Thargoid Titan Taranis

Microsoft Flight Simulator

Finally managed to get a decent balance of frame rate vs. visuals in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 on my Quest 2, thanks to Virtual Desktop’s new custom OpenXR runtime and the performance improvements in the Sim Update 15 beta.

9V Battery

A little experiment with focus stacking. I used my 16mm macro extension tube and set focus bracketing on my camera to take 8 photos with different focus. Then I merged them together in HeliconFocus to get the entire battery in focus.

I tried using Photoshop to merge them first, but I think it needs more images with smaller differences in focus. HeliconFocus had much better results with this set of images.

๐Ÿ“ท Olympus E-M10 Mark II (49mm, ฦ’/5.6, 0.6s, ISO 800)

ArgonOne NVMe Expansion

This weekend I upgraded the Raspberry Pi that hosts my Mastodon instance and Home Assistant (among other services) with an NVMe drive.ย ย Previously it was using an old mechanical USB hard drive, so the performance increase with the NVMe is huge!ย ย 

It runs a bit hotter than with the microSD card + external HDD, but it’s nice to have everything in one case without worrying about SD card wear anymore.

I also finally got around to upgrading from Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 22.04, just in time for the next LTS release later this year.

Trail Marker

๐Ÿ“ Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve (New Hope, Pennsylvania)
๐Ÿ“ท Olympus E-M10 Mark II (92mm, ฦ’/8, 1/15s, ISO 400)
๐Ÿ“… October 22nd, 2023