When I need to update content of this very Tinble-based blog, I usually do that via SSH. It's a simple solution that works, but it does have drawbacks. Firstly, there is no backup: I edit original files, so if something goes wrong, my work might be gone for good. Secondly, working via an SSH connection can be very slow when I'm on the move. Not to mention that SSH is all but useless without an internet connection.

Even though the missus and I weren't feeling all that well, we decided to go on a weekend trip to Frankfurt. After all, if staying there helped my back, so there was no reason to think it wouldn't help to banish the rest of the flu. Spoiler alert: it kind of worked. Although we were dead tired, we were feeling better by the end of our stay.

Just a quick update to let you know that Tinble now uses the unified content directory for storing articles, pages, drafts, and images.

Although I have been sick like a dog for almost two weeks, I spent most of my couch time productively. Besides finishing off several books, I've also learned a few useful self-hosting and Docker skills. Here's what I know how to do now.

I've tweaked the Tinble logo, because I wanted something simpler and with punchier colors than the current one. Plus, I was bored, because I'm still trying to shake of the flu that has been dogging me for two weeks now. Also, because I like playing with Inkscape.

I've added a tiny block of code to Tinble, and now you can pin articles, so they always appear at the top of the article list no matter the date they were published on.

The "feeling under the weather" thing just wouldn't go away, so my plan this Sunday was not to have any plan at all. I just wanted to stay on the couch and binge on Slow Houses. I was through the Episode 1 of Season 4, when I glanced on Flightradar24 and almost fell of the couch: out of the blue, a Piaggio P.180 Avanti EVO was scheduled to make an appearance in NUE.

I was hoping to camp at NUE today, but the weather was abysmal and I was still feeling a bit under the weather. So instead, I spent time tweaking Pellicola's logo which now looks like this:

Even though I felt under the weather, I ventured to NUE last night to catch the SprintAir Saab 340A(QC) (reg. SP-KPC). It was surprisingly chilly, and I wished I wore warmer clothes. The machine was a no-show, but there was some activity on RWY 28, so I did manage to capture a few airplanes.

Last night, exhausted and confused, summer bumped into autumn and dissolved into a gloomy and chilly morning weather with a sprinkle of drizzle. I took a shower, and it felt like I washed away what was left of the summer.

I went to NUE on Saturday. Not because I was expecting anything in particular, but because I wanted to spend some time photographing airplanes. My catch was rather modest: an Airbus A320 belonging to Freebird, a stripey Condor Airbus A321, and other small fry.

With an insurance sticker firmly attached to the rear mudguard, I wanted to give my electric scooter a proper test. So I've been zooming around NUE all day long on Sunday.

Surprise! I didn't go to FRA this Saturday. Instead, I spent time on fixing an issue in Tinble that had been bothering me for a while. You see, when deleting a page or an article, the orphaned .reads files would cause all kinds of problems.

While Metar Viewer - Metar Reader is not on the same level as Metar-Taf when it comes to functionality and polish, the former does have a couple of useful features that make it worth having on your Android device.

Yes, I have. Because 1) riding a bike hasn't been an option for quite a while due to my knees, 2) walking to spotting locations takes too long, and 3) new toy!

By now, it's an established fact that I cannot resist the pull of FRA, which explains why the missus and I spent yet another weekend there. This time around, I decided to forgo my absolute favorite sport on the A5 motorway overpass in Zeppelinheim and try something different. Well, a little bit different to begin with, anyway. Since we arrived in afternoon, position of the sun was ideal for photographing airplanes close to landing lights array. This made it possible to capture aircraft from a different angle than usual. But that required better reaction and steadier hand, because airplanes whizzed by super fast, leaving no room for mistakes. I ended up with a larger than normal rejects, but I appreciated the challenge, nevertheless.

A flight tracker like Flightradar24, a METAR viewer, and a decent weather app are de rigueur tools for any serious aviation enthusiast and aircraft photographer. But finding a weather app that does exactly what you need can be a surprisingly challenging endeavour. There are so many weather apps to choose from, and many of them use different weather data source of varying quality. The way the app presents weather data is plays an important role too.

I haven't visited FRA for several weekends, which felt like an eternity. And even though the weather forecast promised rain and a dip in temperatures along with changing wind directions, the pull of FRA was impossible to resist.

Last Monday, I went on a day trip to MUC. Because it was scorching hot, I decided not to be a hero and opted for the observation deck in Terminal 2 instead of Besucherhügel. Not that it made a huge difference. Although there are a few shadowy pocket on the deck, you still bound to roast slowly under the relentless sun most of the time.

Advanced age demands advanced solutions. My knees are killing me: walking is fine, but standing still is not. So after doing some research (that is, browsing Amazon), I've splurged on a collapsible stool.

We went on a 9-day trip to Istanbul, and it was great. The only fly in the ointment was the shiny new Istanbul International Airport (IST). That is the most aircraft photography unfriendly airport I've been to. Admittedly, I haven't been to all that many airports, but still.

My Saturday's visit to NUE was what I call a fishing expedition: there were no interesting airplanes in the schedule, but I hoped that something interesting will show up anyway. I didn't have time to make my own lunch pack, so I dropped by Der Beck and bought a jalapeno bagel.

Yesterday at 14:08:35 local time, my ADS-B station tracked 62 aircraft. It is by far the highest number of airplanes my station tracked at any given moment. Normally during the rush hour in the skies, the average number of machines in range of my ADS-B station is somewhere between 40 and 50.

I always wondered why some of Lufthansa airplanes have small yellow rectangles along the right edge of the main boarding doors. This Ask The Pilot article explains it all. It's a board for crewmembers to scribble greetings to the passengers. A nice little touch.

What a day! It had been drizzling on and off all morning, I forgot my rain jacket, and my feet got soaking wet. Visibility was poor, with very low cloud cover. So it was pretty much impossible to get decent photos of precious few departing airplanes.

When I travel light, this is what I use as my preferred backup setup: an iPad mini 4, an Anker USB-C 2-in-1 card reader, and a Lexar 128GB microSD card as backup storage. An iPhone with a USB-C port would make it an even lighter and smaller backup appliance, but I'm not buying an iPhone just for that.

I've implemented a simple but convenient feature that automatically picks up files with names containing the current date from the articles/drafts directory and publishes them (that is, moves all matching files from articles/drafts to articles/).

A kind soul added Pellicola to AlternativeTo and left a favorable review. Thank you!

Boeing 737-783 registration LN-RPJ is not a regular airliner. It's a medevac airplane that transports wounded Ukrainian soldiers from the Polish border town of Rzeszów (RZE) to destinations around Western Europe. Here are articles that offer more context:

Up until now, the map feature in Pellicola has been rather unreliable. A photo with missing geographical coordinates would make the map spectacularly fail. Since I obsessively geotag all photos, that hadn't been much of an issue for me personally.

Camera? Check. Lunch? Check. Coffee? Check. The weather was wonderful, so off I went to capture airplanes in NUE. Out of habit, I went to the rooftop of the car parking building. But there I ran into a chatty teenager, who kept talking incessantly, absolutely wanting me to see all his airplane photos. Not interacting with people is one of the attractions of aircraft photography for me, so I wasn't amused.

Between our trip to Malta, bad weather, and Euro 2024, I hadn't had a chance to visit Frankfurt for a while. But last weekend, the weather forecast looked somewhat promising, and I had no other plans, so off I went. Saturday tuned out to be rather windy with occasional rain showers, but the light was pretty good, with dramatic skies to boot. I managed to bag a few good shots, and I even captured the Electra Airways Airbus A320 that showed up on short notice.

Airbus is hinting it might resume production of the 'king of the skies' – the prospect of a new version is a tantalising possibility

As it often happens, all I wanted to do was to make a few simple tweaks in Tinble. Of course, one thing led to another, and I ended up implementing a new feature, fixing a handful of issues, and reworking the entire design.

I upload many of my photos and RAW files to the Internet Archive, but its web-based uploader is slow and clunky.

I stumbled upon these vintage airline signs right in the middle of Valetta. It looked like they were simply left hanging after the travel agencies they belonged to went out of business.

Monday, June 24 was the last day of my summer vacation. Unsurprisingly, I spent it capturing airplanes at NUE. I actually didn't plan to spend the entire day there: I just wanted to catch the Atlas Air Boeing 767-300ER. And since the weather was good, I decide to pack a lunch to enjoy it al fresco on the Besucherhügel.

We went on a week-long trip to Malta. We explored Valetta and the nearby cities, savored the local cuisine and wines, consumed copious amounts of Kinnie and iced vanilla latte, took loads of photos — and not a single time I thought about airplanes.

I thought I'd share my current ADS-B station setup. It runs on an Fujitsu Esprimo Q556/2 machine.

This book is one of the most useful additions to my rather modest library of aviation literature.

This is Cirrus Vision Jet G2 (also known as Cirrus Vision SF50). It is arguably the cutest airplane ever. Last Sunday, I had a chance to see the airplane in person, and it's even more cute in real life than on photos. And the engine on top makes the airplane look even more whimsical.

Last night, I updated my installation of DxO PhotoLab 7 Elite from version 7.6 to 7.7.1, and it refused to accept my registration key. This effectively locked me out of the application, and I now have to wait for DxO to fix the issue. Isn't software activation just great?

An Airbus A321neo Luftwaffe landed in NUE, and I was there to capture it.

I've been holed up at home for two days, because the weather wasn't exactly conducive to long walks. And besides, I has been binging on Gomorrah. But the weather couldn't stop me from going to NUE, because there was another chance to catch a Royal Canadian Airforce Lockheed Martin CC-130J Super Hercules, while getting fresh air and stretching my legs in the process. I was really lucky to capture it the first time. And I was lucky again: the aircraft taxied and took off in a very short window without rain.

It would have made sense to implement Pellicola's first ever Easter egg during the Easter break, but the idea for it occurred to me only recently. Anyway, after a new photo has been uploaded to Pellicola, the application automatically generates a tim (tiny image aka thumbnail) for it when the photo is viewed for the first time.

Tinble now features a search field in the top-right corner. You can use it to find article containing the specified search term.

I recently splurged for a Nikkor Z DX 50-250mm f/4.5-6.3 VR lens to go with my Nikon fc. I mostly use it for casual photography, but I thought that paired with the lens, the camera would make a small and lightweight supplement to my main aircraft photography setup. I didn't have to wait long for an opportunity to put the combo to a real-world test. A Sundair Airbus A320-200 wearing a whimsical Katta macht Urlaub (Katter lemur goes on vacation) livery made its appearance in NUE.

Put an experienced pilot in any airplane and chances are they will be able to fly it, albeit fairly roughly. That is because all airplanes follow the same laws of aerodynamics and gravity: pull back, they go up, push forward they go down, chop the wings off and they go down very fast. But we are currently flying in the ‘fourth generation’ of commercial aircraft, which means beyond the base aerodynamic rules of science, there are some significant systems inside helping them fly.

From the I went all the way to NUE just for this airplane, and all I got is a bunch of mediocre photos department.

Up until now, Tinble included a simple guestbook that I shamelessly borrowed from the flat-file-guestbook repository. It wasn't exactly what I wanted, but I reasoned it was better than nothing. The other day, I stumbled upon this guestbook project, and I liked what I saw. It didn't take me long to integrate it into Tinble.

What happened to Singapore Airlines flight SQ321 and why?

I know, I know: FRA again. But this time it was my wife's idea. She wanted to use Frankfurt as a basecamp, and go for a day trip to Mainz. And she didn't mind spending time photographing airplanes in between. It was a flawless plan, really. So off we went.

Today, I received email confirming that I'm now a fully fledged member of AirsideFoto 🎉 ✈️

New addition to my growing Aviationtag collection:

Originally, I planned to go to Hamburg to catch a Beluga. But I really didn't feel like I was up to it, and I cancelled the trip. Instead, I decided to go for a day trip — surprise, surprise! — to FRA. I didn't have any specific objective. But the weather was nice, and RWY 07C was used for departures (which doesn't happen all that often), so off I went.

Tinble now shows the contents of the preamble.md file right under the navigation menu. The file could contain a quote of the day, a description of the blog, a current status, and pretty much anything else. Right now, I use this featurette to show what I'm currently reading.

Airbus and Boeing dominate the commercial aviation industry, accounting for the vast majority of aircraft carrying passengers and cargo through the skies. With so many similarities between aircraft, it can be difficult to visually differentiate between the two. Here, we’ll take a look at the biggest clues to spotting the difference in the European and American giants’ fleets.

Pellicola has a new logo. Took me about 15 minutes to whip it up in Inkscape.

We had a somewhat rare visitor in NUE today. I managed to quitely disappear from work for a couple of hours to witness the event.

I spent Friday night rewriting Tinble's CSS both to simplify it and to make it more, um, stylish? There are still a few ugly styling hacks here and there, but I'm pleased with the result. Source code

Here's another super useful website and app: METAR & TAF. As the name suggests, both provide up-to-date current weather conditions and forecast for the airport of your choosing.

By my rough estimation, I spent maybe one weekend at home in the last couple of months. But even though I felt pretty tired, I talked the missus into spending yet another weekend in Frankfurt. The offer to visit Wiesbaden sealed the deal. A Machiavellian stratagem right there.

Last weekend, I had an opportunity to be a guest on a photo tour organized by AirsideFoto.

Pilot fatigue is in the spotlight this week, after the news that one Indonesian flight had two sleeping pilots at its helm. But military organisations have been grappling with this problem for decades – and they have a surprising solution.

My back pain was getting so bad that I had no other choice but to visit a doctor. His advice? Walk it off. Basically, the suggested cure was plenty of exercise and physical activity — walking being the best one. I reasoned that it wouldn't make much of a difference whether I wander around the neighborhood or in Frankfurt, where I'd be walking in Zeppelinheim and exercising myself by photographing airplanes. So I booked a room at Staycity and took a train to Frankfurt.

Suddenly, everyone wants to be like Airbus. In recent months, Renault, CEO Luca de Meo has called for an “Airbus of autos” to face down the threat, opens new tab to European carmakers from Chinese electric vehicles. In March, the boss of German utility E.ON was fielding questions about the merits of a pan-European mega-utility that could be the “Airbus of energy”. Military specialists antsy about Europe’s highly fragmented defence industry have even been pondering an “Airbus of defence”. That raises two questions – what this outbreak of sloganising actually means; and whether any of the new Airbus obsessives know the full extent of its tortuous back story.

Despite a pretty bad back pain, I ventured to NUE on Sunday, because I really, really wanted to capture an Airbus A400 Atlas. This particular airplane has been on my wish list for a while, but my previous attempts to capture it didn't bear fruit. The Sunday offered two opportunities to photograph the aircraft in NUE. The one belonging to Luftwaffe was scheduled for departure around noon, but my back hurt so much, I had to stay on the couch. The second A400M from Royal Air Force was scheduled to fly out around 16:30 on the same day. And since my back felt marginally better, I had decided that I didn't want to miss it.

The other day, I discovered OliveTin. This brilliant little tool makes it possible to create button-driven Web UIs using nothing but a YAML file. Better still, defining buttons and their actions is so straightforward that you can whip up a server dashboard in a matter of minutes.

It was the Airbus A340-200, entering service with Lufthansa (LH) on its daily flight from Frankfurt to New York (JFK) 31 years ago this month.

We went to Zurich for a short Easter break. For me, the main reason to go there was to photograph airplanes at ZRH. My research indicated that the airport is among the most plane spotter-friendly in Europe. And, boy, wasn't that the truth! The airport has two observation decks. Getting to the Observation Deck B requires a 5CHF ticket and a pass through security. Ironically, observation decks are usually not the best locations for photographing aircraft, but both decks in ZRH are notable exceptions from the rule.

This one was the oldest airplane I've ever photographed. Until it wasn't. Last Monday, another Swearingen Metroliner made a flying (hah!) visit to NUE, and I was there to capture it.

A nostalgic vintage video of people flying. Good times!

From the dashing Comet to the iconic jumbo jet, our fantasy league table of trailblazing aircraft should provoke plenty of travel nostalgia

I felt a bit under the weather this morning. So I called in sick and spent most of the day on the couch, reading and tweaking Tinble. I've added a page that lists articles and pages sorted by number of reads. Think of it as a poor man's stats. Now it's also possible to append &noreads parameter to page and article URLs to disable read count. This prevents Tinble from counting your own visits.

This is PGYTECH protective wrap, and it's more than just a thick soft cloth.

In case you haven't noticed, this very blog is powered by Tinble which is a heavily modified fork of Tiny Blog Engine (Tinble stands for tiny blog engine). I removed the parts I don't need, added a handful of features I do need, and I tried to improve the underlying code to the best of my modest abilities.

This 29-year old Fairchild SA-227DC Metro 23 operated by Binair is probably the oldest airplane I had the fortune to photograph.

I used the code that counts downloads to quickly implement views count for each item and the total count in the stats.php page. That's all.

You never know what to expect in NUE, because many flights are not listed in the regular timetable available on Flightradar24. And even if a flight does appear on Flightradar24, there is no guarantee it will be on schedule — or even arrive or depart at all. Today is a case in point. I boarded the bus no. 33 in hope to catch a Luftwaffe Airbus A400M scheduled to arrive from Zaragoza at around 15:16. Well, that didn't happened, with the entry simply vanishing from the Flightradar24 app 30 min. prior to the scheduled arrival. But the moment I rolled my eyes in disbelieve, I caught a glimpse of an approaching airplane that looked suspiciously like a Super Hercules C-130J. And what do you know: it was exactly that!

TIL: The B612 font family developed for use on cockpit screen is avaialable under an open-sorce license. B612 is the result of a research project initiated by Airbus.

Imagine being trapped in politics and suffer from whatever dumb decisions your government makes. That's probably how the Airbus A330-200 with the registration EP-IJA from Iran Air must feel. It ferries passengers between Frankfurt am Main and Tehran on a weekly basis, but it doesn't get a warm welcome in our part of the world.

On Sunday, all I could do was to track via Flightradar24 a Lockheed Martin CC-130J Super Hercules from Royal Canadian Airforce landing in NUE. Why? Because it landed after the sunset. So there was no point in trying to photograph it. I kept an eye on Flightradar24 for departure times, but no dice. So this Monday morning, I decided to take a bus to NUE, even though there was nothing in particular I wanted to photograph, and the weather was uninspiring at best.

This one is straight from the Why haven't I thought about it before? department. In all this time, it has never occurred to me what would happen if I add a photo without EXIF data to Pellicola. Until, of course, I actually tried it. I was dismayed to discover that it breaks Pellicola big time. So I've come up with a fix that hopefully solves the problem.

This is something I've been wanting to add to Pellicola for a long time, but I couldn't figure how. Last weekend, I finally cracked the nut, and now Pellicola can show the photos in the currently viewed album on a map. The clever part is that photos are clustered, making the map more friednly and easier to view.

This Sunday, I decided to explore other photography spot around NUE, and I even managed to convince the missus to join me. It turned out that NUE also has a "Besucherhügel". I put it in quotes, because it's just a mound close to RWY 10. There is a bench and a table, so it does qualify as Besucherhügel I suppose. The weather was unexpectedly good, and there were even a couple of aircraft with liveries I haven't seen before.

While the A380 superjumbo is enjoying a steady resurgence after having been on the brink of retirement during the pandemic, its older sibling – another four-engined aircraft from Airbus – seems dangerously close to being grounded for good.

Tonnenschwere Fracht, viel Platz für Passagiere oder Überschallgeschwindigkeit: Auf dem Nürnberger Flughafen schauten seit seiner Einweihung 1955 schon viele spektakuläre Flugzeuge vorbei. Wir haben eine Auswahl in unserer Bildergalerie zusammengestellt.

The first version of the download stats functionality was pretty simple: each time a file was downloaded, its name was saved in the downloads.txt file as a new line. It's not a particularly practical solution when the download count reaches thousands or tens of thousands.

This weekend, Munich hosted the annual Munich Security Conference, which meant that MUC was filled to the brim with government aircraft from all over the world. And since the weather promised to be pretty good, I decided to spend my Saturday on Besucherhügel. This time, though, I traveled with the missus, who was visiting the local botanical garden, while I was photographing aircraft.

How would you feel about flying in a plane built 50 years ago? We go in search of aviation’s most venerable birds

Today in Pellicola news:

I don't celebrate my birthday, but that doesn't mean I can't get a nice day out of it, especially if it falls on my day-off. So I got up at 7:00 to be at Besucherhügel a bit earlier that usual.

I'm stating the obvious here, but not every aircraft photography outing can be considered a resounding success. Our latest weekend trip to Frankfurt am Main is a case in point. We chose to stay at the b'mine hotel, because the Zeppelinheim viewing platform is only a short bus ride from there. Except there were no busses running on this particular Saturday, because farmers, yet again unhappy about something, used their stupid tractors to block roads around FRA to make their point. And on top of that, the S7 line was still not running due to track repairs. It should have been operational by January 21, but when is anything done on time here in Germany?

The weather was fabulous, so I decided to take a day trip to MUC. But this time, I wanted to give the observation deck a try. Normally, shooting through the glass is lame but, hey, beggars can be choosers (especially if beggars don't drive).

It took me a while, but I've finally implemented RSS support in Pellicola. The rss.php script automatically generates an RSS feed containing a list of recently added photos and their tims. Nothing fancy, but it's a good thing for Pellicola to have.

I've decided to rename Mejiro to Pellicola. Why? Because I wanted the application to have a name related to photography and reflect my affinity for the Italian language. Pellicola means film in Italian, and I like how the word rolls off the tongue.

A few minor but important fixes today.

All I wanted was to make URLs in Mejiro less unwieldy, so they look not like this:

The outcome of my first attempt at photographing the D-BADA aircraft was kind of could-be-better-but-it-will-do-fo-now. So I've been waiting for another chance to meet that somewhat elusive machine. Today was the day. Not only its departure was scheduled for 12:00 (meaning that I didn't have to get up in ungodly hour), the weather was wonderful as well: sunny, -2°C, no wind.

I definitely need to put some effort into commenting my code. This is especially true for Mejiro. I started working on it when I was learning PHP, so the code is not exactly a masterpiece of a programming genius. Which explains why I spent several hours today trying to make sense of the jumble I managed to produce, asking myself the same questions again and again: What does this code do? and Why does it do that?

It's not always about adding new features. Today, I spent the evening improving the existing code in Mejiro. Certain code snippets made me roll my eyes: they seem so clueless. But that's a good thing, I guess. It means that I (very slowly) learn and get better.

Another Monday, another day trip to Besucherhügel. This time, I hoped to catch the Boeing 737-783(WL) operated by Airzena Georgian Airways. The wind and weather forecast looked good, so I thought my odds were pretty good. That is, until RWY 26R (the ideal one) switched to arrivals only, while all departures were happening on RWY 26L (absolutely not the ideal one).

Inexplicably, it never occurred to me look into the error.log file of the lighttpd server. And when I finally did peek into it using the command below, I discovered a few bugs in my PHP code.

A small but important (for me) programming victory. To get a list of hex codes of all aircraft detected by readsb, I used this piece of code suggested by phind:

Creating the Map page was a good learning experience, but in a way the final result was not particularly practical. So I decided to replace it with a dedicated Currently in range page that displays a grid with thumbnails of all aircraft that are currently in range. Each entry contains aircraft data, including hex code, callsign, aircraft type, airline, built date, and route. Here's what each entry in the grid looks like:

I wanted to add a simple search feature to Mejiro, and I ended up spending several evenings tweaking and improving the application. Here's a short changelog:

Here's a new addition to my small but steadily growing collection of Aviationtags:

The title says it all, really. The Map page now shows routes for each aircraft courtesy ADSB.lol API. And the popup next to each aircraft looks like this:

While tweaking Tinble, I discovered the Inter typeface which instantly became my favorite font. So now ADS-B station, Tinble, and Mejiro use Inter.

Today I launched Aircraft Photography. Even though I'm a mediocre amateur photographer at best, I did manage to take a few aircraft photographs that are not all that bad. Instead of letting them gather dust on my machine, I've decided to share them with the world.

When I'm not taking photos of airplanes, I make fleeting connections with truck drivers whizzing by. Sometimes, they blink the lights on their trucks, and I wave back at them. And when I see a particularly flashy truck, I wave to the driver first, and they usually reciprocate by flashing lights and honking. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but there is something special in creating an ephemeral connection with someone, who happened to be at the same place and at the same time as you. I guess it's a tiny acknowledgement of each other's existence by signalling "I see you" and getting back "And I see you too!"

The weather on the second day of the new year was abysmal. It had been pouring down all day long, and wind gusts rendered the umbrella almost useless. So no to aircraft photography, yes to binging on Netflix in my hotel room. Good thing then that I'm staying at b'mine in a plane spotting suite, so at least I could watch aircraft landing.

31st of December — Zeppelinheim. 1st of January — Zeppelineim.