As a venture backed company, you could take that money and spend it on making your technology better than the offerings of your competitors, or you could spend it lobbying politicians to draft bills that limit the choice of solution to the one your company makes, whether it is the best option or not.
Luckily, some state governors are not caught out by this blatant attempt at blocking competition & forcing schools to spend their limited funds on just one company.
In addition to posting photos here, I have also been adding them to my new photography website (repurposing a domain I already owned). You can see the California birds in their gallery:
A small white-crowned sparrow jumping in the grass underneath bird feeders. These little birds seem to be happy feeding off the ground or from the feeders (as long as there are no finches on the feeder at the same time).
Totally out of my budget, but just watching that straight at the end of the lap, with speeds north of 340 km/h is terrifying. And I know from experience that camera footage looks a lot slower than it feels when you're in the driver seat. That is getting close to double the fastest I've ever driven a car...
These little Anna’s hummingbirds are also regulars in front of our house even though they don’t eat anything from our feeders. They’re also pretty hard to catch in flight (they do like to rest on this tree between feeding trips to a flower below). This time it stopped to try to eat from the blossom tree.
Today’s bird photo is a female house finch. These are the most common visitors to our feeder, and they perch in the tree outside the French doors in our bedroom in between feeding. They’re getting more used to me being there with the camera too. This one was eating one of the buds on the tree too.
We took my wife's Q5 down to LA, mainly because my 91 year old mother-in-law doesn't like getting in & out of the Taycan. Didn't need fuel for the car en route, but both ways we stopped twice for 30+ minutes each time anyway (for restrooms, lunch and just to stretch our legs). And in all the places we stopped (4 different ones in total), there were chargers (Electrify Americ, Tesla and sometimes ChargePoint too). No real time difference to take an EV vs ICE any longer.
A mourning dove. Fairly regular visitor now to the ground below the feeder, but very hard to get good photos of as it is ultra-timid and leaves at the slightest sound or motion.
These house finches are regular visitors to our front yard feeders, often waiting in the nearby tree until I bring out food in the morning and going up there between eating.
I finally managed to get a shot of the Anna’s hummingbird that hangs around the front of our house (it likes one of the flowers we have there).
It perches on the branch here in between feeding sessions (given how fast it flaps its wings, taking a break between feeding makes a lot of sense to me!).
So, our heat pump water heater (WiFi connected, of course) started sending me these late night alerts. Warnings that the "discharge temperature" was too high.
Called their tech support folks today, and refreshingly the first person I spoke with was able to walk me through starting test mode, get the diagnostic readings, tell me the evap thermistor needs changing, and arrange to ship one out & send me a how-to video for fitting it.
Buried in the end of this article is the concerning line that the extra power these states are looking for to power AI data centers and increasing numbers of factories is potentially going to come at the expense of climate goals. Or, in other words, they'll build fossil fuel powered plants rather than encouraging renewable power sources.
Took this while I was out shooting the Canada Geese, using the 100-400mml lens, which really isn’t ideal for flower macros, but it came out better than I expected.
This is escallonia, or redclaw, a pink flowering hedge plant that we have around the neighborhood.
@pixel I might have to look at the EF lenses too - I have the converter already to use my old EF 28-135 that I love (and works really well on the R7 with the adapter), so I could also get an EF version of the L series lens and I'm sure it would work just as well. Haven't seen any AF issues through the old lens.
@Bluedonkey I wish I could find a converter that goes the other way (use an RF lens on EF mount) I've been drooling over the RF24-240mm F4-6.3 since it came out. that range is amazing, and the size of the lens is so small for such a range