Here's another lesser long-nosed #bats video, but from straight on. This is DJI's in-camera ultra slo-mo. It's a little soft because the camera does massive interpolation, but it's interesting to see their wing motions.
Note, species is only what I've been told, since I have no bat experience.
Bats at the hummingbird feeder back in April. I've been told they are lesser long-nosed bats. I had a video light up on one tripod and a DJI action cam on another, looking down. I peeked out the window and activated the camera remotely once they got used to the light and camera set up.
#bats #SonoranDesert
Bill came back up on the porch, probably because he heard me talking and assumed that I was talking to him and not my phone. Now he's sitting on the threshold above the steps surveying his domain.
I'm such a fucking simp. I'm going to get up and go get him some more mealworms 😆
I haven't seen the western diamondback rattlesnake or the gopher snake since I got back. When I go out at night with a spotlight, there are a fair number of small rodents so I'm hoping one of the snakes comes back to eat them.
I did see a night snake once and the Mediterranean house geckos have obviously had a very good breeding season because there are little baby ones everywhere.
And last night one of the big Sonoran Desert toads came out after I turned the sprinkler on.
Well, that's the basics for now. I will definitely keep you all apprised of the reptile soap opera around here.
I saw the zebra tail lizard once when I first got back, but not since and I've seen a couple of baby whiptails. I've seen the tame one only once. It remembered the whistling and came right up and ate out of my hand like it did in the spring.
So far only one of the iguanas out of four is around. Don, the big one, hasn't been seen. They may have had to disperse a bit to find food or something because the monsoon rains have barely hit here and nothing is really growing yet. No rain equals no plants equals no bugs equals no food.
Well, I guess Bill had enough because he hopped off just now and skittered out to his stump where he is sitting like a little king of the hill. I do most posts using voice to text transcription, so he heard me talking and is looking over here at me, wondering if I have brought more food out. Sorry, bub. Wait till morning.
The only mealworms I have are the ones that survived in the refrigerator for three months while I was gone, so I'm getting close to being out. I've ordered another 2000 and they should be here later in the week.
In the three years we've known each other, Bill has never sat around on me like this. Earlier this morning, he had a cactus sticker in his face and I was able to get close enough to pluck it and pull it out.
Bill is a finicky eater, only eating the live mealworms and ignoring the dead ones. But I took a dried crispy dead one in my fingers was able to use it to scrape the salt deposits off of his nostrils without him flinching much. I'm guessing that at first he thought it was weird but then realized that it felt good to have that gone and let me do it.
Now he's just chilling on my leg. He has never done this before. It might be that my evaporating sweat is cooler than the surrounding air because it's still 100° here in the shade. In the cooler months, Harriet used to sit on my leg like this because I was warm. But I'm also probably kind of cool right now.
I've been a little behind on the #LizardReport since I got back to the desert. So much gossip!
First off, it appears that Cutie, Bill's main squeeze when I left in the spring, is now hanging out with the big male spiny lizard in the backyard that showed up in April. For a while she was rebuffing him in no uncertain terms, but now she seems to be sharing the wood pile out back every morning when I go out there. *ahem*
There is a small female who, this spring, mostly lived under the chair on the porch. She was always extremely skittish, yet she would also wander around in the house and go into my office when I left the front door open. Well now! She and Bill seem to be getting cozy in the front yard on the big stump.
Bill has suddenly shown a new level of friendliness, actually hanging out with me on the chair on the porch even after he ate all the mealworms, something Harriet used to do, but never Bill.
Any day at Grand Canyon is a good day, but I was hoping for some banger lightning shots. Got a couple weak bolts not worth developing (and accidentally deleted one while offloading the cards, duh). That was Thursday. Yesterday had one front come through that was all rain.
The best shot of the trip was this shelf cloud near Valle, AZ on the way in. I seriously should've stop and set up in it for a while!
This is a 12-image stitch, cropped to a 1x3 ratio.
(Wide shot — click to see whole thing)
It's fun to share everyone's eclipse excitement from the other side of the world. I've seen a few eclipses, so I know how much cooler it is in person, but the simultaneous enthusiasm is so sweet.
(And much more fun to see fill up the timeline than the latest sportsball match 😆 )
Back in the '80s we used to felt pen "CIA Today" on USA Today newspaper boxes. "Palantir Today" is not quite as catchy and takes a little longer to write. So, maybe stickers?
https://futurism.com/future-society/usa-today-palatnir-reader-intelligence
From https://www.humaneborders.org/
The number of migrant deaths reported by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner in July 2026 was 19.
Recently found individuals grouped by PMI (Post Mortem Interval):
5 dead less than a day
2 dead less than a week
3 dead less than 5 weeks
1 dead less than 3 months
8 dead more than 6-8 months
Total: 19
Updates for previous cases: 7 individuals were newly identified by name (1645 cases remain unidentified).
#migrants #immigration #border #BorderPolicy #MurderByDesign #EveryAdministrationHasMadeThisWorse
Hey Tucson, I've got a photo show up at Kirk-Bear Canyon Library in Tucson through August. Storm and landscape photos.
(I'll be AFK for a week, so sorry if I'm mostly not able to reply.)
I've heard of this, but never checked it out: states have a fund where companies place unclaimed funds. If you're in California, here's the State Controller's site for such things. Turns out I have about $100 coming back from several sources. It's easy to look up your state and make a claim for the funds if you are listed there.
#FreeMoney
#wordpress question:
I changed the name of a webpage. I changed it in the WP editor and in the "quick edit" window in the admin area. I updated the slug and all menus with the new page title.
But the main header menu still lists the old page name and returns a 404. The two footer menus list the correct page title and go to it fine when clicked. It's the main menu and the "Prints" page header menu that have the problem.
I removed the link entirely from the main menu, but it still showed up.
This has to be a caching issue, no?
Other site changes update fine.
I've purged the Cloudflare cache several times and waited an hour or so, cleared the browser history, tried 3 browsers. Restarted my laptop. Checked on another laptop and phone. Always the same.
If you go to my site https://mikaljakubal.com do you see an "Ajo Library Show" link at the top? It's supposed to read "Tucson Library Prints." Does it still take you to a 404?
This is driving me nuts. TIA
The Fediverse is overflowing with incredible artists, engineers, designers, photographers, and brilliant minds in academia. With the job market on fire globally, let's make a habit of hiring from within our own community, please 🎨📚
Need a designer for a project? A photographer? A researcher? Post your gigs here. Let's create a close-knit support system to help fellow people weather the storm.
If you are hiring: look here first. Post your short-term gigs, full-time roles, and freelance contracts. Give people here a chance.
If you are looking: share your work, follow the hashtags, and connect. Let's take care of each other.
#FediHire #GetFediHired #Academia #MastoArt #art #Photography #Freelance #SoftwareDevelopment #programming #photography
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This looks interesting. Anti-scraper text substitution program that changes key words in the HTML version of your documents or site but displays it accurately to human viewers. The goal is to, at minimum, keep your work out of training models, but also serves to poison them with somewhat meaningless chaff.
They make the point that pure gibberish will be filtered out by AI companies' quality filters, but this program substitutes nouns for nouns, verbs for verbs, etc., so your original sentence still reads as grammatically correct but conveys basically nothing, and specifically deprives them of your original, human-authored work.
You know what the best part about looking up this info about QR codes was? Easily finding actual websites with (apparently?) real people sharing useful information in a clear and informative way.
I'm so old I remember when this was...normal. Y'all remember that? When search (DDG in this case) just kinda worked? And websites weren't AI slop keyword generated on the fly to insert an ad between each redundant sentence? And there was a video that didn't spend the first 20% with the dude blabbering about what he was gonna show you in this video...once he got done blabbering about it?
And just think if it had kept getting *better* instead of monstrously worse. Oh, for what we could have had.
Le Sigh
I'm hanging a photo art show on Tuesday and was thinking of adding little QR codes to the printed image captions to direct people to my site, maybe even to the prints ordering page for that image. (vs thinking this is kind of tacky for a classy photo show.) But I've always had this nagging curiosity about whether data was sent to 3rd parties and, if so, what sort of data.
The static vs dynamic QR code discussion on the site in the OP makes sense. I only need static ones, since this is a one-time show. No data sent to anyone other than what I already get with Plausible Analytics.
I think the important thing for me is that I don't really want to encourage people to click random QR codes in the wild without being really careful because of quishing scams. I keep having discussions with people who are completely unaware of that.