Orchard
- General Purpose:
- Landscape:
- Street:
Pineapple guavas have been blooming for a few weeks now. The Mockingbirds love munching on the flower petals.
Avocado flowers! 🌱🌳
Here goes my second brew - a simple Bavarian Hefeweizen. With way warmer than normal temperatures I figure our house will be close to or within the ideal fermentation temperature range. 🤞
Citrus gummies are a great way to use backyard citrus. We made Meyer lemon with Valencia orange gummies. An Alton Brown recipe. We’ve frozen our remaining Meyer lemon juice. Our citrus season is now over.
macOS Shortcuts, Logger for Shortcuts, Shortcuts Temporary Files, and Hazel
Logger for Shortcuts provided me exactly the information to figure out how to get Hazel to properly use a Shortcut against a file. Now I can have Hazel run a specific Shortcut against a file whenever a new file shows up.
Background: for some reason when Hazel starts a Shortcut, the Shortcut operates on a copy of the file in a temporary folder. My programmer brain assumed that the Shortcut Input would be immutable. Nope. Turns out Shortcut Input is a temporary file that all Shortcut operations (like exiftool) must then run against. So while you think you’ve been working on a specific file in a specific folder, Shortcuts has been working on a copy of it all along in a temporary folder. Thus you must output the Shortcut Input to provide the file you’ve been modifying (in this case with exiftool). It’s very frustrating for Shortcuts to override paths with its own temporary paths but thanks to Logger for Shortcuts I quickly figured out this vexing issue. Already the app is worth $9.99 because now I’ve got the time saving Hazel ruleset I always wanted.
Here’s the Hazel embedded Apple Script I have to run to make a Shortcut with a file output (Shortcut Input (gah)) to work. I suppose now that I’ve fixed the Shortcuts issue this could now be more simply done… but it works (I’ve never had any success with running Hazel’s built in Shortcuts capability and right now it can’t even list the available Shortcuts):
do shell script “shortcuts run ’Shortcut Name Modified for use with Hazel’ -i ” & quoted form of POSIX path of theFile & “ -o ” & quoted form of POSIX path of theFile
Logger for Shortcuts output clearly showing me the ridiculous temporary folder Shortcuts is using to work on Shortcut Input:
The freeze we got a few weeks ago, down to 28°F, did no clear harm to our plants. Mandarin, Valencia, Meyer lemon, & avocado flowers fine. Our nectarine is setting fruit as shown by this cute little green ovary. And ladybugs are all over our California wild roses 🌱🌳
After weeks of warmer than normal weather, weather swung the other way and we had freezing temps for a few days. Had to cover up the weaker & less freeze tolerant trees. I don’t see damage to my earlier than normal blooming trees yet: all citrus, all stone fruit, one avocado 🌱🤞
Harvested our first homegrown Valencia orange this year. So very sweet. Even the pith isn’t bitter. We may want to harvest the rest early if there’s a freeze later this week. Fortunately there’s only a dozen-ish. ~243 mandarins harvested so far — makes great juice 🌱🌳
First bloom for our Valencia orange tree. About three weeks early compared to 2020 & 2021. 🌱🌳
Honey bee approaching a nectarine flower. 🌳🌱
Our New Century Asian Pear tree, seeing as it’s already showy as heck, will be glorious in a few years. 🌱🌳
…. and here is our new (this year) New Century Asian Pear about ready to burst. 🌱🌳
Our Nectarine is very close to blooming. This is its second year in the ground here. 🌱🌳
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. 🌱
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. 🙄
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.
Has anyone figured out the rhyme or reason behind Fujifilm cameras expiring smart phone-provided location information via bluetooth? Location information expires in a few hours (I think) and the Fuji Cam Remote app + Camera do not reliably connect without user intervention.
Current Slate of Fujifilm Film Simulations
I’ve got a slate of six Film Simulations from Fuji X Weekly loaded on my X100V. Fuji X Weekly’s Film Recipes app is nice for a quick reference. Here’s what I’ll be working with for a while in hopes of greatly limiting RAW reprocessing with Straight-Out-Of-Camera (SOOC) JPEGs:
I figured out how to use Fujifilm X Raw Studio to save user settings to the camera. Depending on the RAW you’re using to create a user setting, it may not let you set a higher Dynamic Range so one must find a RAW shot with that dynamic range or higher or adjust that setting on the camera. I made sure to copy these to X Raw Studio’s User Settings to keep a backup. Oddly enough, the User Settings have more restrictions on allowable characters than the camera itself. As a Mac user, X Raw Studio is clunky as heck and has needless alert dialogs but it works well enough. It is clearly purpose built.
Closer look at a senescing apricot leaf compared to a still green leaf.
Our apricot is almost ready to overwinter. The nectarine at the bottom left is being a bit stubborn. California wild rose at the bottom right is in full growth mode.
