… and here’s a lovely jumping spider hanging out on a manzanita leaf that’s surrounded by a creeping sage bush. Some white manzanita flowers show through the leaves.
Sure feels & looks like spring in our front yard. I think this is an assassin bug on a newly blooming Ceanothus. 🌱
…. 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. 🌱🌳
California Towhee from this morning. First sighting ever in the backyard but have seen these around the neighborhood. They don’t seem to care much for the white crowns & house sparrows. This is my kind of bird.
Almond bloom season is already upon us 😒. You can’t avoid it in most of California.
Okay, for once in my life I managed to replace a key home feature without any frigg’n drama. Kitchen faucet replaced & why didn’t we do this sooner? The last faucet not only started leaking last night but years ago had seized into place - no swivel. Local Ace hardware was ace
Thanks to a Honeywell leak detector, at 22:30 we woke to an extraordinarily loud beeping from under the sink & found there a fresh leak. Could have got worse fast. It’s leaking at the braided hose & coupling. That hose is integrated -not replaceable without a new faucet.
Took a walk around a small lake today and saw: 1) turtles sunning on a log; 2) a western meadow lark; 3) redwing blackbirds; 4) long billed curlews; and 5) a duck with a cool hairdo (hopefully).
Audio calls where I have to talk are literally bad for my health hah. The two heart rate peaks after 9am were Teams calls. If not for my anxiety med, my peak heart rate would have likely been higher and sustained longer after a call.
I looked out into the backyard just in time to see a Nuttall’s Woodpecker investigating our cultivated elderberry and Ceanothus bushes. So cool!
We started our peppers today: ancho, jalapeño, serrano, shishito, santa fe, and two tomatoes. Trying for variety this year. 🌱
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. 🌱
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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