Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

The first-party `tzdata` module on PyPI has been updated to 2020.3 to reflect the upstream 2020c release!

https://pypi.org/project/tzdata/

This includes the short-notice changes to Fiji's DST. 2020.4 should be out soon, though, since Palestine just changed their DST on ~4 days' notice.

My son saw a blue jay at the feeder this morning and called over to my wife: "Mama, bird! You need the nocalurs! Take a picture!"

So it begins...

#birding

Since September 24th, I have taken over 750 photos of birds.

I... may have a problem.

#birding

Wow, that's a... significant bulk discount on extension cords.

Some Eastern Bluebirds at the feeder the other day. Male first, then female.

#birding #birds #photography

Male and female northern cardinal.

Possibly a breeding pair? They showed up together, and I didn't see any other cardinals around.

#birding #birds #photography

TFW a tufted titmouse tries to photobomb you.

#birding #birds #photography

Looking at some old pictures of baby starlings waiting to get fed and something jumped out at me...

@Sphinx Hah, no, a while back I bought a Sony Cybershot DSC HX90V superzoom camera basically for the purpose of taking pictures of birds.

Here's a little thread I did on twitter reviewing it: https://twitter.com/pganssle/status/1315069365587529728?s=20

(I think I forgot to cross-post this to Mastodon).

Looks like another kind of bird has discovered my feeder...

Red-shouldered hawk next to a brave or foolish white-breasted nuthatch.

#birding #birds

@brainwane Ah, this seems really useful.

Too bad I just bought 300 pounds of rennet...

@lynne@pars.ee I think the common naïve assumption would be that if you want to cut 30s, and you have keyframes at 25 and 35, you should be able to cut and re-encode 25-30, then prepend that onto a video from 35 on.

Not sure if it's possible to concatenate videos like that without re-encoding the whole thing like it is with mp3s, though.

@lynne@pars.ee I may be able to manually do this with trial and error, but I'm surprised there is no ready-made way to do this that I can find.

@lynne@pars.ee I think it's the other way around that is a problem. I want -ss 00:00:NN, which has problems unless you cut exactly on a keyframe.

I have been defeated by ffmpeg. I cannot find a way to remove the first n seconds of a video without re-encoding the entire video and without losing any video.

It feels like it should be possible to just re-encode the dangling portion of time between keyframes...

At this point I'm thinking the best thing for everyone would be for me to quit software engineering and become an artisinal cheese maker.

Just did a local patch to fix a bug in an upstream package I use to generate my talks... to fix some slides where the take-away is "you probably shouldn't be locally patching just to fix bugs."

Ah, so we're at that stage of the talk preparation process...

I've really enjoyed the Wikipedia article on Monkey Patching:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_patch

Takeaways:

1. Monkey patching is sometimes also called duck punching.
2. The "monkey" probably comes from "guerilla"
3. This is an easter egg waiting to happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_patch#Examples

For now I can switch over to CC search: https://search.creativecommons.org

But it's a bit of a hodge-podge of random stuff, not curated high-quality photos.