I emergency bought a Ratio 6 coffee maker after my old Ninja broke. Best of all, and I didn’t know about this, @RatioCoffee just refunded the cost ‘cuz I won their drawing 🎉 can’t remember the last time I won anything this good!
Apple
Germany trip recap: some 787-9 photos while boarding FRA-DEN. I love it when boarding is at a stand and not a gate.
Our peppers exploded. Best yields ever. Already we roasted some shishitos to go with quesadillas. 🌱
We concluded our trip to Germany. It ended nicely despite the current upheaval of travel. Best unexpected thing to happen was the captain of the United 787-9 we flew on back to the States let me snap photos of the flight deck! Heaven.
Eurasian Coots in the Pagodenburger See at the Schloss Nymphenburg in Munich.
A few more photos of the #EdwardFire in Orland, CA today. Fortunately our house was never in danger. Sad that this fire was likely preventable with mere common sense about mowing. A few homes were lost. #EFire
I do not love it when Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 inexplicably drops my entire approach flight plan and drives me direct to the arrival airport. Keeps me on alert, that’s for sure. I’m pretty close to buying X-Plane. Can’t wait for X-Plane 12 early access.
Baby “Bacon” variety avocados! Latest date I’ve seen berries on this tree. Let’s see if they’ll survive summer and winter. 🌱🌳
Here’s a magenta flower from one of our cultivated California Wild Roses.
Now in bloom in our backyard: cultivated California Wild Roses (pic 1) and Elderberry (2). Still gorging themselves: ladybugs. Everywhere in our front yard. They’re just decimating aphids. Ladybugs particularly love coyote bush (3) and sage.
Latest Shortcuts for macOS Has Vast Improvements
Saturday, March 19, 2022
What's new in Shortcuts in iOS 15.4 and macOS 12.3: “End If” and “End Repeat” can now be dragged in the Shortcuts editor That’s a big deal. I’ve abandoned attempts at refactoring shortcuts solely because I couldn’t move entire blocks of If statements. “Combine Images” no longer produces empty images on macOS I ran into this bug right away and couldn’t believe it. The "Shortcuts Events"
Here goes my second brew - a simple Bavarian Hefeweizen. With way warmer than normal temperatures I figure our house will be close to or within the ideal fermentation temperature range. 🤞
macOS Shortcuts, Logger for Shortcuts, Shortcuts Temporary Files, and Hazel
Sunday, March 13, 2022
Logger for Shortcuts provided me exactly the information to figure out how to get Hazel to properly use a Shortcut against a file. Now I can have Hazel run a specific Shortcut against a file whenever a new file shows up. Background: for some reason when Hazel starts a Shortcut, the Shortcut operates on a copy of the file in a temporary folder. My programmer brain assumed that the Shortcut Input would be immutable.
I’ve been playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 on the Xbox Series S. I’m surprised at how it keeps my mind off everything and on a passion of mine and so it really helps my anxiety. Last time I played was w/ FS 98. This is amazing but not without some bizarre issues.
More Point Reyes National Seashore photos from last Monday: bumble hovering near a flower, elk, and another coyote.
Yesterday, at Point Reyes National Seashore on the Tomales Point Trail, this hunting coyote could have been showing off. The coyote didn’t catch anything.
The freeze we got a few weeks ago, down to 28°F, did no clear harm to our plants. Mandarin, Valencia, Meyer lemon, & avocado flowers fine. Our nectarine is setting fruit as shown by this cute little green ovary. And ladybugs are all over our California wild roses 🌱🌳
We’re slowly preparing the backyard crop rows for planting. We just pulled all the weeds & bolting cilantro out to the compost pile. Saturday we enjoyed a fresh fennel salad. Next weekend we’ll test the drip tape, make any repairs, remove cat poop 🙄, and then add compost. 🌱
Our Nectarine is very close to blooming. This is its second year in the ground here. 🌱🌳
Almond bloom season is already upon us 😒. You can’t avoid it in most of California.
Thanks to a Honeywell leak detector, at 22:30 we woke to an extraordinarily loud beeping from under the sink & found there a fresh leak. Could have got worse fast. It’s leaking at the braided hose & coupling. That hose is integrated -not replaceable without a new faucet.
Dynamic Range Priority Added to "What was my Fujifilm Recipe?" macOS 12 Shortcut
Saturday, January 29, 2022
I’ve updated my “What was my Fujifilm Recipe?” macOS 12 Shortcut. It now includes support for Dynamic Range Priority. The “Scanned Superia” recipe from fujixweekly.com is added. The Shortcut now uses SHA1 hashing, as on modern processors it is much faster than MD5 (Intel and M1 Macs). I removed Grain since I often override it and it doesn’t seem important to ID recipes. Finally, I prefixed “Saturation " to the saturation keyword so that it is clear as to what that keyword refers to.
Managing Anxiety
Sunday, January 23, 2022
My doctor increased my dose of an anxiety med. Took three weeks to feel the effects of that but once again I don’t feel like I’m racing against time when doing a hobby. Or in full flight mode when making calls. My heart doesn’t pound as hard and as long when starting work. HeartWatch, with its history & charts, confirms I’m not imagining my improvement. I’m given more headroom to realize I’m anxious and can mentally manage it better to avoid panic.
macOS Shortcut: What's my Fujifilm Focal Length?
Saturday, January 22, 2022
Since I now have the TCL-X100II attachment and I make ample use of the Digital Teleconverter feature, I made a quick macOS Shortcut to add Fujifilm Effective Focal Length as a metadata Keyword. This Shortcut requires exiftool in your path. It’s a modified version of What’s My Fujifilm Recipe? Shortcut. This is only tested on straight out of the camera JPEGs. I added it to my Batch Processor shortcut that also runs What’s My Fujifilm Recipe?
Today I had to remove a trespassing & bird harassing “Happy Birthday To You” balloon from our mandarin tree and then dispose of it. A birthday card can say as much. 🙄
On Twitter, Matt Roberts, an atmospheric science student, showed a spike in atmospheric pressure at Half Moon Bay airport around 4am. Likely caused by the Tonga eruption. Looked at my weather station and it registered a spike after 4 am. Impressive. Minor(?) tsunami inbound.
Honey bees are apparently feeding on bird seed dust. Never seen this behavior before. More photos on Flickr.
A very frosty morning today. My weather station read a low of 29°F just after midnight.
I planted two Asian pear trees today. A New Century (1st photo) and a Hosui (2nd photo). They’re from Stark Bro’s. These may be the last fruit trees I ever plant.
After a few years of iPhone night mode, high ISO photography (as high as 12800) with my X100V is pretty nice. I really can’t be bothered by the noise since the X100V results in most circumstances look way better than blotchy iPhone night mode.