From My Desk

Digging into the box of this kit there isn't a whole lot present

Hey there, everyone, I just wanted to pop in and talk for a minute about life, website, hobbies, etc. As I'm sure many have noticed, there hasn't been much of my presence around for a while. After that malware or hack on my Linode server a few years ago, the motivation to rebuild everything was just gone. So many hours were poured into building my website, taking photos, writing up detailed summaries, and the like to share with you all just to watch it go poof.

The Northrop T-38 was first introduced in 1959 as a fighter trainer for the USAF. 50 years later this airplane is still flying and training pilots, although the USAF plans to replace it at some point. Check out this model.

One of the most prolific civilian aircraft, created in 1955 by Cessna is the 172. A four-passenger, single-engine, high wing aircraft that has flown the world over for many years is the topic of this Minicraft model in 1/48 scale.

The ATF Dingo is a German MRAP, based on the Unimog chassis with a V-hull design, produced by KMW. The Dingo is a heavily armed infantry transport, used in modern days wars to protect against IEDs and other explosives.

First offered in 1994 by Tamiya we have yet another WWII carrier-based aircraft, the F4F-4 Wildcat. Included in the box are 2 grey sprues, a clear sprue, and a sheet of decals. Detail plenty can be found on both sprues, including up into the gear well at the front of the aircraft, something very unusual about this particular airframe.

My first foray into the WWI and biplane categories was this Se.5a from Eduard. Did I mention it was also my first Eduard kit and first time with PE as well? Many things were learned during the build of this beautiful (and sadly unfinished forever model) aircraft. Its been many months now since I've finished this build and so its hard to remember a lot of the details but i'll give it my best.

Building of this kit took me many more hours than the 10 that is showing, this was started after this kit was started so the time isn't accurate so bear that in mind. I really enjoyed this build minus the annoyances that are very well known and typical of Kitty Hawk, color callouts could have been much better but thankfully I had references when need be, even if it was another model haha. Overall fit of the model was very good, sometimes tolerances were too tight and required a bit of sanding work to ease them up to fit better, but nothing a nice sanding stick couldn't fix.

Miniart is a brand that I've seen many times on youtube videos, forum mentions, and even on retailers. All of their kits looked very well-detailed, and intimidating, and so of course I had to grab one when I found one on

One of the most iconic and my favorite aircraft of all time is the North American P-51 Mustang. I picked up this new tool Airfix 1/48 P-51D Mustang from hobby lobby a few years back and I can't wait to dig into it now. Let's crack that box and take a look!

Hey there everybody! With the Tamiya 1/48, P-47D finished I thought I'd take a moment and share my thoughts on this kit as well as share some pictures.

What did I break? Well that's easy, everything dynamic! Recently the backend service that I use (in this case StrapiJS) recently had a pretty decent update to the provider that I use for image hosting, Cloudinary. What they did was move the `public_id` field that I've been using for each image to a metadata field so that they can have provider-independent configurations and storage methods. Which I love the idea of, makes sense from their standpoint.

Today I want to discuss something important to most websites, analytics, and why I chose not to go with offerings from Google.

Today I'd like to talk a bit more about visual identity and what I'm working on with the site. One of the biggest things that's driven me nuts lately about where I'm going with the direction on the site is visuals, everything to me was starting to look the same and I needed a way to bring some interest and change so that while the overall color theme and styling is the same, there is some individuality of the different sections of the site. An experience tailored to each thing.

So I thought a good place to begin my new blog was on a topic that is pretty important to this website and its functions, the tech stack used, both hardware and software and services used.