An audit rather than a feature, prompted by wanting this fit to hand to
somebody else.
Five options had no command-line flag written down in the table the manual
is generated from -- location, hold, schedules, tile_url and speed_unit --
so five flags that exist were missing from the manual. Four of them did
exist under other names and are now recorded; hold had no flag at all and
has one.
Four switches could be turned off from the command line and not back on:
--no-lookup, --no-basemap, --no-airports and --no-labels had no positive
halves, so an option turned off in the saved settings could not be turned on
again for one run. All four now have both.
And adsb, which opens the window and draws a map when it stops, could not be
given any of the settings that decide what those look like: no --at, no
--radius, no --tiles, no --map-brightness, no --width, --fps, --trail,
--fade, --stale, --airports or --labels. It takes all of them now.
The manual had no list of the aircraft options at all -- the ADS-B sections
were hand-written prose -- so five of them appeared nowhere in it. It now
generates an AIRCRAFT OPTIONS section from the same table the menu and the
flags come from, and the readme carries a table of all thirty-four with
their flags and defaults. Three tests hold the three of them together: one
that every option records its flag, one that every flag the table claims
actually exists on a command, and one that the readme names them all.
The installing instructions now list every dependency rather than only the
optional ones: the four Python packages with their names in Debian, Fedora
and Arch, and librtlsdr, which is a C library and therefore the one thing
pip cannot bring and a virtual environment cannot supply. What reaches a
network is written down too -- which host, when, and which file it is cached
in -- since somebody installing this on a metered or air-gapped machine has
to be able to see that nothing is fetched behind their back. build-repo.sh
needs dpkg-dev and apt-utils, which a minimal system does not have, and now
says so.
Verified rather than asserted: a clean virtual environment, pip install from
this tree, and a real log read back through the installed command. It pulls
seven wheels rather than the four the page claimed, the other three being
what Rich brings with it.
Also: matplotlib is gone from the readme's dependency table, nothing having
imported it; ffmpeg and Qt are in it, both having been missing; ffmpeg is a
Suggests on the package; and resume.sh is ignored.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg
A callsign is a flight number rather than a leg, and the free registers hold
one route per number, so an aircraft over Arizona kept being handed a hop
between two airports in Texas. Nothing on the air settles it: ADS-B carries
no origin or destination. A commercial schedule service does know, because
it holds the day's actual movements.
Four are wired up and all four are optional: FlightAware AeroAPI,
Flightradar24, OAG and Cirium. Each is asked before the free databases and
each answers for the moment the aircraft was overhead rather than for the
flight number in general, so the leg chosen is the one that was in the air.
With no keys set nothing changes at all: a source with no key is skipped
rather than asked and refused, and the free databases answer as before.
Keys come from the environment and are never written to the settings file,
because a settings file is meant to be copied between machines and pasted
into a message asking for help, and an API key is not. There is a test that
holds that line.
None of the four has been run against its live service, since each wants a
paid account. They were written from the published response shapes and are
tested against those shapes, so each reader finds what it recognises and
returns nothing otherwise: a service that has changed since costs a route
rather than a scan. Cirium's plain departureTime is local and carries no
offset, so the UTC field is preferred where it is there -- reading the local
one as UTC is up to half a day out, which is exactly far enough to pick the
wrong leg of the same number. Reading now happens inside the same guard as
asking, as an answer shaped differently from the documented one is the
failure most likely to actually happen.
And the map. The zoom is now chosen from how wide the picture is rather
than from the area alone, with half again over the width fetched and
averaged down, since a downscaled tile is sharp and an upscaled one is not.
The window fetches a little more world than it shows so panning does not
leave the ground blank, and now fetches that bigger piece at the bigger
piece's own size: rendering it into the window's own pixels and stretching
it back was a fifth of an upscale over the whole map, which is what a sharp
map looks like when it looks blurred. The comment in the fetcher said the
opposite of what the code did, which is how it stayed hidden.
At 1920 by 1080 over a hundred miles the tiles now hold about 1.6 times the
pixels the window wants. At 3840 by 2160 the tile budget is reached, the
zoom stops climbing and the map is enlarged after all; a smaller radius buys
the detail back, and somebody else's tile server is not a thing to fetch a
thousand tiles from for one picture. The README says so rather than
implying otherwise.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg
The terminal board says what is overhead. This says where: a real map
with the aircraft moving on it as the frames arrive, and beside each one a
box carrying everything known about the flight -- type and registration,
who operates it, where it came from and where it is going, height with a
rate of climb, speed and heading, how far away and on what bearing, its
position, how many frames it has sent and how long since the last one.
Qt is asked for and not required. Four bindings are tried, the module
imports on a machine with none of them, and asking for the window without
one gets the instructions rather than a traceback -- before the receiver
is opened, since nothing is gained by taking the dongle for a window that
cannot be drawn.
In the menu, "listen now" is now "passive capture" with a realtime
display beside it. Closing the window leaves exactly the files pressing
control-C leaves, because listen and watch share one read loop and one
finishing step; the receiver runs on its own thread, so a slow repaint
cannot cost a frame and a slow tile fetch cannot stall the picture.
The animation's labels grew to match: flight level and speed, type and
registration, and both ends of the route, each with a small flag of the
country its airport is in. The flags are a table rather than a network --
twelve pixels by eight, where a flag is the arrangement that makes one
recognisable rather than a rendering of the real thing -- and a country
not in the table is named by its two letters, since a flag that is nearly
another country's is worse than none. Where a route arrives as bare
codes the country comes from the ICAO prefix.
Four things found on the way. The window ignored --seconds, so "listen
for ten minutes" meant something different with a window open; it closes
itself now. The register was being asked twice per aircraft, once for
labels and once for airport positions. Cached routes had no country in
them, so the first real redraw drew no flags at all -- routes are
versioned now. And past fourteen aircraft on one frame the labels go
back to the callsign, the height and the speed, because five lines beside
each of three hundred aircraft is a page of overlapping text with a map
somewhere behind it.
Long names are folded rather than allowed to stretch a box, breaking at
the arrow of a route so the two ends stay whole; and the animation's
label placement gained the same ring search the window uses, having only
ever tried four spots.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg
The program had no licence file at all, and pyproject claimed MIT into
the void. It is now the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later:
LICENSE holds the text verbatim, pyproject declares it with the OSI
classifier, both .deb builds write /usr/share/doc/<pkg>/copyright in the
machine-readable format Policy requires, both manuals carry a COPYING
section, and --version prints the GNU notice on both programs.
INSTALL.md is the step-by-step: what you need, the Debian package, the
virtual environment for everywhere else, how to check it worked, every
optional dependency with what it buys and what happens without it, and
the errors people actually hit first -- PEP 668 at the top, because on
Debian a plain "pip install ." refuses and reads as a broken program.
Speech transcription gets its own four steps, because it is the only
part with a real download in it: the recogniser into the environment
bandsaunter runs from, checking it took, the model (base.en, 148 MB,
from Hugging Face into ~/.cache/huggingface, fetched deliberately rather
than in the middle of a scan), then turning it on. With the sizes of
every model, the offline routes, and what to do when --engines says no
although pip says yes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg
The Dust Council