I've had one of these same twist valves blow up and start squirting water out the top when I turned it, they seem to be crap

there are 2 outgoing water lines that are unused and the valves are shut off, and if I'm really lucky the whole leak is just crummy 30 year old valves that have started passing water through

cut the water line and pressure tested the incoming line and house, and it's leaked 3 psi in 50 minutes

this is actually good news

11 months ago I realized my water system is leaking

Still is... 19 gallons per day. Despite all my efforts so far I have not identified the leak. Seem to have ruled out the water tanks leaking, and from what I can tell the buried manifold (now excavated) is not leaking.

Best result from today's pressure test will be if I find that the old copper pipe feeding into the house is leaking. Worst result is no leak there which would mean it's probably somewhere in the 300 feet of hand-buried PEX.

it failed the first test but fingers crossed more thread tape fixed it because if not I don't have a replacement for the fitting with the slightly dodgy threads

the local mom and pop hardware store here closes at noon on saturday

every time I do plumbing there comes a point where I realize I am missing 1 part

∎

pressure testing the pressure tester

Want to write an import like this? Tutorial!

https://git-annex.branchable.com/tips/how_to_make_a_simple_importtree_special_remote/

Wrote a 58 line shell script and now #gitAnnex can treat Internet Archive items as remotes, tracking changes to files in them and downloading files from them as needed like from any other remote.

This is a new git-annex feature and it really just comes down to a few lines of shell script, with the meat of it being a `curl | jq`. The rest is boilerplate that would be the same in any script doing this for any web resource.

https://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/external/git-annex-remote-internetarchive

When my bridge camera accumulated too many hardware issues to be worth fixing after 3 years of hardcore use, I considered an interchangeable lens camera. My budget possibly could have stretched to cover a basic DSLR with a zoom lens and a macro lens, but I decided to stick to my current hack.

Would my system work for you? Who knows! Keep reading to assess.

My workhorse camera is a Nikon P1100 (almost unchanged from the Nikon P1000 it replaced, which took all of the photos above; the ones in the very last collage in this post are by the P1100).

What I love about this camera is the amazing zoom, which gives me closer-up shots than all but the most pricey DSLR lenses. I use it in place of binoculars, with the bonus that I can snap shots for ID. I’ve become so much more intimate with the lives of birds since beginning to take the Nikon out in the field!

The price tag is significant, but is low enough that I’m willing to bring my Nikon paddling on level 1 rivers without a dry bag. (A camera in a dry bag is dead weight — not many photos are going to happen that way.) I’ve only capsized once, and my instinct was to grab the camera and hold it above my head. On the other hand, I have let the Nikon get wetter than I should have during a downpour and had to wait a week for the damp to stop fogging up the inside of the lens. (Oops.)

What I don’t love:

The downside of the ultra-zoom is that it only produces non-grainy shots (especially in “bird”/burst mode) in excellent light. If I had one of those huge lenses I see on hardcore birders’ cameras, I’d get better shots…but fewer of them since I’d more frequently leave my camera at home. It’s all a tradeoff.

As you can see in the photos above, the Nikon manages moderate-scale macro pretty well. But it didn’t let me zoom in as close as I wanted to on teensy-tiny things. Which brings me to…

Macro hack:

Two years ago when I had to send my Nikon P1000 in for a repair that took months, I splurged on a second camera. The Olympus TG-6 has a “microscope mode” that lets me see much closer up, and its in-camera focus-stacking deals with the macro issue of blurring everything that’s not on the focal plane. Just like with the Nikon, the Olympus opened my eyes to a different sort of wonder, this time about the complexity of invertebrate life.

Pros and cons:

At the level of water droplets on flowers or faces on toads, the Olympus is excellent. But at the jumping-spider level it starts to lose a bit of acuity. Also, even with the in-camera LED on, I almost always need a supplemental light. Luckily, it’s cheap and simple to provide backup illumination for small, closeup things.

On the downside, the Olympus’s focus-stacking only works if absolutely nothing moves, which isn’t very realistic in the real world. A tiny bit of breeze and you get odd artifacts when you zoom in. That said, the camera makes one unstacked and one stacked photo each you push the shutter button. So even if the focus-stacking fails and your critter hops or flies away, you still have something to remember it by.

Another negative: Images tend to come out dull, so I always have to boost the colors manually afterwards. (Not a big deal, but worth knowing if you don’t post-process. Honestly, I often boost colors with my Nikon’s images too.)

The biggest downside of this camera, though, is that it’s usually in my bag, not in my hand. No wonder I have far fewer “I love this!” photos from the Olympus compared to the Nikon.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the obvious — your phone! After getting hooked on iNaturalist and Merlin, I started keeping my phone accessible in the field. Then, after upgrading to a Google Pixel 7 Pro six months ago, I really tried out that always-on-hand item to see where it excels.

Landscapes are where the Pixel usually wins over my other cameras, with an occasional good semi-macro shot. The phone also seems to be able to manage images with strong contrast of dark and light and to capture the bright colors I see better than my other cameras, which means less editing.

Finally, the Pixel zooms just well enough to snap an ID-able shot of a perched dragonfly when I’ve purposely left my camera at home so I wouldn’t get sidetracked during short exercise breaks (that cut into my writing hours more now. Oops…).

Cons: I mean, this is a phone, so don’t expect too much. Especially in the resolution department — the stats say Pixel image files are huge (and they are), but when you zoom in on the image in the computer there’s far less detail than in photos taken with a “real” camera. And that’s sticking to the 1x an 5x sizes that don’t require a digital zoom.

To sum it all up: When folks ask what camera I use and I share the information above, they usually look at me funny. But all three cameras (refurbished) cost less than the price of a very basic interchangeable lens setup. And I have backups if one fails.

One bridge, one mini, and one phone. It works for me. Maybe for you too?

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_{Note on links: all links in this post are affiliate links, which means I get a few pennies if you click then buy. But my honest opinions above are entirely my own.}

excited this morning about writing a short shell script

The highlight of the week was stumbling across multiple broods of Green Herons just released from the nest. The one above was part of a group of three with baby fluff still sprouting from their foreheads.

In contrast, the young heron shown in this video (interspersed with an adult for contrast) seemed to be on its own. I hope it gets better at fishing fast!

The adult from the video, or another one, visited the fluff-fledgling bush with a mass of food in its gullet about fifteen minutes later. I wasn’t fast enough to catch the moment adult bill met baby bill and food was downloaded, but I thought you might enjoy some of the not-quite-in-focus snaps as the parent called its baby in.

Have a happy, herony week!

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Unfortunately this is the kind of actor who seems to be driving the Haskell Foundation these days. Well them and the finance bros.

AI pilled CEO is on the haskell discourse claiming that this vibecoded patch

a) saves them $200k/year in AWS fees
b) "Solving this problem by hand would have been so difficult"
c) "Testing this without LLMs would have been an absolute nightmare."

https://github.com/scarf-sh/gateway/commit/c45a4599742217b1957198a8a652d70b12a704f0.diff

I am dying laughing. Once you get past the indentation level changes, the meat of this is a check for /v2 in an url, followed by a little bit of url munging. Oh and a random timeout change thrown in for good measure.

https://discourse.haskell.org/t/after-7-years-in-production-scarf-has-reluctantly-moved-away-from-haskell/14380/48

Yatesville Lake, Kentucky, is about halfway between where I currently live and my previous stomping grounds, so I’ve dropped by a couple of times in transit. But this week was the first visit where I spent real time there.

Surprising nature highlight: Mushrooms!!! There were so many of them, often big enough to draw my eye from the water. My favorites were the Amanitas just starting to drop their veils, but there were also boletes and brittlegills and many others. Of course, mushrooms are very rain-dependent, but this is definitely a spot to visit when it’s been wet.

Plant diversity is also high. A cool find this time around was Pigeonwings (shown above with a baby katydid in the flower). This legume is one of those oddball species that grows both here and in Asia.

In general, the rocky shore creates an ecological niche that I don’t spend much time in. So I always seem to find something new-to-me at Yatesville Lake, which has included Purple False Foxglove and Virginia Meadowbeauty on other trips.

While animal sightings were relatively low, the rocky shore has a good population of Fence Lizards. I also saw a tiny mantid that might be my first sighting of the native Carolina Mantis (versus the invasive and much larger Chinese Mantis). And I heard ravens and learned Summer Tanager calls. Okay, so maybe there was more wildlife present than I’m giving the lake credit for…

The water is perfect for swimming with a sandy bottom in most places. On the downside, that means the lake is very busy. Think fishing boats starting at dawn and jet skis and motorboats roaring into life around 9 am and continuing until dark, unless…

…you paddle west into the Wildlife Management Area and go up a side cove. There, I learned it’s easy to be completely alone all day. I only barely dipped my toe into this vast wild part of the lake!

My home base this time around was a boat-in campsite. As you can see, there is a road to these campsites, but it’s only used by the park staff. If you camp midweek and peruse the reservation form to choose a site as far from other campers as possible, you can get a bit of serenity here even in the high season. Don’t expect true solitude though.

Pros: gorgeous views of the lake from the tent pads and you have your own stretch of lake to swim in and launch from. Vault toilets and water (potable?) are also available very close to each site. I grade this camping experience a C (but keep in mind my preference is dispersed camping with no people in sight).

All things considered, Yatesville Lake is worth a repeat visit…especially since my favorite camping lake and my favorite backup camping lake are both closed for two years due to dam slips. But I’m going to keep looking for that true solitude lake within an easy drive!

Exploring converted filling stations and solar powered EV chargers in South Carolina

One minute video on how to handle the heat by: finding water, immersing in beauty, focusing on something else, taking a bath, getting up early, going for a swim (even if you’re a squirrel), and relaxing on a cool rock…all in the time it takes for a Central Ratsnake* to cross our driveway. The sounds are dulled because even the birds were panting instead of singing on those hot afternoons…

*Yes, the species I grew up calling Black Ratsnake and had just trained myself to call Gray Ratsnake got split again by the geneticists this week. As of today, this beauty is a Central Ratsnake.

Favorite photo of the week: Green Heron preening, best of 70 photos taken in bird mode before my model got tired of posing.

Current seasonal highlights: catching spiderwebs gleaming in the sun and the first colored buckeye leaves, a few already on the ground.

Don’t forget to go out and play! And:

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My house has the same amount of solar, passive HVAC, 1/10th the battery and inverter, can charge my car 3x as fast.

Dad's new and older solar arrays

https://www.youtube.com/live/VsnqWp3r7yA?is=DzNPx6uc0Xygq5qz 

  Had fun!

Retrospective: I visited Drake Bay in December 2019. Despite that being quite a while ago, I keep recommending the location to folks, so I figured I should write up my thoughts for ease of future sharing.

This is one of the trips I keep going back to when I want a mini mental break, so I feel like I’ve spent months in Drake Bay. In reality, I was there for just five immersive days (four nights).

Getting there: My friends in Drake Bay gave me the mid-budget recommendation we followed. Their Costa Rica rule: do not plan your international flight and your in-country hop on the same day.

So we spend our first night near the airport in San Jose (not as boring as I expected since I saw parrots in the parking lot the next morning!), then we took a small flight* to Drake Bay. Our Airbnb host arranged to have us picked up at the teensy-tiny airport in a four-wheel-drive vehicle that bounced along roads and through shallow water to our secluded home base.

* We flew on Skyway, but they are now defunct and Sansa fills the same niche.

#1 highlight: Sitting on the balcony drawing or watching a sloth, toucans, monkeys, and macaws. I highly recommend this Airbnb or the other one next door managed by the same host. He arranged tours, let my try my broken Spanish then used his excellent English when my brain got tired, and provided the perfect atmosphere to relax and be amazed by wildlife. Plus, the AC was appreciated on hot and very humid days.

#2 highlight: A boat ride north up the coast past a seabird-nesting rock then into a mangrove-laden paradise where we could watch reptiles, birds, bats, monkeys, and so many other things as we slowly cruised past. If you take one tour, I recommend this one over Corcovado, which was cool but people-filled and without the slow naturalist pace I enjoy (plus gave me a very painful blister between my toes when I didn’t dry my feet well enough after the water landing). I don’t have a link to the mangrove tour, but it will be on the Airbnb host’s recommended roster.

#3 highlight: Great company, including both my amazing traveling companion and the expert natural-history knowledge of our local friends. While you can’t fully replicate my good luck in this department, you can enjoy their Night Tour.

#4 highlight: Walking along footpaths through the rainforest to Cocalito Beach — a hidden treasure with no one else around. There aren’t roads in most of the area, and the paths are the way to get around…while also picking up beautiful flowers off the ground, ambling over a swinging bridge, and being awed by wildlife. This part of the trip felt very much like Monteverde in 2001.

#5 highlight: Food! Walking a few blocks to the town center to buy delicious fruit then gorging on amazing papayas back at our Airbnb was the highlight, but the smoothies were also excellent and so was a restaurant meal on a rooftop overlooking the ocean.

(Chocolate was in short supply though. Maybe bring your own if you’re a chocoholic like me?)

New additions to my iNaturalist life list: 76 (My previous trip to Costa Rica was pre-iNaturalist, so some of these were old favorites. Also, I have no clue why I hadn’t reported Black Vultures previously since I see them almost monthly at home. I’m a hit-or-miss iNaturalister.)

Would I go back? In a heartbeat! I like to visit new locations, so Drake Bay hasn’t returned the top of the list yet. But just writing this post pushed it up a notch…

Photo notes: These pictures were taken with my previous point-and-shoot camera, which boasts a less intense zoom than my current bridge camera. In other words, the wildlife was pretty darn close!

_{Note on links: I don’t get any kickback if you choose any of the excellent Drake Bay folks I’ve recommended, but the link to the camera is an affiliate link and I’ll get a few pennies if you buy anything on Amazon soon after clicking on it. Thanks for paying for my next camera battery!}

I've spent about 100 hours of work to make sure git-annex can build without dependencies that contain LLM generated code. At least so far.

https://git-annex.branchable.com/no_llm_code/

This has me reconsidering my continued use of #haskell

I am actively reviewing my dependencies and expect to have less of them shortly.

gotta love a 1489 line git commit message written by a LLM that just

https://github.com/yesodweb/yesod/commit/1ee25122d82f8f94136bf1496a825c6c00b74fcf

The highlight of this week was carving out a full Saturday to paddle…in the rain. I thought I’d planned ahead with all the food and water and spare batteries I’d need, but didn’t realize that if I used my poncho to protect the electronics I’d end up running out of dry fabric for cleaning lenses!

Despite having to put the cameras away eventually, there’s nothing like a steady stream of water to anchor me in my own skin. Eating the first wild dewberries and blackberries of the year plus harvesting the first chanterelles was also a plus.

New thing I learned this week: Yellow False Foxgloves (Aureolaria spp.) are in the Broomrape family (along with Bearcorn). And, like the other members of that family, they’re parasitic on the roots of other plants (in their case, they steal water and nutrients from oak trees).

In the photos above, the yellow flowers on the left is Aureolaria, which was beside a lovely Russula mushroom, which is the same type of fungus the Box Turtle is chowing down on in the middle picture. The photo on the right is an American Snout Fly on Jewelweed, added just because I liked the yellow-yellow-yellow lineup.

Sensory feature: Did you know that if you scoop a drowning Luna Moth out of the water, her feet will cling to you with the sharp tenacity of beetle legs? (In the video, she’s hidden in the niche she crawled to after I offered her a spot on dry land.)

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deferred running the hot water heater until the heat of the day... time to suck the heat out of this place like a good little energy vampire

In 2020, I learned that the peak firefly season (in the eastern U.S.) is right around the Fourth of July. More recently, I’ve gotten into oding and am learning that dragonflies and damselfies (Odonata) have seasons as well.

Odonata spend most of their life as nymphs underwater. Here in southeast Ohio, the first emergence depends on the weather but usually happens in April, with more and more adults showing up until we hit the peak around the middle of June.

Most interesting (to me) Odonata fact: Many Odonata species are like spring wildflowers in that they only show up as adults for a short time.

Best way to get photos of Odonata: Go out in a kayak first thing in the morning as nymphs crawl up onto rushes and sedges then break out of their exoskeletons. For a few hours, the newborn creatures are pale and soft and — critically for those of us without a fast shutter finger — not yet able to fly.

Best time of day for Odonata: Despite what I just said above, dragonflies and damselflies are sluggish until the day warms up. To see the maximum number, go out in the afternoon (but then they’ll be moving fast!).

Most addictive element of oding: Here in Ohio, Odonata enthusiasts are even faster to ID on iNaturalist than birders are.

My iNaturalist Odonata life list to date: 59 species

Odonata I don’t even try to identify to species: Bluets (except for Orange Bluets which are orange, not blue…)

Biggest danger of oding: You have to look down to notice most of them, which means fewer pictures of birds!

Recommended reading: If you live in my state, A Naturalist’s Guide to the Odonata of Ohio is well worth the price.

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_{Note on links: I only recommend books I adore, but I do get a few pennies if you buy the guide I recommend using the affiliate link above.}

The last official day of spring on Lake Rupert felt like paddling through a Monet painting.

Summer Solstice dawned foggy at Dow Lake, which made for some gorgeous spiderwebs. It took me a while to paddle around this trio and figure out that backlit by the sun was coolest shot.

And today felt like the last day cool enough to make the sunny parts of the bike path fun as dog-day cicadas start easing into song.

I spent most of my outdoors time this week obsessively recording dragonfly and damselfly species, but I looked up long enough to enjoy this Yellow Warbler flitting through the canopy. I also saw the most gorgeous male Scarlet Tanager, but he moved so fast the only photo I got was with my eyes.

And, of course, I looked at lots and lots of Odonata. More about them in my next post…

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cistern 40% full

got very lucky with rain and might be able to refill the cistern in a few days, rather than a few weeks

Solstice brought a #solar power record here, and the closest I've gotten to being able to see the full curve of my arrays.

24.5 kwh generated, with 7 kwh going to the water heater and 10 kwh to the car. Both dump loads well dialed in to match available power.

Now that I've installed a liner in my cistern, I have to religiously protect the feet of the stepladder from puncturing it.

So if you see this load of laundry on the line, you might have spotted a member of the church of Ladder-Day Socks.

#dadjoke

"lizard ladder" is on my todo list for today

after redirecting about 30 million hits of facebook's DDOS scrapers from my cgit to facebook.com/robots.txt over the course of 2 weeks, they seem to have finally gotten the message

amazing

Two weeks ago, I finished the first draft of my current novel, so last week was adventure time! Lake Erie is the closest Big Water to where I live, and I love ferries so a return to Kelley’s Island seemed in order.

Disappointment: big water & June = many people

Unexpected excitement: stops at Cranberry Bog State Nature Preserve on the way up up and Brown’s Lake Bog on the way back were pure geeky delight!

Rarest (sub)species sighted: Lake Erie Watersnake (very easy to see swimming just offshore from the lakefront campsites on Kelley’s Island)

Number of new species added to my iNaturalist life list: 13 (but three were invasive species…). My favorite was the Sphagnum Sprite (damselfly, not pictured). Four others are pictured: Hairy Beardtongue (white flower), Calico Pennant (dragonfly), Rose Pogonia (peachier flower), and Tuberous Grasspink (magenta flower).

Coolest behavior: Grackles collecting huge mouthfuls of mayflies on the beach (presumably for their chicks)

My coolest behavior: First time I felt secure enough to paddle in Lake Erie (albeit in a in a protected cove — the one the campground is nestled within).

Would I go back? To the bogs, in a heartbeat! To Kelley’s Island? Only during the off season…

idk maybe this is the apocalypse we deserve

percent of LWN comments about Conservancy's LLM document that engage with any of the ethical concerns in it: 6%

percent that are pro LLM use: 14%

(The rest are mostly quibbling over how to annotate it in commit messages, which I don't take as *strongly* pro, but certainly leans pro.)

The document tries to get people to engage with the ethics of AI use and make principled decisions, but at the same time it slants decisions toward AI use. It is deeply flawed.

cracked a rib -5 con

#caturday

successfully shot a lizard out of a pipe

And then you get to be in bash heavy material back toward the walls mini game for a long time.

Ever wanted to feel like a video game character? Try installing a heavy liner in a water cistern. Nothing like dangling off a wall and doing a leap out to land in the small space in the middle, avoiding the produce (sacks of rice and potatoes used as weights).

Having slept on Conservancy's "Recommendations When Using LLM-backed Generative AI Systems for FOSS Contributions" I think my takeaway is that I am actually not saving the world. I have no interest in doing so. I'll do my own little things that will be used by the people who find them useful. If this means lessened engagement in the "software freedom" community who are busy prompting proprietary systems because they've decided they're the second coming of RMS, so be it.

time to cathederal up

Somehow I have not actually deployed any AI slop removal tech until today when I turned on https://github.com/Stevoisiak/Stevos-AI-Blocklist

Submitted Plugshare's new AI review summaries and happy they quickly blocked those.

This is somehow the featured website on https://earlyweblinks.com/ this week.

Read all about my web site here! https://earlyweblinks.com/site-of-the-week/joey-hess

Kind of reminds me of back in 1995 or so when my website would randomly end up picked by some best of the web list that I never heard of. The web is still a small place I guess.

Maybe I should join a web ring or something?

Interesting to see what people are getting up to with vibe coding and then reverting that in the next release without any indication of what bug it introduced.

In other news, replaced a git-annex dependency and sped it up by about 400%