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:
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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:
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.
Great Horned Owl Fight
I heard a crash and thud this evening like falling furniture but saw the cats weren’t the cause. After a minute or so there was another thump and thud and the sound of an owl hooting. So I grabbed my camera and went upstairs to the patio outside the bedroom, expecting maybe to see an owl going at the plastic owl on the patio. (The fake owl is there to keep away small birds that would otherwise fall prey to Pan as he lies in wait every morning.)
However, what I found was two great horned owls in a vicious brawl on the patio floor. Pan and I watched from behind the door as they kept at it for some ten minutes or so, despite me turning on the porch light, making noise and cracking open the door to get a better look. After nearly ten minutes of this, and not wanting to see how far this would eventually go, I pounded on the glass to drive them off. Now I’m imagining that one of these owls was a newcomer trying to encroach on my neighborhood owl’s plastic “mate” on my porch.
It’s not unusual for us to see or hear owls around the house here in Santa Cruz, including perched on my bedroom roof but I’ve never captured decent video or photos of them. (Unfortunately, I didn’t notice my auto-focus was disabled on my camera until five minutes into filming this brawl.)
Before posting, I looked online to see if this vicious-looking fight is something great horned owls commonly do. I found that they are territorial but confrontations are usually in the form of sounding vocalizations and spreading wings before escalating further. However, it sounds like they are known to sometimes go so far as to kill each other in territorial conflicts. Would love to read comments on this encounter from any well-informed folk.
Transit Van Conversion Complete
It’s not only more-or-less complete, but it’s in the driveway! I’m tweaking things and making some additions but after about 15 months from initial contact to finish we finally got to pick it up from Van Haus Conversions in Vancouver, WA in mid-September, amidst the smoke and fires across the western states.
This previously empty Ford Transit cargo van is now officially a nimble little 4×4 adventure campervan, (or disaster bug-out van, or zombie apocalypse survival unit) or… The New Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle. It’s quite the change from the original Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle which was a 25-ft Sprinter-based Class B RV from Leisure Travel Vans. We had a good time with the LTV Unity, but our two biggest wishes were to 1) have internal storage for our mountain bikes and 2) downsize to a smaller, more off-road-capable camper van, which would also allow us to park more easily in busy metro areas. We did take the Unity out on dirt roads a lot but we were often of course constrained on just how rugged the road could actually get with a vehicle of that size and length. Anyway, here it is – wishes made true — and it looks great:
The new campervan is built on a 2019 Ford Transit cargo van (Long Body, High Roof, 148″ wheelbase, non-extended, 19.5 feet long).
QuadVan in Portland, Oregon did the conversion to support 4×4 as well as upgrade the suspension, add a locking differential and protective skid plates, raise the low-hanging rear shock mounts and the overall body and add all terrain tires.
Van Haus Conversions did the build out to a campervan. (Here’s some pictures of the work in progress.) The design features a queen-sized raised-platform bed that creates a large “garage” space for bikes and gear underneath. The living area centers around the galley with a sink, refrigerator, double burner induction cooktop and a fold-out swiveling table between the two front swiveling seats and a small bench seat that hides a dry composting toilet.
I’ve set up a separate page (Transit Van Conversion – Tips and Details) where I’m documenting various build details and decisions, where to buy stuff and all the additional customizations I make along the way, like I did for our LTV Unity.
Click through for a full gallery of the completed build – I’ll continue to update the gallery as I make changes to the van:
Mmmm… Acorns
They’re so desperate for acorns, it doesn’t even matter if I’m in the open garage using noisy power tools:
Fire and Smoke and Evacuations
Leaving heavy smoke in Tahoe on Wednesday 8/19
We headed back home on Wednesday, leaving the heavy smoke in Tahoe from the Loyalton Fire, through the smoke filling the Central Valley to reach the heavy smoke in the Santa Cruz Mountains from the CZU Lightning Complex fires.
Looking south and west from the house (Wednesday evening, 8/19)
Ash and charred leaves deposited around the house (8/19)
As we came through Vacaville and Fairfield on I-80, we slipped through just before the LNU Lightning Complex fire jumped I-80 and even saw flames from the interstate:
LNU Lightning Complex Fire about to cross I-80 near Fairfield on 8/19
On Wednesday and Thursday we prepped for evacuation, loading up the cars with necessities and some irreplaceables, prepping the house as per wildfire pre-evacuation recommendations (moving furniture away from windows, etc). Sure enough, the mandatory evacuation zones were expanded Thursday evening to include everything west of highway 17 (including downtown Scotts Valley). We’re a little south of Scotts Valley and just east of highway 17, but we decided to go ahead and evacuate Thursday night – heading back to Tahoe.
The evacuation areas are expected to remain in effect for a few weeks. Darlene will be renting a place near Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto as she’ll be returning to work next week.
So far, it looks like they’ve been able to mostly hold the fire west of highway 9 and north of Santa Cruz and Davenport. Unfortunately, we’ve got the potential for more fire starts due to more dry thunderstorms expected around the Bay Area from Sunday (8/22) through Tuesday morning (8/24).
Here’s a combined, interactive map showing both the perimeter of the ZCU Lightning Complex fire and the evacuation area. 63,000 acres burned, 77,000 people evacuated – snapshot as of Saturday, 8/22:
Here’s a really nice mapping tool (CalTopo) that can overlay various satellite data (like VIIRS) on a map source of your choice and plot additional weather data like wind patterns. You can even zoom in to see individual temperature sample numbers showing where the fire is hotter and cooler or no longer present:
For more info on the Santa Cruz Mountains fires, here’s some resources:
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Update (Thursday, 8/27): 81,000 acres affected as of this morning but they’re continuing to get good control of the fires across the Santa Cruz Mountains. As the mandatory evac area was never extended to where we are (just east of highway 17), Darlene headed back on Monday evening since she had to go into work at the hospital on Tuesday and I headed back with the cats on Wednesday evening as things seemed to be continuing to go well. As of 3 pm Thursday, they’ve lifted the evacuation order on Scotts Valley and surrounding areas.
Update (late September): As the number and size of the wildfires continue to grow across the western states, we get a taste of our potential future norm, including days that look like night and seemingly right out of “Blade Runner 2049”:
And when we ventured up through Oregon to pick up the Transit campervan in mid-September, we encountered some of the worst air yet: PM2.5 counts of well over 500 outside the rental car.
We brought along our not-so-portable home air filter to use in the car, which was quite helpful on the long drive up and overnight car camping in this nasty environment. I’ve since bought a more compact unit for the campervan given the very likely future event of being caught out in future multiple-states-wide wildfire smoke.
