A few Covid-19 rules are still in place at this botanical garden, though it’s a lot more relaxed than it was last spring when they managed to stay open even through the early-pandemic lockdowns.
Author Archives: Kelson
Humming…birb?
An Anna’s hummingbird perched at local park. Most of the time they don’t stay in one place long enough for me to even focus on them, never mind catch a photo. Even when they pause somewhere like this one, it’s usually just for a few moments before they fly off again.
Of course, the reason the bird was staying in one spot was that it was grooming itself, so I also had quite a few shots that looked…less impressive.
Overload the Cores
I finally got around to trying out No Man’s Sky a few weeks ago. I started on a super-hot planet, where you need to find shelter and/or resources to recharge your suit’s hazard protection system to keep cool. Got killed a few times trying to figure out what I was doing. And after about 20 minutes, my computer spontaneously shut itself down.
I waited a few minutes to let it cool down, then tried again. Managed to figure out a bit more of what I needed to do in the game, and then the same thing happened.
What is up with MacOS system updates?
On Monday, the home laptop mysteriously started lagging on heavily-modded Minecraft worlds that it had been just fine with the day before. Katie tried all kinds of troubleshooting over the next few days: using different launchers, trying local and server-based games, disabling mods, reinstalling Sophos, rebooting the system repeatedly. Nothing helped.
Until she checked the system update panel. Sure, it had a notification dot, but it always has one because it wants us to update to Big Sur, and we’re not quite ready to upgrade the system from Catalina. So it wasn’t obvious that it hadn’t actually installed Monday’s macOS update despite multiple reboots and a checkbox to automatically install updates.
Not that you’d expect a missing update to be the cause of the problem, since the lag only just started happening. But still, worth a shot. Especially since it started around the time the update was released.
(Incidentally, 2.3 GB? It’s only been a few weeks since the previous update. Did Apple just give up on deltas a while back and start shipping the entire OS every time there’s a bug fix?)
She had to manually tell it to install, and then force-shutdown the machine, because it wouldn’t restart on its own. Then the update installed.
And the Minecraft lag mysteriously disappeared.
Which means one of two things happened. Either:
- Just knowing that the update existed caused something to chew up or block resources.
- The OS silently started to install the update and got stuck, leaving the system in a broken state without telling anyone.
Neither of those is what I’d call encouraging.
Double-Shot
We’ve both received the second dose of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine! Same location and keep-you-moving procedure as the first dose, in and out within a half hour.
Like many people seem to, we got stronger side effects after the second dose than the first. She got fatigue and a fever, I also got loopiness, chills, and a headache. I imagined my immune system looking at the new batch of spike proteins, saying, “What, this again? That’s it, let’s bring out the big guns and make sure it Never. Comes. Back.”
Oh, and my brain decided to launch into a migraine aura around the time the chills hit, but I don’t think that was related. 🤷
But both of us were mostly recovered within 24 hours and back to normal within 48. (Well, my arm’s still sore, but I don’t really count that.) And a day or two of mild “illness” that you can schedule and you know won’t kill you is a heck of a lot better than a surprise attack by the actual coronavirus making you spend weeks in bed with the option of a hospital stay, chronic illness, or dying gasping for breath, watching your loved ones say goodbye to you over video chat because they can’t visit you in person safely.
And passing it along to someone else before you even know you’ve been infected, so they have to go through it all too.
The cost/benefit analysis is pretty clear.
Still a couple of weeks to go for our systems to completely lock in on it, but we should be able to relax a bit around the end of the month.
That would certainly be nice!