This desk is in the background of my Teams calls at work. After last night’s discovery of WeatherStar 4000+ emulator, it’s only appropriate that I have the retro weather display on the Linux computer on my back desk.
I’m waiting to see if anyone at work notices the retro display.
The two smaller displays are attached to Raspberry Pis. The first one shows a map of all the aircraft and their ADS-B information at any given moment, as reported by another Raspberry Pi setup on the roof. The right hand display shows the current stats from the weather station that’s also mounted up there.
You’ll also notice a trackball. That’s so I can play an occasional game of Super Breakout on an Atari 2600 emulator when I feeling the need to step away from the work computer.
I saw a mention of a website fly by on Mastodon. This happens a lot, but the screenshot caught my eye, so I had to follow the link.
weatherstar.netbymatt.com has recreated the look and feel of the mid 1990s Weather Channel in the WeatherStar 4000+. There’s even the older version with the WeatherStar 3000! It even includes the music!
I used to watch The Weather Channel at Grandma and Grandpa City’s home because they had cable and I was fascinated with the real time information, hoping to see mentions of upcoming thunderstorms.
Today, as I drove along US 30 from Sidney to Ogallala, Nebraska, I noticed a few power lines following along the route anywhere from 1/4 to 3/4 miles north of the highway. The largest of the lines is a 345kV high voltage transmission line providing service to this part of Nebraska, officially known as the Keystone-Sidney line, operated by the Nebraska Public Power District. I stopped and took the third in a series of my photos in tribute to this 1950s photo above.
If you follow my Pixelfed or Instagram feeds you’ll notice a post a lot of infrastructure photos, and probably more powerlines shots than most people. My mom will tell you that I was fascinated with powerlines as a very young child, and that fascination endures 50+ years later.
So many men of my vintage post selfies and party shots and the like. I’m too busy being a Geek in Awe.
The first photo was taken in May 2016 in Upstate New York, about 50 miles of the Capital District.
The second photo was taken in May 2020, southwest of Chicago.
I was enjoying this landscape along US Route 85 in eastern Wyoming today when I realized something. The view reminded me of the default wallpaper on Windows XP, nearly 25 years ago. That wallpaper was known as “Bliss”. I’m calling this “Wyoming Bliss”.
Wyoming is one of my favorite states in the Union. And plenty of open land like this is one of the reasons.
To jog your memory, here’s the original Windows XP wallpaper.
There was another version of the Windows XP wallpaper that came out in a later service pack that has more of the vibe I captured in my shot from today. For the life of me I can’t find it on the Internet (because search has become all weird in the past year), but the palette was closer to what I captured today.
I’m not one for algorithms, but when I originally posted this entry, WordPress suggested I read this blog entry from 2011 again. I’m really glad I did. It fits perfectly with the vibe and sense of discovery I’m feeling on this solo trip in the middle part of the United States.
Mother Nature is still in a mood when it comes to her weather wishes, so I started the trek north from Denver to start heading to the Dakotas for possible severe weather later this weekend.
First stop was in Longmont, Colorado, which has a very charming downtown. I’ve been here a couple of times. I took the opportunity to walk around a bit and passed by Elite Barber Shop, which I had been to before. Feeling scruffy, I stopped in for a proper shave at this well-established barber shop. It’s been in business since 1872. They’ve modernized since then.
The older barber (I think his name is Jeff) did a fantastic job.
All freshened up, I had some lunch at Rosalee’s, which had a nice mix of people and some great pizza, and perhaps a beer. Lunch time beer is always enjoyable on vacation.
I finally made my way up to Cheyenne, where I met up with our friend Tim. Tim and I have known each other since 2000 or so. We found each other online talking as we both have an interest in master clock systems, specifically those made by The Standard Electric Time Company. We had dinner together and had some laughs and enjoyable conversation. Tim’s husband Gordy passed late last year. He had been painting in his retirement and Tim gave us a few of Gordy’s paintings that I’m bringing back to Tucson. I will post a proper photo when we have them arranged at the house.
Tim’s clock collection is huge, and his clock system is still keeping time, even though some of the clocks are now over 100 years old. I know we want everything to be modern in the 21st century, but schools still spend a lot of money replacing classroom clocks that don’t really need replacement, they just need some TLC.
It was good to get together and visit for a while. I’m now getting situated for the night, with plans to keep heading north tomorrow.
When I was a young lad, one of my bucket list items was to fly on Concorde. With the ending of the supersonic passenger service in 2003, this item on my list will never come to fruition. Instead, I can live vicariously through accounts of passengers that were fortunate enough to fly at 60,000 feet above the Earth.
My Lenovo ThinkPad T460s is nine years old. I picked it up used four or five years ago and maxed out the RAM and the hard drive at a rather inexpensive price. While I have newer computers in my stable, my ThinkPad T460s is still my favorite. The keyboard is fantastic and it just does what I need it to do.
ThinkPads are known for being very friendly platforms for running Linux. This is one of the things I like about it. I have my laptop set up specifically for my use and the operating system just gets out of my way. MacOS on my MacBook Air seems to be getting in my way more and more; I want to use my computer for creativity and productivity. Keeping the setup simple is important to me. For the technically inclined, my ThinkPadt T460s is running Debian Linux 12 (Bookworm) with the bspwm task manager. I have a minimum of applications installed, including Firefox (for web browsing), Obsidian (for knowledge management and writing), Spotify (for music), and a selection of utilities for things like grabbing a snapshot from my webcam, as seen above.
I’ve been trying to decide if I want to bring this laptop along with me on the Storm Chasing Trip. I’ll have my iPad and MacBook Air. The former is for tracking storms while I’m on the road and the latter is for editing video. But the rest of it? I’ll probably end up doing the bulk of the rest of my weather research and other online things using this ThinkPad.
Doesn’t everyone carry three computers with them when they travel? I’m fortunate to have the opportunity.
Most general aviation flying in the desert happens in the early morning. The flight schools are busy this morning. This data is coming in from an ADS-B receiver I have mounted on our roof. Being a geek is awesome and aviation is always awesome.
The bigger airplanes along the northern edge of the map are inbound to Sky Harbor, the grey airplanes in the lower right area are parked at Tucson, and all the yellow airplanes are most likely students and other General Aviation aircraft.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 29 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
