This morning, House Finches were breakfasting on ripe elderberries in our backyard. #HouseFinch #BirdsOfMastodon #BirdWatching #Fujifilm
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.
Delta 767 (N1604R) SFO-JFK and flock of Brown Pelicans. #AvGeek #B767 #PlaneSpotting #BirdsOfMastodon #BrownPelican
In more expected bird behavior, on the infill shores of the San Francisco Bay, here’s a Willet (a Sandpiper) snacking on a worm. #BirdsOfMastodon #Willet #SandPiper
Back from a relaxing day of plane spotting at SFO. Here’s a series of aircraft landing and preparing for takeoff. Dang that’s a lot of 777s. #AvGeek #PlaneSpotting #SFO #B777 #B787 #B737
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. 😬
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
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.
My #RaspberryShake detected the M6.9 in the vicinity of the Tonga Islands. #EarthquakeMastodon
Suppose it will only be a matter of time before the Justices are on the receiving end of their undemocratic, hateful rulings.
In preparation for the heat in California, added a ton of shade for some sensitive trees. That side of our house does get sun blasted in the afternoon, so should help there too. I need to add more attachment points to the shade cloth but ran out of time with work and all.
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.
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 😬
X-Plane 12 performance on a M2 Max Mac Studio
Monday, June 19, 2023
It turns out that Austin Meyer, founder of Laminar and creator of X-Plane, uses a Mac Studio as his main computer (see interview). I imagine he has an M1 Ultra. That likely explains why my new M2 Max Mac Studio runs X-Plane 12 so well. I got the 32 Gigabyte RAM and 2 Terabyte model (I’ve found that capacity is the sweet spot). At max scenery settings, X-Plane uses about 23 GB of RAM for video, leaving 9 GB free for other things.
I was watching BigJet TV’s Paris Airshow Preview and didn’t notice one of my E-175 gears didn’t extend. Landed at KRDD (Redding, CA) and found out pretty quick what happened... Oops. #FlightSim #XPlane #AvGeek
Using Migration Assistant via thunderbolt is insanely fast.
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.
Offline Apple Maps. FINALLY. #WWDC2023
Little NavMap, open source flight simulation flight planning software, is pretty great. I should have looked into it for X-Plane much sooner. #FlightSim #XPlane