In the early days, this was pretty clumsy as it required the use of LIRC: an out-of-tree set of drivers to support IR receivers through a serial interface.  I would usually use it with some generic universal remote control or a remote that came with a video capture card.  Once it was working, it usually worked fine for a while.  However when it came time to perform an OS upgrade, the remote would always be broken because of issues between LIRC and the kernel.  LIRC went through several generations of config changes as well, so my painstakingly-created lircrc would often not work even when I managed to get LIRC itself working.  Eventually I threw in the towel and bought a bespoke MCE remote that was supposed to "just work".  There were a number of these available that were designed to work with Windows Media Center.  I chose...poorly.

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Solo Cross Country

Posted in Aviation on August 22, 2016.

After several weeks of bad weather, I was finally able to fly my first cross country solo.  Flew to UES and back.  It was an uneventful flight, which is exactly what I was hoping for.  The weather was great and everything went pretty much to plan.  The only snafu was as I returned to PWK, the winds from east were strengthening and I ended up pretty far east of the airport even though I was flying the flight plan.  I was correcting my heading as I came south, but when I made the turn over Lake Zurich, I needed to correct even more and ended up getting pushed east.  I eventually figured it out.

Stage 2 Check

Posted in Aviation on August 08, 2016.

After several weeks of bad weather, I took my flight school's check for the final phase of their second training stage.  It involved taking my instructor to KUES and then practicing a diversion on the way back.  We got there fine, but I then had some uncertainty with my last checkpoint.  While looking at the chart, I got off course.  Once I figured it out, I did find the airport and landed there fine.  Lesson: don't abandon the plan, even if you think you are off course.  On the way back, we diverted to Galt (K10C).  My course was again a bit off and I ended up west of the airport, but I did spot as we approached.  In that case, I didn't immediately draw the course line and so my heading wasn't very accurate to start with.  I did fix it along the way, using VOR/DME to find myself, but it wasn't enough.  We then flew back to KPWK, which I mainly did with the VOR.

Overall it wasn't a complete success, but my instructor was confident enough to let me fly it solo.  So I will be making the same trip to KUES as my first cross country solo.

Night Swim

Posted in Aviation on July 13, 2016.

I flew at night for the first time last night.  Not only was it my first time flying and landing at night, but we also did the nighttime cross country.  Sink or swim.

The cross country actually went quite well.  Had a bit of snafu when we got there as I entered the downwind for the wrong runway.  Check those instruments! Once I fixed that, getting setup for that approach was quite an interesting experience.  I would have preferred that my first night landing happen at a familiar airport.  It's quite hard to judge height, as one would imagine, so I landed flat.

On the way back, I flew under the hood for a while.  Then he spring lost procedures on me.  I found my position and figured out where to head, but then he started asking questions that made me second guess myself.  After a bit of a panic, I confirmed my position with the VOR.  It turned out he was trying to get me to explain my plan after I got to where I wanted to go.  I interpreted his comments as hints that I was not doing it correctly.  Sink or swim.

Once we got back to the airport, my second landing was better and the rest went fine.  We had a long debrief, and discussed the next steps.  Next we have a, "stage check", which involves a mock check ride of sorts.  If that goes well, I'll be doing my solo cross country flights.

Rebust the Rust

Posted in Aviation on July 12, 2016.

Between work ramping up to a deadline and preparing for the written test, I took a month off of flying.  I probably should have squeezed a solo in there somewhere so keep my skills up, but that didn't happen.  I managed a 92% on the written test, and it is nice to have that behind me.  Since I hadn't flown in a month, my instructor went up with me for a couple of laps to shake the rust off.  Made a couple of dumb mistakes with ATC, but went fine otherwise.  Flew solo after that, but the airport was so busy that I only got 3 laps in before calling it quits.

I went up again a few days later for some more practice, but again it was very busy.  It's good to have practice with ATC procedures, but I also need to practice things like short field take offs and soft field landings.  They don't like having small aircraft linger on the runway when they are squeezing us between small jet traffic.  I think I'll need to head to a different airport for that.

Hectic Morning at PWK

Posted in Aviation on June 08, 2016.

Flew around the pattern again at PWK this morning.  This will probably be my last flight until I get the written test out of the way.  The airport was busy and it proved to be challenging to deal with all of the odd ATC requests.  At one point we had 4 Cessnas in the pattern with small jets coming and going.

The wind ended up being rather variable and at one point I was landing with a tail wind.  I got maybe two or three "normal" circuits in the pattern.  The rest contained ATC deviations of some sort, including extended bases, short finals, and runway changes.  At one point I was getting a little too close to O'Hare and had to hover in the downwind at 50kts until I finally got the call to turn around for a different runway.  At another point, I had too much power on a short final and had to forward slip like crazy to get down to the runway.  The techniques all worked like they were supposed to though, and I didn't have any major problems.  Just some squirrelly landings.