Like a Hawk
Current Wx: Temp: 73°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 11.5mphWords: 394
This morning's keeper. Not a great shot, but I hadn't seen a hawk in a while. The OM-1's bird recognition kept the focus off the branches that make this image less than great.
I think I've mostly got the "workflow" figured out. I use Image Capture, which imports the images to an SSD in a folder organized by camera. Each SD card is named for the camera it serves, so the images all end up in the right folders.
Right now, I'm using RAW Power by Gentlemen Coders to do the initial review, and first edits like cropping and basic adjustments. I like the Lighten and Deepen adjustments under the Enhance panel. I may make some specific color adjustments.
People's experiences seem to vary, with many recommending doing noise reduction first. I've found that there always seems to be some modest color shift with Topaz DeNoiseAI, and if you try to do any adjustments after noise reduction, then you get weird posterization artifacts. I'm working with jpegs, which I know are limited to 8-bits in the color and luminance channels (and I've probably used those terms incorrectly). But if I do my adjustments first, it generally comes back looking fine. The same can be said for SharpenAI. RAW Power allows you to send a copy of your image, since the adjustments are baked in on the return trip.
Sue me, I'm not and never will be a "pro."
RAW Power is like Photos and seems to always want to do its own thing with file extension case, exporting ".jpg" despite the original filename being ".JPG". So I export to a folder on the desktop, watched by Hazel, which changes the case of the file extension back to ".JPG," sends it to Photos, then deletes it from the folder. I only mention this because RAW Power will export directly to your Photos library, but then you have to manually change the file extension case, if you remember to, which I seldom did.
If I have to, I can do minor tweaks in Photos, then run the script for posting here, where Hazel once again changes ".jpg" back into ".JPG".
I still need to reconsider the size of the images I want to post here. They really do seem to suffer on export, being reduced to 1000px width.
Anyway, the beat goes on...
✍️ Reply by emailThe Fondness of Absence
19:36 Sunday, 5 March 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 68.95°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 10.36mph
Words: 714
Or something.
I am the master of the meaningless non sequitur, if that's not a tautology.
Obliquely, opaquely, I am referencing my lack of productivity here.
It was a busy week. We had guests Friday and Saturday, the place needed to be straightened up, taxes prepared and I have a new hobby/passion/obsession - old transistor radios.
I more or less declared RSS bankruptcy this evening, skimming through more than a couple hundred posts, starring a few in what I expect will be a vain hope of revisiting.
Apologies to one and all who missed the marmot.
So, some updates:
Spoke to mom this morning. She's received three of seven cards I've sent so far. She reported that I didn't have her correct address, despite the fact that I've been shipping radios and little grab-sticks and the like to that address since she moved there. Correction made. Hopefully the rest will find their way to her. Judging by her smile, I think she likes them.
There's a blog post I meant to revisit and link to about how Gen-Z doesn't know how to print. Forget Gen-Z, I've forgotten how to print. I used a different card size for one card, which required a new envelope. That consumed more than an hour of one morning; and entailed a robust degree of salty sailor-talk. I finally got it to work, but I have no idea how I did it and I'm not certain I can replicate it again.
I need to take a more deliberative, investigatory approach to solving these little dilemmas, and make clear notes.
Figure the odds.
Somehow I stumbled into the radio thing again. Cameras, computers, calculators, and radios. Oy. I have a couple of transistor radios from the 60s to the 70s on hand. First was a Panasonic Panapet 70, the "ball and chain radio." Got a blue one for Christmas as a teen. They're ridiculously expensive for what they are today, because there's no price for boomer nostalgia. I bought a white one that looked pretty nasty. Fortunately, it cleaned up pretty well. Still works about as good as I recall it did when it was new.
I have a really bad looking yellow one on the way, with a cracked bottom. Some guy here in Florida was selling the bottom half of a red one. Problem solved.
My most exciting acquisition is a Hitachi TH-841. Mine is in slightly better physical condition than the one in the link. No chips, but a small crack I can fix, though it was advertised with no cracks. I also paid significantly more than that etsy one, mostly because I'm a dumbass. But I'm learning.
It has cleaned up quite well, and it works fine. It's six inches long and three and half high, so it doesn't take much space on a shelf where it looks quite cool. These radios have a much larger ferrite loop medium wave antenna than a more conventional "portrait" handheld. Not always the case, so it pays to check.
I've got a much larger radio, the Panasonic RF-2200 inbound. I will play around with it a bit before I decide whether to send it off for refurbishment. Jay Allen knows more about radios than I do. I can clean, but I don't think I can align. There's a guy who offers a service on ebay, specifically for this radio, so I may go that route. We'll see.
Finally, there's a Monarch RE-760 on the way. Delayed, apparently, by UPS. Probably get here tomorrow. I like the style, but what especially attracted me was the brand name, Monarch. I get kind of a Godzilla vibe with this radio. Might display it with one of these, which I have, because of course I do.
If there's any good news to report, it's that I've successfully talked myself out of buying five, new to me, contemporary multi-band radios in the last several days. None of them offer anything I can't already do with the six I already have, which are some very good ones, to say nothing of the six or seven I gave to my son and his boys.
Anyway, I expect "this too shall pass." But for now, it's an amusing diversion.
✍️ Reply by emailRabbit Holes
01:50 Tuesday, 5 March 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 71.24°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 85% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 955
One of the things that came up in the Tinderbox Forum discussion on using AppleScript with Tinderbox and Mail, was getting a rich text formatted link into the text of a note.
If you used AppleScript to get the URL for an email and placed it on the clipboard, it appeared in UnClutter, my clipboard manager, as clickable link. That is, click on it and it opened that email. But if you then pasted that same link into the $Text of a Tinderbox note, it was just text, not a clickable link.
It turns out that if you enter a space after that text, Tinderbox would automatically make it a link. It just needed something like a prompt.
It became irrelevant for my purposes, because it was also easy to use AppleScript to populate a URL attribute in a log entry, and that is, by design, clickable. And it kept the raw link out of the text as well.
One of the most experienced Tinderbox and AppleScript users posted an AppleScript that would get the email URI and then run a terminal command to convert it into rich text format with the subject of the email being the clickable text, and place the result onto the clipboard.
While that wasn't required for my purpose, I tried it out to get some more experience with AppleScript and the Terminal. Well, the only thing that appeared on the clipboard on my machine was the text of the subject line.
Thinking I may have omitted something obvious, I rather foolishly asked if that were the case. The answer was "No," but then I got a six paragraph commentary about using third party apps to do things that MacOS is perfectly capable of doing itself. Example:
Those can provide benefits in some situations, and can be fun to play around with. But when I’m trying to think and get work done, as opposed to play with the process, I’ve found they can be more trouble than they’re worth.
I didn't want to get into it with the guy in the forum, I'm certain he intended to be helpful, but I could have done without the commentary.
There's a certain personal attraction to various types of "purity." In my case, in the matter of blogging, it's the use of static html on a server at a URL that I have some control over, as opposed to some of the other approaches to blogging where your "content" is served up "dynamically," and woe be unto you if you don't keep up with the security updates.
Some people fetishize "plain text." A "note" can only be a plain text file, and then you use the file management and automation facilities of the OS to organize those files into whatever structure you feel best supports your needs.
There's nothing really wrong with that, except I think it gets a little tedious sometimes, proselytizing about it. I suppose when you have the "floor" in a "forum," and a great example of the superiority of your view is made manifest by the preceding question, well, it's an opportunity that is simply too hard to pass up. They can't help themselves.
Anyway, I'm fortunate in that I'm not trying to "get work done," because I'm retired. And I suppose my thinking is impaired by any number of personal flaws and failings, the least of which is perhaps my affinity for third party apps.
It did cause me to dive down a rabbit hole, trying to understand what was going on with my clipboard. I ran the terminal command in Terminal, minus the part about putting it on the clipboard, typing in the values of what had been variables in the AppleScript. The output was a lengthy bit of text that I took to be rtf markup. When I ran the command again, this time with the clipboard bit, what seemed to appear on the clipboard in UnClutter was just the subject of the email, as before.
Then I went for my walk.
I really don't know why it doesn't appear as an rtf link on the clipboard in UnClutter. I'm not sure it matters, as the amount of stuff I "don't know" about Unix and AppleScript and terminal commands could fill volumes. I'm usually content to know how to do something without really understanding why it works. This limitation is exposed when something doesn't work, despite employing the seemingly correct "how."
Sometimes I pursue it, as with Tinderbox. Other times, well, life is too short.
When you ask for help, I guess you can't be too particular about how it's delivered.
As for third party apps, there are a ton of clipboard managers. There's one built into LaunchBar, a third party app that I use that could probably be replaced by Spotlight and AppleScript and Terminal. I suppose I could read about the clipboard manager in LaunchBar and get rid of UnClutter. I don't use the Files portion that much, and the Notepad is really just where I stash a bit of text I may want to use later that might scroll off the clipboard history.
But a clipboard manager of some kind is invaluable to me. I can copy a bit of text from a web site that I intend to quote in a blog post, then copy the URL, all in Safari, switch to Tinderbox and write my blog post, switching to whichever bit of text I need in the clipboard manager. No need to switch back and forth between Safari and Tinderbox. (Yes, I know CTRL-Tab makes that trivial.)
I suppose someone could point out to me that there's a clipboard manager built into Mac OS, I just don't know about it.
✍️ Reply by emailTension
Current Wx: Temp: 69.6°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 89% Wind: 8.05mphWords: 150
Overcast today. Uninspiring. Brought along the Oly TG-6 and shot a bunch of frames with the "Grainy Film" filter, might put a couple up at Flickr.
This caught my eye. Used the OM-5 with the 14-150. SOOC.
Mostly this is to verify the workflow again. It's installed where the AppleScript calls it, and I've already checked to see if it moved the image to the correct folder, and it did. The real test will be in 2025, but at least I'm not getting any errors.
I'll be working in the Blog Test Platform TBX today. I have a few Buckaroo Banzai gifs that I'd like to post from time to time, so I'm going to borrow an idea from Jack Baty and see if I can get that set up in the BTP today and then bake it into the marmot.
Guess that's about it for now.
✍️ Reply by emailThe Insomnia Drafts
22:12 Tuesday, 5 March 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 67.78°F Pressure: 1004hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 18.41mph
Words: 1085
I received a reply to the feedback I offered on the event I attended on Saturday.
In the email I sent, I was very critical of the manner in which some information was presented to those in attendance. Not to be too elliptical, NFLT received some $400M in state revenue to purchase land or conservation easements. That was an astonishing amount of money for an organization that, to my knowledge, normally operated with an annual budget that was less than 5% of that figure.
Ordinarily, this would be good news. It wasn't the news, per se, it was the anecdotal account of the reaction to receiving it.
After describing the degree to which the president is connected in Tallahassee, one of the officials that accompanied him described the gales of laughter in the car on the drive back from Tallahassee, saying that he felt like they had made out "like pirates." After this official inexplicably offered his annual report in the form of a number of very bad haikus, the president corrected him and said that they'd "made out like privateers, and therefore, legal."
I had a visceral reaction to this. The program continued, and I couldn't immediately put my finger on what was so revolting about it.
It was on the ride home when Mitzi and I discussed that part of the program, her reaction was similar, that I was able to put my finger on it.
What was clear to me was that I had witnessed an account of the culture of cronyism in Tallahassee. Paul Renner, Speaker of the Florida House, represents a district in north Florida, not far from here. It was clear to me that this was a means of securing a legislative legacy for himself that is somewhat more redeeming than a record of performative legislation supporting Ron DeSantis' presidential ambitions, promoting division through culture wars, voter suppression and attacking marginalized citizens. All of that might be overlooked one day, given the unprecedented amount of money he was able to deliver to conserve undeveloped land in the region.
This is the same legislature that has steadfastly refused to expand Medicaid for more than a decade, leaving tens of thousands of Floridians without health insurance, and leaving billions of federal dollars on the table, which would go a long way toward alleviating many of the staffing challenges Florida is facing in its healthcare industry. (Florida faces a growing litany of challenges. "Parental rights" and "stop woke" not being among them.)
In any event, by the time I got home, I was angry and almost immediately began to write an email to the organization.
But I decided to sleep on it, and see if I still felt as strongly in the morning. Anger is a feeling, and feelings pass.
As these things go, I woke in the wee hours, still angry, and began composing the email in my head even as I tried to go back to sleep. Unlike the last time this happened, I didn't get up and just go write.
Well, I'm not sure it helped. It was the first thing I wrote that day, and I did go over the draft several times, trying to temper my remarks. Basically it followed the outlines of what I've related above, and that I found it inappropriate to the point of being offensive that they would relate this story to the members in attendance. I could go on at length about what that suggests to me, but I didn't and I won't.
Yesterday evening, about 36 hours later, I received a reply from the president. It was a lengthy, densely written piece that mostly defended his background and character, offered some flattery toward me and an invitation to get together over coffee someday. He did include a scattershot explanation of the nature of the $400M appropriation. (It was so large that before I wrote the email I was doubting that I'd heard the official correctly, and I had to do some online searching to learn that indeed, that was the correct amount.)
I think I expected one of three things in the way of response, ranked in increasing order of probability: A "You're right, we blew it. We'll do better next time. Thanks." Or, silence. Or, something along the lines of what I received, which never addressed the fundamental criticism.
My sister-in-law is still with us for a couple of more weeks. She's a social worker with a lot of experience. She said he was defending himself because he felt attacked.
I guess when you're at the top of an org chart for as long as this guy has been, when you walk the halls of power with a constellation of political luminaries (as dim as those may be), when you're feeling pretty full of yourself for landing a $400M appropriation, you're probably not accustomed to being criticized, and that it likely did feel like an attack.
So last night's insomnia was about my reply.
This is it.
Judy mentioned that I wasn't going to change him, and I know she's right. There's little point in responding to him directly.
The North Florida Land Trust does do important work that I support. The president was, as I understand it, specifically recruited for his connections to replicate the success he had in south Florida. He is a political animal, and this is the nature of the political ecology, and reality, in Florida.
I'm an insignificant donor. If I decide not to give to NFLT this year, the money will go to a similar organization doing related work.
If I remain a member, I don't think that I'll ever attend another annual meeting. What would be the point?
In an ideal world, receiving an appropriation of that magnitude would be a humbling experience. It would suggest a degree of trust and confidence in an organization's ability and integrity that, to me, might cause me to feel some trepidation. Gratitude, certainly, but a lot of humility too. And it would sober me, knowing the scale of the opportunity cost. That there are many deserving and underserved needs in Florida that will go on being underserved because that money was given to one mission.
I think there should be some awareness, some acknowledgement of that. And that any public mention of the appropriation would be made with the degree of sobriety that that awareness should engender.
But I don't live in an ideal world.
I live in Florida.
"We made out like pirates!"
✍️ Reply by emailInsufferable
11:38 Wednesday, 5 March 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 75.42°F Pressure: 1007hPa Humidity: 78% Wind: 20.71mph
Words: 213
I don't read Ezra Klein much. I've read some things he's written, but he's not the kind of author that I look forward to reading. If someone links to something he's written and recommends it, I'll give it a look. But it's not like I'd click on anything of his just because of his name.
He's never resonated much with me, I guess.
But watching him on this "podcast," just makes me want to hate him.
I don't know if it's his camera setup, the set, his tone of voice, his head tilt or what, but he just comes off as condescending and, I mean, just literally looking down his nose at his guest.
I watched the whole damn thing because the topic is important, but the guest was far more informative and easier to listen to than the host. And in that respect, I'd say it's worth your time too.
I'm not fan of Joe Rogen either, but it seems like Klein is kind of the polar opposite of Rogen in presentation, but equally as insufferable.
(Just before I uploaded this, it dawned on me that he reminds me of William F. Buckley, and that's not a good thing. Do you think that's kind of the vibe he was looking for here?)
✍️ Reply by emailOnly Murders In the Cave
17:43 Wednesday, 5 March 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 75.27°F Pressure: 1004hPa Humidity: 42% Wind: 25.32mph
Words: 209
I guess that was a bit of a spoiler if you haven't seen Paradise yet. The season wrapped this week and I'm just a little disappointed with how it ended.
It ended as it was conceived, probably, as a returning serial drama rather than a "limited series." The finale has several hooks for the next season.
Episodes 1 and 7 were the best. I thought 7 was very intense and well done. Episode 1 was just mind-blowing with the reveal. I cared about most of the characters, some were better developed than others. I'm a little unhappy with how the Jane plot line wrapped up. And I have questions about airplanes sitting, apparently fully fueled, for some number of months or years and then being ready to take off. But what do I know?
Still enjoying Only Murders In the Building, usually one episode a night. We're on season 3 now, and it seems to have lost a step. I'm not a Paul Rudd fan, and it feels like it has lost its sense of intimacy, or claustrophobia, when the suspects are cast members and not residents of the Arconia, although half the cast seem to be residents. Martin and Short are more frantic, or overplayed, too. Disappointing.
✍️ Reply by emailFoggy Morning Breakdown
12:21 Thursday, 5 March 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 39.33°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 97% Wind: 3.56mph
Words: 456
Technically, well, actually actually, it's after noon, but it's a blog. I'm here. I needed a title. And it is foggy.
Sleep has been problematic since Friday. It's never "great," but lately I've waking up in the wee hours of the morning and failing to go back to sleep. I'm usually up until 4:00 a.m. when the Puzzles in Apple News+ roll over, and then I do the Quartiles puzzle until I either complete it, or I get tired of trying. Then I do the mini-crossword, and try to go back to sleep, usually successfully. But then I'm in bed until 0730 or thereabouts, which is usually pretty late in the day for me, and it screws up my "schedule."
So that's the reason for the late start here. Unsure of when this is going to resolve itself. It also feels as though I've been grinding my teeth. Not good.
After wiring up Tinderbox and Claude, I haven't gotten back to working with it. Distracted by Trump's "special military operation," and all the other chaos this administration is inflicting on the American people.
Mitzi and I have been trying to get in better physical condition, so I've been trying to cut down (not "out") sugar in my diet. Which means I've abandoned my vanilla Häagen Das and that makes me sad. Also trying to do more than just the twice weekly workout with the personal trainer.
Since the weather has been warmer and the snow is pretty much all gone again, I've tried to be outside a little. Yesterday I began trying to rake some of the stone displaced by the plowing back into the driveway. This morning I figured I'd do a "farmer's walk" with two thirty-pound dumbbells I bought, and then do some raking.
Starting out feels pretty easy, but it's about 70 paces to the road from the porch and I really start to notice the weight about two thirds of the way down. By the time I get to the road and turn around to go back up the driveway, it's a genuine question in my mind if I'm going to make it or not. But, "one foot in front of the other," ya know, and I get to the porch with my heart pounding in my chest. I didn't die, so I'll call it a "win."
Then I went back to raking gravel. That's a workout in itself. Not that my Apple Watch seems to notice! I did that for about half an hour and my watch gave me six minutes of "exercise" credit.
Bastard.
So that's been this morning's marmot.
I may muster up the enthusiasm to play with Tinderbox and Claude this afternoon. We'll see.
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