We started our peppers today: ancho, jalapeño, serrano, shishito, santa fe, and two tomatoes. Trying for variety this year. 🌱

seed starter under an LED lamp

Did a bit of pruning of the apricot today. Doesn’t look like much but I removed lots of suckers and interior branches. I’ve quit trying to top it. Dang tree barely produces so it is not worth the extra effort. 🌱

If you’re new to Apple Music, because reasons, you may follow me. https://music.apple.com/profile/rpmik

Dynamic Range Priority Added to "What was my Fujifilm Recipe?" macOS 12 Shortcut

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.

You can get more information at the Shortcut’s page or grab the Shortcut here. Remember, this requires a Mac with exiftool to be available and in your path (or you can manually hardcode the path in the Shortcut).

The Annie Cat successfully catting this past afternoon.

Managing Anxiety

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. Hooray for medicine.

A few different birds & a landscape from today’s nature walk. One vulture and one 777.

macOS Shortcut: What's my Fujifilm Focal Length?

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? Shortcut(example of that is linked to on that Shortcut page).

So photos imported into macOS Photos can now have the effective focal length as a Keyword. That’s very useful as I can search for it or make Smart Albums with it.

This Shortcut still has to output exiftool’s results to a temporary file as it errors on me if I try to read the results from only console (aka Shell Script Result).

Get the Shortcut: What’s my Fujifilm Focal Length? Shortcut

I pay for 800 Mbps down and 15 Mbps up. Xfinity/Comcast over-provisions my download a ton. Recently I got a free unannounced bump in upload speed. Basically I now have near gigabit internet. Got to be happy about that especially with the small price increase.

House Sparrows on the feeder and a reddening House Finch waiting its turn on top of the pole.

The front yard Manzanitas (1st photo) and Coyote Bushes (2nd) are flowering. Next up are the Ceanothus bushes, then the Elderberries. 🌱

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. 🙄

happy birth balloon stick in a mandarin tree that has ripe oranges on itabout to cut into a trespassing happy Birthday balloon a drip tube cutter cutting deeply into a happy balloon

Last night’s roast beef dinner. Sunday night came early! 🤭

Random aircraft photo of mine from 2005 at Incheon International Airport, Republic of South Korea. You won’t see lined up 747s like this anymore.08272005 1286 IMG 2580

Today we moved our lemon grass over a few feet to give our new Asian pear tree some room. Then we finally mulched the area. Looking good! BTW, our electric tiller is amazing. Way better than hacking away at compacted soil with pick & shovel.

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.

On today’s walk, there was a very photogenic & easy-going Black Phoebe. This one did not want to leave their tree.

My favorite person made cinnamon rolls today for tomorrow morning and another weekend (raw rolls apparently freeze well).