Pesky's home

Welcome! This website serves as the home base to all the content I publish, which includes posts I write, videos I upload and more. The content generally surrounds trips my wife and I go on, trains and technology.

Here are some other places you can find me:

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Recent blog posts

Stabilise video using FFmpeg FFmpeg has the ability to stabilise a video using a 2 pass approach. I first learnt about this from a post on Paul Irish's website and later also shared the link. Their post also includes a useful single command to stabilise and create a comparison video to see the before and after. The purpose of my entry is to add some references and commands that I've found useful mostly for me to look up later Read more.
Departure timers to improve level crossing safety The Netherlands has a fairly large and busy railway network with close to 400 passenger stations on 3000 line kilometres and with its largest operator, NS, transporting over 1 million passengers per day. Where rail meets road there are over 2000 crossings throughout the country. That comes out to a crossing every 1.3 kilometres on average.1 Given the high density of rail traffic and the number of Read more.
Delays on the drielandentrein After years of delays, the drielandentrein finally started operating at the end of June this year. However, despite all the planning and waiting, the train connection between the three countries is not without its hiccups. Earlier this week, Rover, the public transport traveller's association, expressed their disappointment with the reliability of the drielandentrein. For starters, Arriva still ha Read more.
Working with dates in Athena and Grafana Grafana has the ability to use Amazon Athena as a data source allowing you to run SQL queries to visualize data. The Athena table data types are conveniently inherited in Grafana to be used in dashboard panels. If the data types in Athena are not exactly how you'd like them in Grafana you can still apply conversion functions. In this case the timestamp column in Athena is formatted as a string, a Read more.

Recent toots

@donkersgoed Seeing Monitron go is a tough one :/ Read more.
@duky Unassigned seating in an open floor office. Read more.
Agile seating was a mistake. Read more.
An interesting side effect since the train conductor is no longer in charge of beginning the departure procedure if they move between trainsets at a stop they must notify the driver so as to not be left behind. This is seen at 16:18 in the video. Read more.
Machinist Stefan uploaded a new video of the 'Airport Sprinter' equipped with cameras and software that enable the driver to close the doors before the train departure. A task that is typically done by the train conductor. It's been in testing since 2022 using the SNG rolling stock and according to the video saves 10-15 seconds on average per stop. I wonder if the time savings will finally be wor Read more.

Recent beer check-ins

Pesky P. is drinking an Ichnusa Non Filtrata by Ichnusa View check-in.
Pesky P. is drinking a Salted Maple Stout by Totem View check-in.
Pesky P. is drinking a Peach Ice Tea Table Sour by Vault City Brewing View check-in.
Pesky P. is drinking a Non De Jus! by 100 Watt Brewery View check-in.

Recent Anilist activity

Pesky completed Rising Impact View activity.
Pesky watched episode 19 - 25 of Rising Impact. View activity.
Pesky watched episode 16 - 18 of Rising Impact. View activity.
Pesky watched episode 14 - 15 of Rising Impact. View activity.