Mercury News: “We may be the last maskers’: California COVID cases are rising. “
I’m still wearing a mask indoors (not at home of course) and I’m going to be extra vigilant for a while.
New The Clientele album! I Am Not There Anymore by The Clientele https://album.link/us/i/1678797674
Huge cooldown for Northern California this week. I’m about to get a lot less cranky 😂
Nice! Photomator and Pixelmator Now Support Fujifilm Compressed RAW: https://petapixel.com/2023/07/21/photomator-and-pixelmator-now-support-fujifilm-compressed-raw/
“Abortion bans and restrictions are known to increase infant deaths, maternal deaths, and maternal suffering. And the US already has the worst maternal and infant mortality rates of any other high-income country in the world.”
Infant deaths surge in Texas after abortion ban: https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/07/infant-deaths-surge-in-texas-after-abortion-ban/
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
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. So 32 GB seems perfect. I love how Apple Silicon GPUs can access all available RAM!
My previous desktop machine was an M1 Mac Mini with a mere 8 Gigabytes of RAM. Depending on airport and aircraft complexity, X-Plane 12 typically ran 10-15 FPS on the ground and 20-30 in the air (worse FPS if there are low clouds). Crucially, this was (and still is) on a 1080p monitor. Despite knowing quite clearly how non-performant my Mini was running a flight simulator, I was still unprepared how well my new Mac runs X-Plane. It now runs 25-35 FPS on the ground and ~60 FPS in the air. What I thought were bugs were actually caused by the underpowered Mini. For example, on the Mini, during replay mode, spoilers and reversers would always deploy laughably early even though I deployed them at the right time. That is no longer an issue. Taxiing was also rather challenging at low 10-15 frames per second. I’d oversteer all the time. Now taxiing is far more responsive. The aircraft also feels livelier in the air, as now I can descern the air buffeting aircraft even outside turbulent conditions.
Now all I need is the soon to be released Yawman Arrow controller. I have avoided buying other controllers because the Yawman looks perfect for my use case.