Category: Kev’s Blog

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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:

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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.

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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.

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Preserving generated files as artifacts in GitLab CI Pipelines

Today I learned after spending a while trying to debug why a later job in my pipeline couldn’t see a file from a previous job, that GitLab does not preserve files on the filesystem between stages, and even jobs. I guess this makes sense as your pipeline is running against what it currently in your repo, and not untracked files that have been created by your pipeline.

If you are generating new files, from for example Ansible generating files from templates, if the files are generated in one job and then you expect to use them in a later job in the pipeline, you need to tell GitLab that the files are ‘artifacts’ to preserve them.

In the case of generated files, they will be untracked files in git. Tell GitLab to publish them as artifacts with the following config:

generate-nginx-config test2:
  stage: generate-templates
  environment: test2
  script:
    - cd iac/ansible
    - ansible-playbook -i test2.yml nginx-playbook.yml
  # keep the file generated from ansible template, which is now 
  # untracked, so it can be used in following jobs
  artifacts:
    untracked: true
    paths:
      - nginx/config/etc/nginx/sites-available
  tags:
    - docker-test

This is a job in my pipeline for generating my nginx config based on the environment I’m deploying to. Note the untracked: true which tells GitLab to preserve the untracked files as artifacts.

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