Back from the dead

So, here we are again. I have neglected this blog for far too long. Mostly due to personal circumstances, life tends to get in the way sometimes… I have relocated a lot since 2012 and haven’t had the means to invest a lot of time/money/space into this intriguing hobby. So, everything was kind of tugged away and I promised myself I’d pick this hobby up again whenever I had the time and means.

What renewed my interest this week was the purchase of a gaming rig from my oldest son. I was just looking for some newer hardware to replace an old Windows desktop I was using in my office, and he wanted to upgrade this system which turned into a complete new build we did together. Just for giggles, I installed X-Plane 11 (which I bought back in 2017) to see how it’d run. Turned out it was running beautifully on this system. Which led me to dig up the Teensy 2.0, breadbords and components. Soon enough, I was rewriting sketches to interact with X-Plane again, like I was doing seven years ago. Which reminded me I started a blog about all this back in 2011.

And yes, I had backups of that blog, so I thought about resurrecting it. Decided to do so and grab the latest backup, which wasn’t easy because I just made some copies without dates and versioning (insert facepalm). To add to the confusion: turned out I had not backed up the accompanying MySQL database of the Wordpress files. Rather stupid, but this blog didn’t have my attention back then. I figured I was screwed because of the lack of content, but I had an idea: I checked the https://archive.org site to see if the site was crawled (and indexed). Sure enough, it was:

A sigh of relief and I started clicking through the snapshots. Unfortunately I couldn’t discover any useful snapshots. The problem was that I have used my own VPS that hosts some other sites, too. And the alt7700.net webspace configuration pointed to the default website sometimes. Luckily, there was one snapshot that proofed to be useful! I used this snapshot combined with the file backup that I did have to re-enter all the content and resurrect the site. I’ll post more on my plans and ideas soon..!