Instrument panel

What is actually on the panel

Pictures of the instrument panel and the rest of the airplane, gathered on the My Airplane page along with position and track data.

This is the personal home page of Joe Dubner, a self-described gentleman at leisure since 1999. The site collects the threads of an ordinary, curious life: an airplane, a dog named Smiley, and a handful of technical projects built along the way. It is less a blog about one subject than a quiet notebook, updated in small increments, where aviation sits beside radio, electronics, and the occasional family footnote. The pages here are written in plain language for anyone who likes the smell of hangar dust and the sound of a propeller turning.

The centerpiece of the site is the airplane: a Long-EZ, a canard pusher designed by Burt Rutan in the late 1970s. Joe's was built from plans rather than a kit and completed in 1997, and it carries its own registration in the type's usual tail-number tradition. A dedicated page gathers the photographs, drawings, and links worth keeping, and it also tracks where the aircraft has been. Live position data is fed by APRS technology and displayed in real time, so a visitor can follow the plane's reported altitude and route across the map without any special software of their own.

Alongside the aviation pages sit smaller technical projects that grew out of the same habit of taking things apart to see how they work. There are notes on display and GPS units, fixes for avionics equipment, and an interest in the Dynon EFIS D10A installation in the panel. Elsewhere, a serial-to-parallel converter and an altitude encoder occupy their own corners. None of it is presented with the polish of a commercial product; it reads more like a workbench log, where each problem is written down before it is solved and the solution is posted for the next person who searches for the same answer.

There is also a solar energy thread running through the site, tracking generation and usage figures from panels mounted around the property. It is a modest, practical subject rather than a grand declaration, and it fits the broader tone: a private page about real-time reporting, real hardware, and the small satisfaction of a number that reads correctly after a long afternoon of adjustment. A photo of a smiling dog appears in passing, because on a personal site the non-technical material is welcome too.

The site mentions family in a light, affectionate way. Joe Dubner is described as the older brother of the famous Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner, a fact that occasionally stumbles into print and prompts a gentle note of correction. Rather than leaning on the connection, the page moves on quickly to what actually interests him: the skies over gunfighter country, mountain flying, the occasional airshow, and aircraft that have been exhibited at a nearby air force base. The famous brother gets a sentence; the aircraft get pages.

Some of the site's practical infrastructure concerns email and message handling, including forwarding, returning mail, and the etiquette of sending something on behalf of someone else. A brief set of notes asks the reader kindly to acknowledge normal mail rules, and there are pointers and additions for the handful of people who want their addresses included, shared, or kept off certain lists. Instance-specific exceptions are handled with a kind of discretion, and there is an acknowledgement of the small, tedious work involved in keeping an address current.

The visual character of the site is deliberately understated: pale blush pinks, off-white and cream backgrounds, and near-black text that keeps long paragraphs comfortable to read. Pastel accents appear sparingly in photography and buttons, corners are squared or barely softened, and thin hairline rules separate one section from the next rather than heavy boxes. Headlines are set in a bold, clean sans-serif while body copy and metadata sit in a lighter weight, with small caps and wide tracking used for category labels. The result feels editorial and airy, like a well-printed personal magazine rather than a crowded dashboard.

Navigation is modest and text-driven, the kind of arrangement that assumes a reader arrived from a search engine or a forwarded link rather than from a homepage curated for browsing. Sections carry short uppercase labels, and the latest entries are arranged in a denser grid with tight card padding, so the front page reads as a running index of recent additions. Older material is reached by descending into the archive, where pictures and reference notes accumulate. The whole structure suggests a site that grew organically, one careful edit at a time, with an occasional cleanup pass to remove stale pointers.

Overall, the impression left by these pages is of a long-running private project: a canard pusher in the hangar, a receiver on the desk, a solar array on the roof, and a dog keeping watch. The writing is unhurried and self-contained, and the details of propeller design, radio discipline, and avionics configuration sit comfortably beside a family photograph or a picture of a shop. It is the sort of corner of the web that rewards a few minutes of attention, and that asks for nothing in return beyond the reader's curiosity.

In the hangar

Solar generation and the hangar cam

Notes on solar generation around the hangar, alongside the hangar cam view of the airplane's home on the ground.