Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

Three different kinds of woodpecker in my back yard today. Yellow-bellied sapsucker (male, then female), hairy woodpecker (male), then downy woodpecker (female).

You can tell the hairy and downy woodpecker apart because the hairy woodpecker has a longer beak, and the downy woopecker has black bands on her white inner tail feathers.

#birding #birds

Going to be a confusing few weeks for anyone in Palestine. Evergreen link:

https://codeofmatt.com/on-the-timing-of-time-zone-changes/

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...

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

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

#birding #birds

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.

I really liked Unsplash and I'm not one to jump ship whenever a company does something I don't like, but the whole reason I used them was for ease of use and license compatibility...

WTF? Unsplash switched (apparently silently) from being a repository of CC-0 stock photos to using some semi-proprietary license that is not compatible with CC licenses!

Anyone have a good replacement and/or an archive of the photos released in the CC-0 days?

I also saw this hawk on the way home. I'm thinking red-tailed hawk.

#birding