For quite a while now(since Autumn 2024) i’ve been back into flight simulation. I was playing around with flight simulation using FSX back as a young teen, it died down when i started my professional career as a developer around 2016. The initial reason for getting back into it was that i watched some youtube content talking about and discuss plane accidents on a technical level and a personal level for the pilots, since the videos are created by a pilot. As a child it was my dream to become a airline pilot myself, this was rendered impossible due to physical health reeasons early in my life already and later combined with mental health issues.

Bun UI is a project i started a good while ago without a set goal per se, but it has grown to something i think is pretty cool, this is a explanation and introduction to it!

What is Bun UI

In short it’s nodejs bindings for displaying RGB(a) buffers using GLFW layered in different levels of abstraction and a canvas based plotting drawing library.

How it came to be

I didn’t mention this on the blog yet, but from time to time i like to do some data projects, as in i collect data from some services public api and then later do data things on it. My current project involves VATSIM btw.

Volanta is a application to track sessions and flights in Flight simulators. Besides tracking where you go and when, it also provides information about the landing, among that the Landing rate, which describes the value in feet per minute at which the plane touched the ground.

Within the flight simulation Community that feet per minute value is the defacto standard measurement of how “smooth” the touch down was.

Recently i bought a bunch of Rollei round filters. Those filters are special in the regard that they are not classic screw filters, but magnetic filters you clip onto each other.

This does mean though, that you need a Base Ring which actually attaches to the lense by screwing. The filters themselfs do not have to have the same diameter as the lens though, for that purpose Rollei sells seperate Step up rings, which connect a smaller diameter size to a bigger one.

Pigeons are special, but me saying that might surprise you, let me give you some context.

What is a pigeon

The Pigeon is a very long domesticated bird. Thousands, yes thousands of years ago we used their extreme good navigational sense or for food. Pigeons you see in cities are rock pigeons, one of a few existing pigeon species like the Common wood pigeon, Eurasian collared dove or the Diamond Pigeon.

This is not something i expected myself to be writing about, but i think the hurdles, learning and overall experience doing this project are worth a blog post.

A close friend of mine had started tinkering with a color e-ink display a while ago, we talked about it and she proposed me to buy a bigger version of the display. Since we had planned to meet up it was a good idea for a time sink anyway, so i ordered a 7.3inch ACeP 7-Color E-Paper E-Ink Display Module, a starter electrics bundle and a debug probe for the Raspberry Pico W, totally unaware of what rabbithole i was signing up to. I should mention that my friend provided the PI pico at first.

I’ve never been to a Anime convention before, infact due to the social anxiety created by the [Depression]({% link _posts/2024-01-07-depression.md %}) i had avoided big crowds alltogether for a good while.

But after the stay at the Day clinic was over at the start of June, i decided to go with my friends, as i was staying in the area of the convention anyways.

What is Dokomi

The Dokomi is one of the biggest anime and manga conventions in europe, receiving well over 100.000 guests.

I’ve done a lot of photography in my teens, mostly animal photography. But i stopped around 2020-2021. Recently though ive found a big interest again in picking up photography again as a way to distract myself and keep myself busy with something i enjoy. I mostly do street photography and animal photography.

Do you even need cameras though?

No you don’t, the aspect for me that makes photography special is the moment you capture, the play with subjects, light and so on. Our phones these days have thanks to very good sensors and software gotten to the point where from a technical standpoint the pictures they produce are extremely good, but i still do not photograph with my phone at all, i’ll say why next but know i really don’t mind Smartphone photography and i think its a great medium. But why don’t i use my phone then?

In the last post i talked about my first experience with Depression.

What happened since then

I wrote the first article in January. I was sadly at the start of my second depressive phase there.

Compared to the first Depressive phase, this had some events which i think triggered or “supported” the worsing of the second phase.

On the one hand i lost my job at Bun in late November(i also created a blog post about that), which was very surprising and also took away a purpose, a thing i had to do. I lost that purpose unexpectedly without a connecting job, i’ve done a few small jobs since then but these where for the money more then for actual purpose.

I’m not even sure where exactly to start here, who this is for or why exactly i’m writing it but supposedly it’s if you want to learn about the topic or hear my experiences with it, how it changed me and how i cope with relapse.

What IS depression

This might seem unnecessary but its very important. In my experience the word “depression” is not only stigmatized but also misused a lot. It’s, how do i put this, what people often call depression on a short notice isn’t depression. moreover its feelings of boredom, sadness or remorse. I don’t want in any way to discredit or downplay those feelings, they are very real and might well require treatment, but they are not depression.