Posts

Posted on

MS Flight Simulator 2024: Around the World update 6: Oregon -> Washington -> Alaska

Continuing from Update 5, I left Southwest Oregon Regional KOTH, continuing north from Oregon, through Washington and into Alaska:

Although it seems I’m seeing less issues with MSFS 2024, random weird issues still popup, like this odd rending issue on the ground at KOTH:

This reminded me of the screen update issue you used to get on Windows 95/98 when you drag a window across the screen and leave a trail:

A restart and some time later, and passed over Seattle:

Into Alaska, no glaciers yet, but incredible scenery:

Approaching Port Hardy CYZT, Alaska from the south-west, about to turn for runway 11:

Posted on

MS Flight Simulator 2024: Around the World update 5: I5 North through California, into Oregon

I have a backlog of screenshots to catchup on with my Around the World flight – here’s continuing from Update 4 – this update covers 2 legs, from Edwards to Half Moon Bay KHAF, and then onto Southwest Oregon Regional KOTH:

After leaving Edwards and flying over LA, I started flying North following I5 over the Grapevine and into the California valley:

Took a short break on this leg, stopping at Elk Hills Buttonwillow L62:

From Buttonwillow I headed west to the California coast, passed San Luis Obispo and then started heading north along the coast:

More scenery streaming issues over SFO:

Realtime weather, fogged in approaching Sonoma County for a break:

Northern California following 101 north:

It’s surprising how mountainous most of the Oregon coast line is:

I ended this leg at Southwest Oregon Regional KOTH, but forgot to take any screenshots on approach.

Next up, heading through Washington and on to Alaska.

Posted on

How refresh rate affects your perception of performance

I’ve had my Mac Pro 2013 (aka ‘Trashcan’ Mac) for a few months now, and while I didn’t buy it for any specific purpose, there was an odd sluggishness that I couldn’t put my finger on, compared to the performance of my much older 2008 Mac Pro 3,1.

I didn’t have any Thunderbolt display cables so was initially using an HDMI cable into my 4k monitor, which rather surprising I thought for a 2013 machine only supported 30khz refresh rates. I didn’t think too much of it, but eventually got a Thunderbolt to DisplayPort cable, and now the screen is at 60khz everything my usage is noticeably smoother. It’s odd that it would make this make difference, but the jankiness of the slightly laggy screen updates when dragging around or resizing windows really made a massive difference in how I perceived the performance of the machine.

Posted on

Site update: Migrating hosting providers – automating deployment with Terraform, Ansible and GitLab CI Pipelines

Over the past couple of years I’ve been working on and off on a personal project to migrate and update a GitLab CI pipeline on my self-hosted GitLab for building and deploying this site. Unfortunately my self-hosted GitLab used to be on a e-waste HP DL380 G7 rack server that I no longer have after moving house, so I’ve gone back to using my old 2008 MacPro 3,1 as a Proxmox server, where I now run GitLab (which oddly is what I first used this Mac for several years ago).

As part of the update, I wanted to achieve a couple of goals:

  • update the GitLab pipeline to deploy to a staging server for testing, and then deploy to the live server
  • template any deployment files that are server/domain specific
  • update my Docker images for WordPress, updating the plugins, and anything that needs to be in the image to support the runtime, e.g. nginx, php plugins for nginx etc.
  • move to a new cloud provider that would allow me to provision VMs with Terraform
  • automate updating SSL certs with Let’s Encrypt certbot

I won’t share my completed pipeline because I don’t want to share specifics about how my WordPress site is configured, but I’ll give an overview of what I used to automate various parts of it:

While I’ve ended up with a working solution that meets my goals (I can run the pipeline to deploy to my test server or deploy latest to my new live server), I still have a few areas I could improve:

  • GitLab CI Environments, and parameterization – I don’t feel I’ve taken enough advantage of these yet. The jobs that deploy to my test server run automatically, but the deploy to my live set is the same set of jobs that I manually run, and configured to deploy to a different server – I feel there’s more I can parameterize here and need to do some more experimentation in this area

Although this effort was spread over a couple of years before I got to a point of completion, it was a great opportunity to gain some more experience across all these tools.

Proudly powered by WordPress