@midendian@mastodon.social avatar

midendian

@midendian@mastodon.social

Nerd, bear 🏳️‍🌈, hacker, cyclist, traveler, avgeek, geographer, San Franciscan. He/him. KJ6DYS. Landscape photographer and space-borne image sensor enthusiast.

(Also same name on sfba.social.)

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

midendian, to SanFrancisco
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fun afternoon at the Bay Model in Sausalito. the pumps weren’t running today so it was a bit more post-apocalyptic than intended. https://www.spn.usace.army.mil/Missions/Recreation/Bay-Model-Visitor-Center/The-Bay-Model-Journey/

Photo of the interior of a large wooden building containing the hydrological model of a vast watershed; from the middle foreground a signpost says FOSTER CITY, broken in two, the first part dangling precariously as if the dream of suburban living has finally faded into distant memory.
Photo of the interior of a large wooden building containing the hydrological model of a vast watershed; in the foreground a dilapidated rendering of the Golden Gate Bridge is threaded by an enormous green monster (toy).
Photo of blue sky quickly being obscured by an aggressive marine fog; a red bridge is barely visible in the center, under no threat from the monster of a green hills to the right.

midendian,
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Many photos on the signs at the Bay Model are credited to Robert Campbell, who seems to have been very active in aerial photography in the 90s and early 2000s. Great stuff. https://www.robertcampbellphotography.com/san_francisco.html

Ortho view or SFO’s terminal complex
Summer sunset view of San Francisco downtown with fog and Mount Tam
Oblique aerial of San Francisco’s sunset district

brunoph, to random
@brunoph@breakpoint.cafe avatar

It's hard to pick favorites, as many of my photos turned out pretty good. So here's a few picked to give you an idea of how varied the show was tonight.

this photo was taken just moments after the previous one. the angle is almost identical, but now the columns are mostly green, with some faint red, purple, and blue also visible
the sky seen straight upwards. the aurora seems to pour down from the heavens like a cosmic shower. it spirals in a great mix of green, purple, red, yellow, and white. some of the sight is blocked by trees, giving it an immense sense of scale
now looking towards the bay again, the aurora seems to emanate from the corner of the frame, spreading outwards in a fan. there's a bright red column in the middles, and many more columns of green around it. they all reflect off the water

midendian,
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@brunoph gorgeous! where did you end up watching from?

brunoph, to random
@brunoph@breakpoint.cafe avatar

Bought a TC-14EII 1.4x teleconverter for my telephoto lens, and Nikon lists the AF-S 105mm ƒ/2.8 macro lens as compatible but with "AF not possible", which made no sense since it's a very fast lens.

So I connected it to my Z6ii and… it worked fine! Fast AF too! Hmm… Maybe a recent firmware update fixed it?

So I tried on my 2006 F75 film camera and… it also worked!!

What the hell Nikon…

midendian,
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@brunoph maybe it just didn’t work with the era of DSLRs that had a separate phase detect array (pre-mirrorless)?

midendian, to random
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I think my takeaway from this is that I should de-rate my trust in other people’s air purifiers as the room CO2 concentration goes up. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47777-5

midendian, to SanFrancisco
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some hands-on radio engineering going on atop @SutroTower this afternoon.

Close-up of enormous red radio tower covered in antennas, with a gondola hanging from each side, one containing two humans.

midendian, to Oakland
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brunoph, (edited ) to random
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The fact this cable is possible and exists is equal parts cursed and amazing.

Update: it sucks lol – check my reply below

midendian,
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@brunoph ohh I didn’t realize you could buy them now. I’ve got several I’ve made from old power bricks and those cheap PD trigger boards from Amazon.

midendian,
@midendian@mastodon.social avatar

@brunoph alas, that’s unfortunate. well you could chop the barrel off and wire it to one of these (get the one with terminal blocks mounted so no soldering). https://www.alexwhittemore.com/notes-on-usb-pd-triggers-and-zy12pdn-instructions/

brunoph, to random
@brunoph@breakpoint.cafe avatar

Hoping clouds stay absent so I can try chasing 12P/Pons-Brooks tonight after sunset

midendian,
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@brunoph is today the last day for the northerners? I kept forgetting alas.

midendian, to random
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A decade ago this week, I learned that they open the Trinity test site to the public twice a year and I was underemployed so convinced @mct to go on a roadtrip why not. The Trinity site was interesting but the real treat was stopping at the VLA the day before. I was just starting to dabble in signal processing and one of the tour guides was working on their FPGAs—I learned a lot. Also the weather was incredible. https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=80321933%40N00&sort=date-taken-desc&text=&view_all=1&min_taken_date=1396335600&max_taken_date=1397631599

Very Large Array radio dishes in dry grassland with two pairs of train tracks extending to the horizon
Very Large Array radio dish portrait with dramatic stormy and blue sky behind.
Large red railroad machine with rotatable wheels for moving VLA dishes, contrasted with dry grassland and dramatic stormy skies

xek, to random
@xek@hachyderm.io avatar

Google will start replacing search results with a chatbot soon. Duckduckgo is an excellent search engine; I switched to it a year or so ago. Whenever I accidentally wind up using google to search, it takes a minute to realize why the results are so crappy.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/google-search-will-start-automatically-showing-a-chatbot-to-some-users/

midendian,
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@xek I dunno ddg is also pretty terrible the last few months.

midendian, to random
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the internet has gotten very dumb but somehow I can still watch an hour on fixing test card generators from forty years ago so not all is lost. https://youtu.be/4XWZ4RnHk4g

midendian, to random
@midendian@mastodon.social avatar

another lovely one-runway day at SFO.

mattblaze, to photography
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

United Nations Secretariat Building, New York, 2021.

All the pixels, disagreeing about everything at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/51381729335

midendian,
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@mattblaze nicely done! I wonder if the guard house was in the original design.

midendian, to Birds
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two weeks into the new year. no airplanes of note this weekend but some good birds.

Snowy egret skimming San Francisco bay.
A white swimming bird (some kind of loon?) slurping up a fish in San Francisco Bay.
A yellow full moon rising over the Oakland hills, partly obscured by radio antennas and squished a bit from atmospheric refraction. East Bay city lights in the foreground.

midendian, to random
@midendian@mastodon.social avatar

So they’re just proposing to build pre-car Main Street neighborhoods but with no permitting processes, as if we didn’t just do that a century ago and discovered it gets complicated quickly. Typical “if we could just start from scratch we’d do it so much better” attitude you see at every software org. https://sfyimby.com/2024/02/yimby-interview-with-california-forever.html

petes_bread_eqn_xls, to random
@petes_bread_eqn_xls@mastodo.neoliber.al avatar

Yeah, I'm a single issue voter. Check out my bumper sticker.

midendian,
@midendian@mastodon.social avatar

@petes_bread_eqn_xls or, in systems engineering, a python script…

geographile, to random
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Maybe the airlines could have covered the bart tickets
https://sfba.social/@MsMerope/111882244898642297

midendian,
@midendian@mastodon.social avatar

@geographile it’s even worse most likely. not enough passport control folks at OAK to get them ground side (which might get charged back to the airline?), and the airline no doubt eager to get the aircraft in position for its return flight.

in this particular case they got very unlucky; if they’d just held for another fifteen minutes or so they could have made it in. the wind suddenly shifted and SFO changed runways and their capacity doubled.

midendian, to random
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“good morning everyone, hope you enjoyed your breakfast. we’re going to spend the fifteenth hour of this flight trying to land at SFO.”

midendian,
@midendian@mastodon.social avatar

was running on a single runway for most of the day. Wind pushed both departures and arrivals to RWY 10 (already a rare condition) but 10R is closed for repairs. Luckily once the worst of the wind started mid-afternoon, the direction had changed enough to move to 19L/R—with an obvious relief in the voices of the controllers.

But still a fun afternoon hanging out with the resident seagull population of the Tanforan Target parking lot.

Air France 777 arriving SFO RWY 10L in bouncy stormy conditions
British Airways A380 arriving KSFO RWY 10L in very windy conditions
Six seagulls (one brown) standing in pairs in a parking lot with a green hill in the background reading SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO / THE INDUSTRIAL CITY in white letters

midendian,
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Not usually much for video but it’s difficult to convey how dynamic wind shear is with stills.

SkyWest ERJ in AA colors bobbing around in the wind above the Tanforan Target store. They decide to go around quite early in the clip but the bouncing would have still be very unpleasant in the cabin.

midendian,
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@mattblaze yeah you can see an increase in the exhaust when they decide this is not a good idea.

midendian, to SanFrancisco
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watching the clouds move in.

Raven looking at the Golden Gate Bridge from the headlands
Boiling clouds on the horizon above the golden gate with green hills in shadow in the foreground

midendian, to random
@midendian@mastodon.social avatar

went to my “want to go” map to add a pin for the original El Torito of bootable CD-ROM fame and realized I’ve already eaten there several times without realizing it. it appears to be a much better restaurant now.

https://nondeterministic.computer/@mjg59/111516285779147860

midendian,
@midendian@mastodon.social avatar

(Had lunch at what was once the CD-ROM-related El Torito this week and can confirm it is better than the original restaurant.)

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