I just tried out this new deep learning tech, Deep Nostalgia, on a couple of old photos of our parents. You give it an old still photo and it generates a “Live Photo” animation from it – pretty freaky:
Author: Chris
Joshua Tree and the Mojave Desert
After the long delay in building out the van due to Covid-19 shutdowns, keeping indoors from the widespread smoke and wildfires, dealing with several pet health issues (and emergency), then more Covid lockdowns across the state, we were finally able to take the Traveling Cat Adventure Van (II) out on a week-long maiden voyage. We headed south to Joshua Tree National Park and the Mojave National Preserve, away from the storms and snow in the mountains.
All the campgrounds across the state had been closed until recently and not surprisingly, all the campgrounds were already booked up in Joshua Tree and the first-come, first-serve sites filled by Thursday afternoon when we arrived. Not a big deal though as there is dispersed camping allowed in the BLM land just north of the park in and around the Coyote Lake dry lake bed. As the nearest national park to the greater Los Angeles area, Joshua Tree was already fairly busy on Friday but turned crazy busy on Saturday so we moved on to the much quieter and deserted Mojave National Preserve on Sunday.
The van proved to be super comfortable and worked well for the two of us and the cats, including having to hunker down multiple nights in the midst of heavy wind storms. We can easily see spending any amount of time (weeks or months) traveling and living out of the van. And with the smaller size, it’s so nice to be able to easily go and park anywhere, unlike the previous 25-foot Leisure Travel Vans RV.
Click through for the full gallery:
Skiing Through a Pandemic
In mid-January, we migrated up to Tahoe to spend a few weeks in the snow. Darlene didn’t feel up to skiing with her current hip and ankle issues so I was just skiing solo, going out every other day while she kept busy at the house.
All of the resorts have implemented rules to keep folks from spreading the virus, like face coverings and social distancing around the lifts and resort, but of course you still see the usual sampling of not helpful behaviors. I went to Alpine Meadows and Squaw Valley on the quiet mid-week days and Homewood on busier days – around weekends and fresh powder days – so it was possible to avoid lift lines and sharing lift chairs. (Sharing a six-person chair with one other rider seemed fine though.) I planned on Northstar a couple of times, but one day the pass was closed due to a big rig slide out and the other day I saw how the required parking lot bus was loading up with people and decided to go elsewhere – plus it would seem that they’re insisting on loading solo riders every other seat on the chairs. I’m not so keen on that despite the open air.
Started out with limited snow and seriously hard frozen stuff anywhere off the groomed runs from several weeks of warm weather but happily we then got a cold front and multiple heavy snows (5+ feet) over a week or two. Lots of powder to play in. Meanwhile, back at the house, we “relocated” a series of squirrels over a couple of weeks but I’m not sure we’ve caught the culprits living inside the vaulted ceiling.
Two Giants Meet in the Sky
Jupiter and Saturn meet in the sky… it’s a conjunction! Their closest appearance will be right after sunset today, December 21st, 2020. Here’s the view 10 days ago on December 10th and they’re about the moon’s width apart:
Clouds obscured the view off and on Monday evening (Dec. 21st), but it was still visible at times:
Here’s the view through an 8″ Schimdt-Cassegrain type telescope on the 20th:
I combined three different levels of exposure above to mimic what you see with your eye through the telescope because a single camera exposure just blows out Jupiter and Saturn to make the moons visible. (Note the view is also inverted left to right in a Schimdt-Cassegrain telescope due to the final angled mirror in the light path.)
Here’s video of all three nights through the telescope:
Sunsets and Bike Rides
Flying All Over the Planet
I’ve been enjoying the new Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 which features the ability to fly anywhere in the world with often amazing displays of detail and realism, including live weather effects. If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s several written reviews (IGN, Polygon, Gamerant) and a few showcase videos:
(notice all the detail in the cockpit: sunlight, reflections in the windshield, etc.)
I’m running MS Flight Simulator on my 16″ 2019 MacBook Pro, an ultrawide LG monitor (3440 x 1440) and a Logitech G Pro Flight Yoke system with rudder pedals. (A yoke is much easier to fly with than the keyboard controls.) It’s a pretty immersive experience:
(For all of these YouTube videos, you’ll want to go full screen
and force the highest resolution, not just leave it on “auto”.)
Be aware that right now, as with all the newest graphic cards, every flight yoke and joystick is pretty difficult to find anywhere at normal retail prices ($165-ish) as the release of this game (and the pandemic) have driven them out-of-stock everywhere.
Even with the whole world available to explore, it’s particularly fun to fly around places that you know very well from the ground. I’ve created a couple of longer videos of such flights – here’s a tour of the Santa Cruz area, including the boardwalk, downtown, Scotts Valley, Felton and north along the coast as far as Año Nuevo:
Some locations (like Santa Cruz above) benefit from detailed photogrammetry data providing lots of realistic detail. Other locations get carefully handcrafted buildings and objects (particularly at select airports), while the rest of the planet gets more generic textures and topographical information from satellite data and auto-generated details like trees and buildings. For example, the generic buildings populating the ghost town of Bodie are very out of place in my little tour of the Eastern Sierra – from Bishop to Mammoth and on to Mono Lake and Bodie:
Lots of folks are already making add-ons that you can drop in to enhance the rendering of a particular location or add a particular plane. Here’s one great index of available add-ons for MS Flight Simulator.
The 16″ MacBook Pro (2.4GHz 8‑core Intel Core i9) can actually manage to run MS Flight Simulator on my ultrawide monitor with just the laptop’s built-in AMD Radeon Pro 5500M GPU but at lower Medium level settings. This game can be very CPU and even network intensive (the world does not fit on your hard drive) so the game can bog down even if your GPU has cycles to spare.
For higher quality settings, I’m using a Red Devil Radeon 5700 XT graphics card in an external GPU enclosure (connected via Thunderbolt) running MSFS 2020 on Windows 10 via Apple Boot Camp. This setup allows for something between High-End and Ultra settings at 3440 x 1440 resolution.
Update (Jan 2021): I’m since been able to get one of the new, next generation GPU’s: an overclocked Radeon 6800 XT and I’m now able to run smoothly at even greater than “Ultra” settings from my 2019 MacBook Pro. It looks fantastic!
Note that you’ll likely need to go through a bit of hassle to successfully configure these AMD graphics cards under Boot Camp. See the egpu.io forums and bootcampdrivers.com for help. The Nvidia cards don’t require workarounds for Boot Camp but they’re not supported at all on macOS, whereas the AMD cards work under macOS without doing anything.
And now in virtual reality: I’ve also picked up a very high resolution HP Reverb G2 VR headset which makes for a truly amazing and engrossing experience. With a proper VR headset, you get that incredible, brain-fooling trick of virtual reality immersion – of seeing and hearing only the virtual world around you, no matter which way you look. With the Reverb’s incredibly high 4320 x 2160 resolution, I can’t run at the highest graphics settings (even with that new GPU) but it doesn’t matter – that feeling of immersion is so captivating – feeling like you’re actually sitting in the cockpit. You’ve got to directly experience it though to believe it. Watching a video recording shown on a fixed screen in front of you can never convey it. I’ve written more about experiencing virtual reality here.
Gaming Continues
Despite the upheaval that is 2020, the gaming continues with Near and Far, Elfenland/Elfenroads, Ecos: The First Continent, Cryptid, Galaxy Trucker, Streetcar, Memoir’44, Covert, Now Boarding, Great Western Trail, and a few Clank! expansions: Sunken Treasures, Temple of the Ape Lords, and The Mummy’s Curse. Then there’s our new favorite trick-taking game, The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine.
We also played a number of titles from the Exit: The Game series, but I don’t recommend them – they’re often a rather mixed bag and sometimes annoying in their puzzle designs.
A Limited Halloween
No social gatherings amid the pandemic of course, so a rather limited Halloween this year – just in costume to go pick up some take-out food, play a board game, watch a movie:
