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I hope the PR hype for the new Fujifilm mobile app is worth it! Seems promising and I like its new settings backup. Out May 25th. Petapixel: “Fujifilm’s New XApp Offers Smooth Connection, Speed, and Activity Tracking”

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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

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My ADSB receiver (plane tracker) has been doing quite well under adverse conditions of its testing location. I plan to dramatically improve reception this week.

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Here is a Black-necked Stilt from the #SacramentoNationalWildlifeRefuge #BlackNeckedStilt #BirdsOfMastodon #Fujifilm
A Black-necked Stilt bird is waking through a shallow brown pond. Small forbs surround the pond, including low laying purple flowers and then, further in the background, yellow flowers. The Black-necked Stilt has a all-white underside and all-black back and top of head. It has long legs and a long black beak.

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We visited the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge and it was busy with all sorts of creatures. Gray Buckeye butterflies, American Avocets, Lesser Goldfinches, dragonflies and more.  A brown butterfly with patches of orange and black eyes near the top edge of its wings. The butterfly is surrounded by green to brown grass.An American Avocet has a brown head and neck with black wings and a white underside. It’s stepping through a pond and beyond it is a floor of purple and then yellow flowers.A Lesser Goldfinch (we think) seems to be using gymnastics to collect grassy nesting material. It is upside down on a stand of grass or a slender branch. It has a beak full of small grassy material.A dragonfly hovers in midair amongst bokeh of grass. It has a slight blue iridescence and looks to be about to fly downward.

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Found my old Raspberry Pi 3 and finally got it set up as an ADSB feeder (aircraft tracker). Are people still skeptical of ADSB Exchange? Been a while since I’ve heard anything about them.

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Got sick of ArcGIS Pro 3.1’s Export Layout not saving export settings per Layout. So Export settings from one layout end up carrying forward to others especially if you don’t hit the Export Layout button. So made a quick Python script to stop the insanity. Jupyter notebooks are nice. #GIS

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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.

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With the family today, we had whole glazed ham with scalloped potatoes (the potatoes are a Kenji López-Alt recipe). The swiss cheese (we used Raclette) makes the dish 😙👌

A spiral of creamy scalloped potatoes in glass bowl with the slices edge up. The top is brown & crisp.
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71°F at 06:23 in the North Sacramento Valley. 18°F warmer than yesterday this time. 😬

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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

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3am today: Another quake, another shake alert. M5.2 and I didn’t feel it. #RaspberryShake

A map showing the quake at lake almanor and the seismograph.
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Earthquake east of Chico near Susanville! People in Chico felt it but not here in Orland. Very clear signal on my #RaspberryShake

A seismograph of the 5.5 earthquake
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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.
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Last weekend: just a taste of the views you can have at Pinnacles National Park, California, if you take the the High Peaks Trail. #PinnaclesNationalPark #Fujifilm #GeologyMakesThePhoto

Pinnacles of rock jut out of a hilly landscape, with their northsides in shadow and southern sides completely lit up. Vegetation is quite green with a classic kodachrome blue sky and mountain ranges along the horizon.

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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.

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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.

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Ash-throated flycatcher was also a new bird for us at Pinnacles National Park. Ash-throated flycatcher looking toward the horizon! It is perched on a bare branch against a blue sky. It’s a slender bird with a gray chest and belly and a dark gray head. Its wings are brown with white bars that curve down. Its brown tail is very narrow.

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Went to Pinnacles National Park on Friday and we were treated to soaring and resting California Condors. Amazing to watch these birds, not long ago nearly completely extinct, thriving here.

A California Condor showing it’s brown body, the underside of its half brown, half white wings, and it’s naked neck and head. The background is a blur of vegetation.
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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.