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Jim boosted

Here's the story of the 'Messerspit' aviationhumor.net/messerspit-t The original Free French pilot was murdered during the retribution for the 'Great Escape', one of those sad bits of wartime trivia.

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There was a Spitfire the Germans captured and put a Daimler in . You can find photos - it looks really weird.

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And here's an HA-112 'Buchon', a Spanish license-built version of the BF-109. The engine is a Rolls-Royce Merlin, changing the nose shape significantly. A very popular stand-in for the Messerschmitt in film. There's a lot more Rolls motors around than Daimler originals.

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If you look at most German aircraft of the era, they feature extensive framing on the perspex cockpit pieces. Making large perspex bits with good optical quality is hard. It is a challenge for restorations nowadays because all the moulds and tooling are gone.

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The 'greenhouse' framed cockpit was a good example of the Nazi regime's limited ability to produce complex perspex shapes at this stage. Everyone was using bubble canopies by this point of WW2.

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Two examples of the BF-109 'G model, one airworthy, one residing in the Smithsonian in DC. They made a bunch of these and they constitute a lot of surviving examples.

Jim boosted

I admit ActivityPub is hard when going both directions. But if you just want to expose some content and don’t care about the interactions, it’s extremely easy. Look at this fully working implementation in a Cloudflare Worker: https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/miipub-worker/-/blob/develop/src/index.ts

Can be done in a matter of hours.

Jim boosted

Famed Griffith Park #mountainlion #P22 was apparently captured safely this morning.
He had been behaving in an unusual way, attacking leashed dogs, suggesting something is off with his health. He is quite old and lived in an urban island a small fraction of the usual range of a male mountain lion.
Fish&Wildlife had gotten a report he was hit by a car this weekend, making it even clearer he had to be captured for his own safety. Best of luck to LA icon P22! latimes.com/california/story/2

My 6yr old is concerned I am drinking so much tea "...You will get drunk!"

🇬🇧 🇬🇧 🇬🇧

I really wanted to like S2 but it got mired in its own pretension and never really delivered on any of its promises. Plus the frequent, knowing shots of sculptures and painted faces - and the swirling ocean - were overblown to the point of self-parody.

Although S4's very weird pacing really jarred for a while.

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Quite impressed Babylon 5 has a whole fake news pastiche, and it's pretty well-written too. Continuing to enjoy my binge.

Jim boosted

Our VPN now uses 2FA and calls a web page for SSO; this has broken support for openconnect and networkmanager without some fucking about, so I'm having to use the Cisco proprietary client which doesn't support Aarch64 linux and is also tied to some very specific debian supplied libs. Sigh.

Jim boosted

High resolution scans of every single photo taken during the Apollo program are available on Flickr via NASA's "Project Apollo Archive."

I'm going to post the link but let me warn you right now it is very easy to lose a couple hours in there.

flickr.com/photos/projectapoll

It cannot be beyond the wit of Bose to make headphone pads that don't split

55F this morning. In December. That's extraordinary.

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