Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
Some #butterflies from an exhibit, including a banded orange, a postman, an two morphos (they had SO many morphos)…
one of which decided to land on my leg and stay there. They had made it clear that we were not to touch the butterflies so as not to damage the wings with skin oils, so when it still hadn’t left after a couple of minutes, I asked a staff member to remove it, and they coaxed it away with a sponge brush soaked in gatorade.
Reply to @brion’s remarks about VR and screen resolution
I think until they can make higher-res displays, a lot of it depends on finding a gameplay/use case that works better with the interface. I’ve tried a bunch of games with VR modes, and a bunch of games that are VR-based but could easily be screen-based, but only a few that are actually better in VR.
Beat Saber’s one of the best. You slice cubes with lightsabers in time to music. It really wouldn’t be as effective on a regular screen, even with something like a wiimote.
I imagine FPS and stealth games would work pretty well too. I played a demo of a Star Wars game at the mall a couple of years ago that was impressive, at least for the first experience.
Kid just found this parody of The Sound of Silence as “Portal: The Sound of Science” 😂
In other video gaming news, the kid has discovered Portal 2. “Shut up, GladOS!” is a frequent refrain.
(Also: we’re playing through the co-op levels for the first time. I’m really impressed at how well they’re designed to *require* co-op strategy.)
Realized what I like about No Man’s Sky is that it combines aspects of Minecraft (which I’ve played a LOT over the last 5 years) and Wing Commander: Privateer (which I played a LOT of back in the 1990s).
Both open-ended, self-directed sandboxes. Like Minecraft you seek out resources and build equipment and bases. Like Privateer you fly through space and do different types of missions depending on what you want to do.
Bought a bicycle head/taillight set as part of a curbside pickup order. It arrived without the taillight. Went in to exchange it for a complete set.
The only one left was missing the headlight.
Customer service rep agreed it was simplest to just combine them!
Kid keeps talking about “btools” on Roblox and I keep hearing it as “bee tools” and interpreting that as the “cow tools” from The Far Side.
A #MonarchButterfly spotted while walking around the neighborhood the other day.
#nature #photo #butterfly #flowers
We have a flock – or more likely several flocks – of feral parakeets in town. I saw these two going after the sunflowers in someone's front yard. #birds
On PixelFed.Social
On Twitter
On iNaturalist (1)
Me: brew update curl
brew: proceeds to update 60 packages including MySQL, ImageMagick, ffmpeg, python, and all their dependencies…
…not just shark week, but shark week in the *Bermuda Triangle* 🙄
Some #florespondence from last weekend’s walk at the botanic gardens.
I didn’t write down what the yellow flower is, but iNat suggests it’s Senna didymobotrya, a cassia native to Africa.
The magnolia was a popular nectar spot: every single flower that I could see had multiple bees crawling around in it.
#flowers #plants #nature #photo
(following up on battery/drive trouble)
Laptop has been shipped out and back with a new battery, seems to be working fine. 🎉
New HDD should arrive tomorrow, but I’ve got all the data off of the one where SMART was indicating likely failure within 24 hours 😱 and was able to wipe it before it died.
And now my desktop monitor is dying. 🤦♂️ Admittedly it’s 12 years old and isn’t even full HD, but FFS, the timing…
Robocall from power company apologizing for the 2-hours-long-and-counting outage at my address, assuring me it’ll be fixed soon and they’ll keep me posted.
Me: What power outage?
My best guess: Either someone reported the wrong address for an outage, or there was an outage nearby that didn’t impact my building. But I didn’t see any repair trucks when I went outside, either.
The kids' event at the South Coast Botanic Garden this month(?) is a search for #gnomes that have been scattered around the grounds.
Sculpture at the garden. There are a half dozen pieces scattered around the grounds of this botanical garden. Pictured here are Fuller (as in Buckminster) by Doris Sung and Trace by Nancy Graves.
Fuller is near the entrance, so I see it most times I go walking there, but Trace is waaaaay on the other side.
#sphere #photo #art #buckyball #outdoor #sculpture
1. Had to take the laptop in due to imminent battery failure. Apple apparently designed a laptop that their own techs can’t service, so they had to send it in to swap the battery.
I remember an older model MacBook where I was able to order the replacement battery, have it shipped to my home, and then swap it out using a coin to turn the latch.
2. Had to pull recent stuff off the storage drive in the desktop due to imminent drive failure (thank you SMART warnings!), which is manifesting itself in a drastic collapse of data throughput, which is of course slowing down the process of getting those recent files onto a drive that’s in better shape.
At least I don’t have to run out and buy a replacement drive on a holiday. But it’s still not what I wanted to do with the afternoon.
I spotted this squirrel as it ran up to the trash can opening. Once it decided I wasn’t going to leave, it jumped down, then ran past the trash can and apparently found something to eat, though I couldn’t see what.
