Phil Landmeier @shuttersparks@qoto.org

@pinsk Exactly. I drove an '89 Ford Ranger to 320,000 miles. I had it for a reason. I used it to carry cargo, sheets of plywood, sacks of concrete.

People I know today who have late model pickups have forgotten or never knew what a pickup is for. They don't haul anything because "It might get the bed dirty." They haul the wife and kids around in the crew cab and the bed is never used.

But I know what it is. It's an SUV, driven by guys who don't want to be seen driving an SUV. They want an SUV but it has to be a Dodge RAM.

The EV companies are probably just catering to the market. So they make an SUV with a 1500 pound thingus on the back so it looks like a pickup.

@peterrelph2 I think they want better pay.

Here in the U.S., beef prices soared a while ago and then came back down to "normal". Now they're soaring again. What that all about?

@_L1vY_ @ianlivingston @ai6yr Interesting. I must have missed the memo. Never heard of control over the timeline.

Until Elmo came along, I'd been an avid Twitter user from the beginning, when we tweeted via SMS from a flip-phone. In other words, back when Twitter was really interesting, useful, and exciting.

@_L1vY_ @ianlivingston @ai6yr This was one of my big beefs about Twitter, even before Elmo took over. Tweets from some of my favorite people would show up 10 to 20 hours late in my timeline, if they showed up at all. What good is that? And why call it a timeline? It was a randomline.

@nathans Well, but it's yours to play with it seems. ;-)

@nathans It is your privilege to do that. It's one of the perks of having your own server.

@trinsec Aha! Thank you for that.

@Blob_Calder Great! It's an amazingly useful tool. There are so many calls to learn I couldn't do it without help.

Mastodon Question:

In addition to Lists, my instance has a feature called "Circles". Reading the documentation and searching the Web have turned up nothing about this feature. As far as I can tell it doesn't exist.

Anyone know what Mastodon Circles are and how they differ from Lists? A link to documentation maybe? TIA.

#mastodon #circles #MastodonHelp

Birdwatchers Unite!

Do you participate in Cornell University's ornithology programs? Do you use the eBird database? Do you use the eBird or Merlin apps? If so I want to follow you and build a list of fellow eBirders so we can share knowledge, experiences, photos, etc.

#eBird #Merlin #ornithology #birding #BirdWatching #BirdInventory #cornell

@aliide That's a good question I'll never know the answer to. Haha.

I've done a lot of traveling but never to the Baltic states or Scandinavia. Now I think I'm too old to do much of that anymore.

@aliide Likewise. Your name immediately caught my attention. You're the first Aliide or Aliede I've ever encountered.

My grandmother came to the U.S. in 1948. Here she adopted the name Lydia because it was easier for Americans than a name they'd never seen before. Haha.

She and her brother Wilhelm were both very politically astute and would get into raging arguments in Estonian, but I never learned the language. She did teach me to sing the national anthem of Estonia when I was a child, though.

I wish I had been a little wiser then. She would have taught me Estonian and Russian if I had been interested. (She was educated in St. Petersburg.) Instead, we spoke German all the time.

@aliide Hello. My grandmother on my mother's side was born Aliede Lucke in 1886 in Estonia. She's the one I spent a lot of time with growing up, traveled with, etc.. She taught me a tremendous number of things.

@ai6yr Hahaha. Yes, especially now that the sun is active, it's good to keep an eye on real-time solar activity while you're on the air. I have my phone set up to give me immediate bulletins about flares and jumps in Kp index. I often have the blackout map up on the screen. https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/animations/d-rap/global/d-rap/latest.png

Not only do you know what's going on but you can observe the effects on propagation and ionospheric noise yourself. If a big flare happens around midday where you are, and you happen to be on an upper band (15m is best), you can hear the normal noise quiet down and be replaced by another kind of noise. You're then listening to the sun itself, which sounds different. You're listening to radio signals from 93 million miles away. Whoo hoo.

If conditions are going to spoil your DXing plans, might as well have fun with it.

#radio #HamRadio #solar #Solar Dynamics