> For a lot of fiction books, my rule is to read the first 50 pages. If I'm not engaged, move on. Life is short.
Just encountered myself doing this. I was reading John Birmingham's Axis of Time books. The first three sucked me in and I devoured them in a day or two apiece. Starting the fourth...something was off. The writing felt stilted, like the author was trying to cram in too many pop culture references or something. I put it down and have given it two more tries since with the same result, so now I'm done.
I'm sad, because I was really looking forwards to having several more books in the series.
There are some really nice things that home automation enables that was previously impossible.
I live in Bend, Oregon. We have hot summer days, cool nights, and sometimes really bad wildfire smoke.
I can save a lot of money on AC if I open the windows at night and use the attic fan to pull in outside air. But if smoke rolls in, then we'd all be breathing 200+ AQI air all night.
I have outdoor AQI sensors, which if the AQI spikes, will close up the house and turn on the air purifiers.
> Why would I want to automate lights?
We're bad at remembering to turn lights on and off. We like having our porch light on an hour or two after sunset, but don't need to leave it on 24/7. We also have stairwell baseboard lighting that's completely unnecessary during the day, but very nice to have already be on if we get up in the middle of the night. To each their own, though. These are just nice to have. The AQI automation is an actual health benefit to us though.
But our mission is really heritage trees, which we loosely define as pre-WWII. We do work with landowners to get their trees DNA tested and identified if they're interested. But despite maintaining the encyclopedia I linked in the other comment, we're a small group of volunteers (~6 people) and are mainly focused on a specific geographic region.
I run a nonprofit group that maintains a similar but different database, ours focuses on identification of heritage varieties, I.e. apples that existed pre WWII. We're in the PNW so we also have catalogs of where they were sold to make their way to us, etc, as we identify trees in old orchards.
I've learned some interesting stuff along the way, like that English varieties keep showing up in eastern Washington because English nurseries shipped to Vancouver in the late 1800s.
We haven't been doing that for now. The success rate doing so is somewhat less than directly grafting the whole top of the tree onto rootstock, for a few reasons. Since our primary goal is preservation and a lot of these trees have zero clones and could be wiped out by wildfire on any given year, our first priority is to get clones of every tree.
> I think it’s probably more important to find and cultivate wild apples showing attributes that can keep them hardy in 21st century climate.
The neat thing is that these tend to be self-selecting! These older orchards drop a lot of fruit and can self-propagate new seedlings. The ones that manage to survive are the ones well adapted to current local conditions.
Apple trees are pretty easy to propagate if they're alive. Snip off a twig, graft it onto another tree, and away it goes.
Some poor-condition trees can certainly present a challenge in terms of finding ideal graftable wood, but even a poor-quality scion is a lot easier to propagate via grafting than trying to culture in a petri dish.
I'm in the middle of building out a similar big project that takes a different tack: looking through every period pomological text (e.g. Apple of New York, Fruits and Fruit Trees of America) and pulling the images, descriptions, etc for every heritage apple variety. Includes the watercolors too. I also pull in every scanned catalog from nurseries selling fruit trees in the PNW from the late 1800s.
The goal is a tool we can use to identify apples, and also have comprehensive info on every variety, using public domain period content.
I think we grafted ~90 scions this year. A lot of them we haven't actually DNA tested yet so no idea what they are. So many of these trees are on their last legs, so our priority is cloning them first, and then once the clones grow, DNA test those as funds are available.
I make my own cider too (though as a hobby). If we ever find ourselves in the same city I'd love to meet up and we can swap scions/cider/etc.
We work with Dr Cameron Peace's lab at WSU. They send us test tubes, we send the tubes back with leaves in them, they run the DNA tests and compare against an apple ID database they've built. We pay ~$50 per test, which is what most of the groups budget goes towards.
I got myself involved with a nonprofit local group preserving local pioneer era apple trees. They've been DNA testing and cataloging the trees, and had all the info stashed away in google drive and onedrive folders. The founder was looking to step back so they asked me if I wanted to step up as project lead, which I did.
I took the info and organized it into a nice wiki-style site with maps and descriptions so everyone in the community can learn about the old orchards.
I've also learned how to prune and graft hundred year old apple trees and now have a couple dozen young grafted trees growing in my garage, all clones of local hundred year old trees, some of which genetically tested unique and are of currently unknown varieties.
I love that this is something that is feasible for someone to just do right now as a hobbyist or blogger. The prices involved here are very reasonable and well within reach of someone wanting to do some project, though not yet at "sequence your microbiome every day" levels.
I hope we see a lot more posts like this in the future.
No, we wanted full EVs. Mazda doesn't make any, only hybrids. We wound up going with Chevrolet in both instances.
The Equinox EV is one of the better EVs to offer AWD out there right now, matching the range of a Model 3 at a decently better price and obviously massively better UI. Slower charging is the only real downside.
And a used pre-2020s Bolt is a really excellent value, because they are insanely cheap (under $15k) and due to the whole catching-on-fire thing they all had their batteries replaced in the last few years, which means you get a much newer battery than the mileage/age of the car would suggest. The Bolt is replacing a much older Leaf, so bumping the range up to ~200 miles from ~70 is a huge upgrade for us.
The Subsonic API is pretty fantastic and the apps that support it are full-featured. The Jellyfin app, while completely capable of streaming music, is far far less feature-ful.
Personally I use Gonic rather than Navidrome, because I don't care about a web UI, but if you go to the Navidrome website and look at the "Apps" page it lists every Subsonic API compatible app. There's a lot.
In the last three years, there have been two times when we traveled, rented a car, and were given a Volkswagon.
Both times, the touchscreen-only controls were such a pain in the butt that we vowed we would never purchase such a car. It was a timesaver, because in that period our family has gotten two new (to us) cars, and our experiences with the rental Volkswagons allowed us to exclude an entire manufacturer from consideration.
If they haven't re-broken their interiors by the next time we look for a new car, I guess we'll have to consider them again.
> Colonial New England barely exists outside of active preservation attempts.
As someone who grew up there, this isn't really true. It's more that buildings have been upgraded/replaced over time by choice, resulting in a sparse patchwork of old buildings rather than large old cities. Places like the Wayside Inn[0] predate the country by a century, and have been "preserved" only because they have more-or-less continuously operating as an in since 1686.
The New England climate isn't all that different than the original England. I think the cultural and legal climate around old buildings is more impactful here. I would be curious to know about the comparative longevity of 17th-century wooden buildings in Europe.
I would suspect that the sort of person (like myself) that would rather run GrapheneOS over LineageOS would rather install themselves than buy preinstalled. Much easier to verify no one slipped you an altered image.
Contact: [email protected]
Staff software engineer at viam.com
Formerly a bioinformatician at pgdx.com
Founder of Central Oregon Tool Library: cotool.org
Project lead of the Heritage Apple Corps: heritageapplecorps.org