Wednesday, November 20, 2019 →
Armillaria mellea. Honey mushroom 🥾
Wednesday, November 20, 2019 →
Armillaria mellea. Honey mushroom 🥾
Very pleased that HomeKit Secure Video streams live video on the LAN. No more stream to cloud and download, adding many seconds of video delay & failure points. 📱
I finally got a HomePod and I’m impressed that it can accurately hear me mumble across the room while it plays music📱
Saturday, November 16, 2019
I love listening to full albums. But often I’m not in the right mood to choose them. So a long time ago I created a Shortcut that creates an Apple Music playlist of a variable number of full, track list ordered albums. It allows you to unselect albums that you have a strong opinion to not listen to. The shortcut unfortunately needs at least a 1 second wait between adding albums or it’ll silently fail and the playlist won’t be complete.
Looking toward Saint John Mountain from near Fouts Springs, CA. Chaparral plants.
Pleased that my HomeKit devices still worked from the Home app during a big Comcast (Xfinity) & Verizon internet outage. Pretty sure Alexa and Google alternatives would have been dead.
Wednesday, November 13, 2019 →
Visited some tree frogs in the forest today. Pseudacris sierra.


Old iPad Pro 9.7” just got replaced by an iPad Pro 11”. I did not expect to be impressed by the differences but dang that’s nice!
I have some anxiety over the iOS 13 Reminders upgrade button. If I upgrade, then my partner has to upgrade, and she lives on reminders. So if the upgrade goes wrong… 😱📱
The Prisoner, episode 10, “Hammer into Anvil” — soo good.
Today’s sourdough with a side of Annie Cat stare.
Friday, November 8, 2019
All these years Apple still has no way to share entire photo libraries with family. The shared family album is useful only to temporarily share the week’s photos. So I use PhotoSync iOS App to sync our iPhone photos to the NAS, files prefixed with first names, and then once a week manually import to the two libraries via macOS Photos. Works well enough but Photos has very poor dupe detection.
Wednesday, November 6, 2019
The Lapins Cherry has some confused or mutated buds. It’s probably nothing to worry about. The dormant appearing plum tree, however, did not look well so I checked if it was alive. There’s still some green in a cutting so… I suppose it’s still alive. I needed to prune that branch anyway.
A very good lake. 🥾
Also in bloom! Eriogonum fasciculatum (California buckwheat).
Front yard native plants currently in bloom: Epilobium canum (California Fuchsia; red flowers adored by hummingbirds) and Baccharis pilularis (Coyote Bush; small, pleasantly scented white flowers loved by small pollinators).


Only those with broken circadian rhythms get an hour extra of sleep going to standard time.
We’re starting to get some color on our Mandarins. These should be perfectly sweet by end of December 🌳
In the Yolla Bolly-Middle Eel Wilderness on the Mendocino National Forest via the Ides Cove trail: A landslide-related fissure and then a view.


19 trick-or-treater’s. Half last year. Fortunately, we’re stuck with good candy and not the milk duds with taffy (where milk duds taste like strawberry taffy). Happy Halloween 🎃
Yesterday: Mount Shasta from near Mount Linn. 🥾
Saturday, October 26, 2019
My new iPhone refused to access old iTunes Match music, perhaps as a result of my unsubscribing from iTunes Match months after subscribing to Apple Music. I did that as Apple Music includes Match. But things broke anyway. No idea why. So I spent yesterday rebuilding my collection using Apple Music. To Apple Music’s credit, their library is massively better for British & twee pop than ~3 years ago. So with exception of Manic Street Preacher’s Know Your Enemy and older Billy Bragg albums, I only had to match really obscure stuff.
Barely photographed a bee on our holy basil. They were extremely shy and did not loiter. 🐝
The Annie Cat waiting patiently for the nighttime brushing routine to begin.
Western toads in the backyard 🐝😍


A little more than halfway through The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater and I don’t want it to end.
So the Shortcuts widget syncs the same shortcuts & order on iPad and iPhone. Too bad, as I have very different Shortcuts uses for these devices.
Cooler weather means it’s time to check your tire pressure! A bit low as they need 32 PSI.
Trees & rocks. 🥾
🤦♂️📱 iPadOS 13.1.3