Apple

    Much as I dislike that my heat-pump requires a proprietary communicating thermostat, I do like that I can change some deep level settings to optimize things without dip-switches.

    Some real dinosaur stuff happened today at Bay Front Park just south of SFO. This Great Blue Heron caught a gopher, paraded around with it for several minutes, then swallowed it whole. Then the heron proceeded to hunt some more. 😬A Great Blue Heron stands in a dry grassy area with yellow flowers. It has a gopher’s neck in its mouth and the entire gopher is hanging.

    Volunteer Sunflowers in the backyard. The scrub jays garden really well. I continue to be impressed with the new Fujifilm XApp for transferring photos from my X-T5. #Fujifilm #Sunflowers #BloomScrolling

    Two sun flowers, one at the bottom and nearby and one about 15 feet away. There’s vegetation surrounding the flowers and a weather station behind the forest Sunflower. The flowers are extremely yellow and well lit.A close up of a sunflower, brightly lit by the sun.

    Out of an abundance of caution, early this morning I’m watering my front yard native plants in case the neighbors get whacky with their fireworks.The Rachio smart hose timer is working well so far. Turned on at 3am while I was sound asleep.

    Suppose it will only be a matter of time before the Justices are on the receiving end of their undemocratic, hateful rulings.

    It sure is easy to rise in FlightRadar24’s ADS-B rankings! I guess most people don’t even try to get a even half decent antenna position and reliable uptimes.

    The new Rachio hose timer works well. Currently, it has fairly simple operation with basic App scheduling and timer. It doesn’t yet have smart home support or an API. It’s independent of the Rachio valve controller. But it works quite well for my needs: rare but long (deep) watering of my front yard native plants.

    The grey and white Rachio hose sprinkler timer. It is outdoors and connected to a Y spigot. There’s a back flow preventer and a hose attached to it. It has some water on it.Oscillating sprinkler spraying arcing water over native shrubs.

    Perfect morning in California to cool the mass of the house off with our whole house fan. Normally it’s in the 90s this time of the year with lows in the high 60s and low 70s. Sorry for those in Texas though 😬 A Weather Strip iOS appweather chart that shows unusually cool June weather with lows in the 50s and highs in the low 70s and 80s.

    Using Migration Assistant via thunderbolt is insanely fast.

    Migration Assistant dialog showing 612 MB/s transfer speed.

    I’ve been very patient with my M1 Mac Mini. But now I have an M2 Mac Studio on the way. Flight simming and photography will be enormously improved. Less likely: And now that Apple allows on personal device “testing” of apps for free, I might resume learning iOS development.

    macOS Universal Control is so very good when I’m multitasking between my Mac Mini and my MacBook Pro. One keyboard + one mouse = total control of both.

    I’m slowly getting the canopies of my shrubs off the ground. Mostly to reduce outdoor cats hiding under them. I’ll do a lot to keep their destructive, bird killing lot out of my yard.

    The new Fujifilm XApp is a vast improvement for transferring photos to a smartphone on the fly. But the app’s notifications alerting to the camera’s request to transfer photos are a bit aggressive. #Fujifilm

    Virgin Orbit’s Cosmic Girl OBT01 is on its way back to Long Beach. No idea what it is doing out and about. My ADSB receiver is tracking it. https://www.flightradar24.com/OBT01/3061cbdb

    Woodpecker granaries are really neat. This one was right on a trail at Pinnacles NP. We did see an acorn woodpecker nearby though the photo isn’t great.

    A dead pine tree pecked full of holes meant for woodpeckers to store acorns.A close up of actual acorns in the holes of the granary.

    I neglected to post that our cultivated native California roses (Rosa californica) are blooming. Their flowers are fragile and nearly just by looking at them they go to tatters

    Ortho4XP on macOS Ventura

    Ortho4XP has some code that’s been deprecated in the latest Python 3 Shapely and Numpy.

    You’ll need to downgrade Shapely to version 1.8.5. On my Mac after following the Big Sur installation instructions (I’m running Ventura):

    pip3 install shapely==1.8.5

    After that you’ll need to go through the source files and replace numpy.bool to just bool and then numpy.float to just float (I used bbedit). This is probably safer than downgrading numpy.

    Python files that need this should include:

    /Ortho4XP-master/src/ O4_DEM_Utils.py O4_DSF_Utils.py O4_Airport_Utils.py O4_Vector_Map.py

    I think that’s all I did and it seems to be working for me now.

    A X-Plane 12 Toliss A340-600 in Lufthansa livery (mostly white with a blue tail and logo at the body) flying south of Pinnacles NP, where orthophotography has hilly terrain and farm land. There’s scattered clouds below the aircraft casting some shadows.

    Last weekend: in its most happiest habitat, predominantly here are Yellow Monkeyflowers within massive rocks at Pinnacles National Park, California. #MonkeyFlowers #PinnaclesNationalPark

    Sandwiched inbewteen massive lichen covered rocks are vertical stems of monkeyflowers showing bunches of yellow flowers. The rocks are kind of forming a small channel.

    I’ve learned a bit about repairing hose bibs and turns out it’s pretty easy. I’m kind of looking forward to repacking my front yard hose bib this Friday so it stops leaking at the stem and I can put a new Rachio smart hose timer on it.

    American Gold Finch digging for sunflower seeds the other day. #AmericanGoldFinch #Birds #Fujifilm

    The American Gold Finch, peering into a bird feeder hole, has a black cap and, besides it’s wings, an all light yellow body. Only the front edge of its right wing is visible and it is mostly black with some white patches. The bird is partially obscured by a vertical transparent bird feeder with a blurry (bokeh) green vegetation background.
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