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Reclaiming the Skies: Empowering Local ADS-B Monitoring

In today’s world, many enthusiasts are turning to Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS‑B) technology to track aircraft locally. Unlike traditional radar systems that depend on ground stations, ADS‑B is transmitted directly by aircraft using their onboard GPS and transponders—making the data openly available in real time.

Understanding ADS-B

Modern aircraft continuously broadcast their position and velocity via ADS‑B. This self-reporting system offers a transparent view of the skies without the need for centralized control. However, most commercial tracking services consolidate this information into large databases run by governments or corporations. By setting up your own receiver, you can reclaim that data and use it responsibly within your community.

  • 7 min read

Red Hat AI Inference Server (RHAIIS) with Open WebUI

With the recent announcement of Red Hat's new stand-alone AI Inference Server, I wanted to test it out locally in my Blinker19 Lab. I'm particularly interested in the LLM Compressor capabilities and seeing how increased the efficiency is between models. Red Hat AI Inference Server (RHAIIS) is a container image designed to optimize serving and inferencing with Large Language Models (LLMs), with the ultimate goal to make it faster and cheapeer. It leverages the upstream vLLM project, which provides bleeding-edge inferencing features. It also uses paged attention to address memory wastage, similar to virtual memory, which helps lower costs. Here is a blog that goes into more of a technical deep dive called Introducing RHAIIS: High-performance, optimized LLM serving anywhere.

  • 6 min read

Operation 0ri0n - Local AI

Recently, I found time to explore a new area and decided to delve into Data Science, specifically Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models (LLMs).

Standalone AI Vendors

Using public and free AI services like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Claude requires awareness of potential privacy and data risks. These platforms may collect user input for training, leading to unintentional sharing of sensitive information. Additionally, their security measures might not be sufficient to prevent unauthorized access or data breaches.

Users should exercise caution when providing personal or confidential details and consider best practices such as encrypting sensitive data and regularly reviewing privacy policies.

  • 3 min read

[📡 QRP Antenna Build from K6ARK]

Mixing QRP radio waves with camping stays and hiking days with this little antenna build!

Quick Summary

Main Topic: Pictures and steps from my experience building this qrp antenna from k6ark.
Key Features: Super tiny components and a rookie at soldering what could go wrong?
Outcome: Multi-band resonate low power antenna that is lightweight and easily deployable.

  • 3 min read

My DIY 6 Meter Coax Antenna

Summer 2022 is almost here and I've been hearing about the 'Magic Band' and how 6 meters can be used to make regional contacts as opposed to just local contacts I usually make on 2  meter simplex.  So that means fun in the short term, but long term operating on 6 meters can come in handy during emergency situations.  

I have a TYT TH-9800D Quad band radio that can rx/tx on 6 meters pushing up to 50 watts, all I need now is an antenna.  What I have to work with is 50 feet of RG-58 coax cable and here is how I made my 6 meter antenna using that cable.

  • 5 min read

Automate Publishing and Promoting Content Views in Red Hat Satellite

Recently, I have been working with Red Hat's system mangement solution, a product called Satellite. If you want more information on what Satellite is or what it can do for you and your organization, please read Crossvale's data sheet. However, the purpose of this post is to document the process I used to automate the publishing of Content Views and then automate the promotion of those Content View versions to the first step in the Lifecycle Environment path. When a product offers, not only a web browser interface(GUI), but also a CLI and API for installation, cofiguration, and mangement tasks, the possiblilities are endless to what solutions can be achieved.

  • 6 min read

Continuous Deployment with GitHub Actions - AWS SAM

A couple of weeks ago, I finally got my email giving me access to the new feature released by GitHub, called GitHub Actions. This weekend, I finally got some free time to play around with it and kick the tires so to speak. The purpose of this post is to run through a simple Continuous Deployment workflow I was able to setup using the new GitHub Actions feature.

The Plan

The idea here is to leverage GitHub Actions to create a pipeline or workflow to automatically deploy/update an AWS Lambda function using the Serverless Application Module everytime a GitHub branch is merged into the master branch. I used an already working Lambda function that serves as a twitter bot with the purpose of retweeting tweets to promote technical conferences that are looking for speakers and papers.

  • 3 min read

My Tricks with UFW, Fail2Ban, and Python

I am using a combination of tools to monitor, temporarily ban, and block problem IPs that attempt to brute force SSH on my Digital Ocean, Ubuntu server. Then allow SSH, so I can manage my server.

First, I installed ufw to easily create firewall rules. Below commands allow me to show all available options. You can list pre-configured apps that I can allow or block. I can also get more info on a specific app.

  • 3 min read

Enhanced SSL Cipher Walkthrough

If your site or service has any interaction with customer data, especially credit cards, then you will want to ensure that you are using the latest up-to-date SSL ciphers. Below are some quick notes that I took while recently updating some ciphers I'm responsible for. A lot of credit goes to Ivan Ristic as I did spend time reading thru his OpenSSL Cookbook. This post will not cover creating or converting SSL keys, but focus more of the cipher suite and how to change to increase security.

Find out current complete version info

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