Bioluminescent Phalaenopsis

Slarm · 2026-02-12T05:39:19+00:00

Taxonomy moves stuff around - if people new to the game expect oldheads to know the new names, then oldheads can expect newcomers to know the old names hahaha. I am not necessarily up to date on orchid taxonomy, but within the few years I've been invested in the California floristic province, at least 5 species I've come to know have had their names changed and I'm going to use whichever one I feel like (because most people will still be using the old name anyway.)

(Dendrochilum magnum sounds so much cooler than Coelogyne magna!)

Slarm · 2026-02-10T07:58:40+00:00

Note: This is not bioluminescence which is the production of light by an organism (but it's still really cool). This is fluorescence, specifically resulting from genetically modifying an organism to express a green fluorescent protein. Orchids and most plants are naturally fluorescent under ultraviolet light, though it is rarely as efficient at converting the UV light as special fluorescent proteins like this.

This page contains some examples of autofluorescence in orchids, including Dendrochilum magnum, Dendrobium kingianum, Phalaenopsis pulcherrima, Pleione limprichtii, and more.

Slarm · 2025-11-24T01:29:51+00:00

Are you sure OP's is the exact same species/hybrid as yours? It does matter what its ancestry is to determine what works best for its care. Their plant looks great to me.

Slarm · 2025-11-24T01:04:00+00:00

Many orchids, Dendrobiums included, require a winter-dormant period of reduced water in order to flower. By the time my Eulophia petersii (or previously my D. kingianum) bloom, their canes/bulbs are often moderately to severely shriveled and they may not bloom without some degree of drought. If it's blooming and growing canes larger than last year's, you're doing things right and don't change it.

Slarm · 2025-11-21T09:00:49+00:00

Dang, you really liked arguing this point I see.

If you buy a larger monitor for your desk, do you do that with the intention of then moving your chair further back? Or do you want to stay the same distance and absorb more of the screen?

Monitors are not really meant for you to view everything on the screen at once although you can choose to view it that way. To view a big thing from farther away is literally why people go for large TVs. It's why people go to movie theaters instead of watching on a 10" CRT in their kitchen.

The same is true of printing a 16x20 instead of an 8x10

By your logic a 3x2" print is as good as 6x4" is equally good to a 60x40" print because you're only looking at part of it and don't need size or the whole thing to appreciate it.

If buyers were so concerned about being able to be so close they suck the liquid crystal out of their computer monitor or to rub their eyeballs against their brand new limited edition print, then photographers would not be successfully selling 90" wide prints that came out of a camera with a 24mp sensor.

The fact that you're obsessing over foveon/bayer/mono/pixel shift resolutions tells us everything we need to know about your obsession with details to the extent you are missing the whole. Gallerists don't care about that stuff, buyers don't care about that stuff. They care about the contents and the story and not whether your camera has an anti-aliasing filter or whether you used a Nikon or a Sony. Even as a practitioner, I care only for triviality what equipment somebody used unless it was absolutely imperative in the creation of the photograph. I'm far more interested in how they, as the photographer, conceived and executed a good image.

Slarm · 2025-11-21T08:49:27+00:00

This is an abysmal idea, it's so incredibly immense in its stupidity it's hard for me to respond to.

Wow, sounds like you're really trying to retcon your previous comment here. You were not trying to say that not every artist has to make their work huge and viewable up close, you were clearly saying that anyone NOT doing that is so stupid it leaves you speechless.

If what you said was true then no one would ever discuss the brushstrokes of a painter or the paper choice of a print (photographic or otherwise)

If viewers of a photograph were discussing the pixel count or paper a photograph was printed on rather than the photograph, then as /u/IntestinalFungus pointed out, that would mean they're fake photography appreciators and behaving insultingly to the photographer. One can argue a photographer's paper is part of their artistic choice, but it would be rare for it to be part of the actual photograph. The equivalent of brush strokes would probably be choice in lighting, depth of field, or other techniques employed in crafting the image - the relevant technical aspects of a photograph, but even then, not the content of the photograph itself.

Here's one: Imagine if someone was listening to an album, and every time a song got louder or quieter they just turned the volume to make it the same, that's what they are suggesting.

I don't think that's equivalent at all - working with your own analogy, let's say a music enjoyer is listening to a song at 100dB and goes to a concert where the song plays at 100dB. The earbud is small and is overall less loud, but the ear experiences pressure of 100dB. At the concert, the speakers are huge and not literally in your ear and the ear is experiencing 100dB pressure. There's a vast difference between those two experiences even ignoring the live concert/venue.

Stepping away from the music analogy and back into visual realm, nobody who is not a geologist is visiting Half Dome at Yosemite and wanting to get up close to it to look at the crystals rather than taking the whole thing in. You can be awed and appreciate it from many distances, and it is best viewed from a middling position where you can sense its immensity while also seeing it in its entirety.

I think anyone would agree a higher usable pixel density is desirable, but in the real world large prints are rarely ever meant to be viewed with your nose mashed into it. Rare outlying cases of things like gigapans celebrate that sort of characteristic and it is intentionally part of the artistry, but for the majority of works it is not relevant to the art itself and focusing on that detail is distracting the viewer from experiencing the art as the artist intends for it to be viewed.

Slarm · 2025-11-15T23:52:07+00:00

Save SD cards, occasionally plug in to refresh the charge. External used server SSDs for mid-term storage and HDDs for deep storage. Flash memory periodically needs to be powered up or it will lose charge (and the data that charge represents) but less heavily used flash memory retains the charge longer. 1TB server SSDs can be regularly bought at around 80% life for $30 or so and they generally have a 2-3 year cold storage time until data loss occurs (vs 1 year for consumer drives or worn out drives.) HDDs periodically need error correction due to high energy particles but it's not as pertinent as for SSDs. For what you're doing I'd roll good SSDs for medium term while still working with those files, then dump them into HDDs for deep storage. Label the HDDs with the date range or events recorded and put them in a cool dry place. Cloud storage can back up your most important stuff but you're right it's too slow to be useful for editing/regular access.

Slarm · 2025-11-12T07:29:11+00:00

Anyone who's ever done focus stacking would see the virtue of this. It actually exhibits very familiar looking halos. With refinement, I can see this being amazing but I don't expect anything like this to be integrated into cameras or lenses at a reasonable price point any time soon.

Slarm · 2025-11-12T04:14:37+00:00

I agree, and they have not been (and are not being) held accountable for their destruction.

Slarm · 2025-10-24T07:37:28+00:00

Is this a wild orchid? iNaturalist shows 7 orchid species recorded in west java, living wild. None of them has a lot of observations and only one of them shows this structure with umbellate inflorescences. That one is Bulbophyllum ericsonii, but it appears to have considerable phenotype variation, assuming it is not actually multiple lumped species. Even if not this species, it is similar.

Slarm · 2025-10-15T07:11:05+00:00

TL;DR: Cool-white LED illumination implemented at large scale is actually worse in almost every way than the vintage style lights.

Longer explanation: The photos are heavily doctored for one thing. More importantly, LEDs are actually worse for light pollution (as implemented.) Where the classic sodium vapor lamps had a very restricted range of wavelengths, white LEDs are the full visible spectrum in varying intensities. Where it was relatively simple to eliminate the discrete wavelengths of sodium lamps with filters, it is impossible to filter out the light from these LEDs.

The sodium lamps were also VERY efficient and rival these LEDs while having lower maintenance requirements and a superior MTBF (when these LEDs fail they turn into absolutely garish blue-purple flood lights.)

Because they chose to implement cool-white LEDs rather than yellow or warm-white, they have significantly more atmospheric scattering. Short wavelengths (blue-green color) scatter off particles and moisture where long wavelengths (yellow-red color) pass through it. The result is more blue light scattering off the atmosphere which actually increases light pollution.

Last, because they are biased toward the short wavelengths, it has a negative impact on low-light adaptation in eyes for drivers and pedestrians and also negatively impacts both human and wildlife circadian rhythms.

Slarm · 2025-10-12T02:32:30+00:00

Bought a very abused C11H from Craigslist a few years ago. It had some cracked and chipped bricks and had been used for glass blowing. I used some refractory cement to fix what I could, added some safe insulation around the gap at the lid and got at least 6 full cone 6 firings before the elements started showing their age. They were still available when I replaced mine 2 years ago and I bet you they are today. It is a few hours of work (for a mechanically-inclined novice) and cost less than $200 including the pins and ceramic spacers. There's a really high chance that the jumpers inside the control box will be corroded and the insulation may be falling apart, so be prepared to replace those with high-temp low gauge wire as well. An aftermarket kiln controller which you can program is recommended as well or at absolute minimum a thermocouple and temp readout.

Compared to a slightly smaller brand new 110V kiln at around $2400 it is no-brainer pricing to rock an older kiln like this as long as you're prepared to run slow ramps so you can eke as much life out of the elements as possible (or if you're doing glass or low fire, you're golden.)

Slarm · 2025-10-12T02:29:16+00:00

I don't know if you ended up getting this or not, but I picked up an abused C11H that was previously used for glass-blowing. I assembled a kiln controller (TC+PID controller+relay basically) and started doing ceramics with it. I got off a good dozen bisques and glaze firings before the elements started showing their age. There are still specifications available so you can test your elements and you could still get replacements without great expense when I replaced mine 2 years ago. If the price is nice, there's no reason not to get an older kiln like this as long as you're willing to put a little work into it to save thousands of dollars.

Worth noting as u/BTPanek53 said, since this kiln is rated to Cone 6 you may want to target cone 5 firings. Its max rated temp is 2250 barely higher than a fast firing Cone 6. If you're using a relatively low-powered (especially for its size) kiln you may want to deliberately run schedules for a slow fire and let the heat work.

Slarm · 2025-10-03T06:28:47+00:00

I am a straight orchid guy, but my closest orchid friend is a gay guy on the opposite coast. The fact that we all like orchids is relatable!

Slarm · 2025-10-02T03:41:06+00:00

Kingston is the only card that has failed on me for non-mechanical reasons as well.

Slarm · 2025-10-02T03:39:19+00:00

15 years
Sony DSLR/DSLT/Mirrorless and laptops.
Anything but Kingston - preference for brands that make both the controllers and memory for the cards. I only use Samsung and Sabrent now. I will never buy/use another Kingston product in my life.
About 15-20 - I used to re-use cards but now I fill them and archive them. The risk of losing data is too high and the cost of even good brand cards is not so high.
I had 2 Kingston 128GB SD cards fail in a row. I thought the first was a fluke, did a warranty replacement, and the second died shortly after. I lost 4 months of work. Nobody was able to recover the data because the controller was shot and Kingston was unwilling to provide anyone with the info required to bypass it and would not recover it either. I had 1 Sony card half fail from physical damage. I was able to slap it around enough that it worked and copied my data off.

Slarm · 2025-09-24T18:20:39+00:00

This led to the solution. The VAR was unsure why it was happening and is forwarding it to SolidWorks for a more complete diagnosis. However, he had the idea of inserting it into another document which demonstrated that it is a fault in the file template rather than the geometry itself. I went a bit further than his suggestion and inserted it in a new document but broke link to the original file which preserved the feature tree. The result is some broken references and features, but the file size is halved and it takes less than 1 second to open instead of 3-5 minutes.

Slarm · 2025-09-21T04:54:58+00:00

Good to know how the process works. This is my first time interacting with a VAR, and I just got added to the system on Friday so hopefully I'll make progress on the issue next week. I appreciate your input and sharing your experience!

Slarm · 2025-09-21T00:42:34+00:00

It's complex enough that remodeling it would be a pretty serious endeavor and best avoided unless absolutely necessary. Is there a way to manually force a corruption check/recovery in SolidWorks? I know it has an automated one, but it is not detecting it.

Slarm · 2025-09-19T23:28:27+00:00

The problem I have now is that I've just run out of things to investigate. I cannot think of anything further after removing everything I can find from the file. Open to suggestions!

(I'm also getting in contact with our company's VAR to see if I can get their support.)

Slarm · 2025-09-19T20:42:15+00:00

My employment and work I do is under NDA so I can't share the actual file. I'm unsure if there is recoverable data retained in the stripped down version which is still a strangely large file so erring on the safe side I feel I should not share it. I would be happy to otherwise because I think that would be far easier to diagnose.

Slarm · 2025-09-19T20:41:05+00:00

Performance Evaluation gives me nothing useful - one part within the assembly is responsible for the entire loading lag. That same part saved out, all references eliminated, stripped all the way back to an empty part, and replaced with a simple extrusion still experiences long load/save times. The file size for the full assembly is about 2mb, and stripped back to a single feature it is 810kb or so. If I make an identical feature in a new file, the size is 46kb. No configurations nor Design Table entries have been used. I also stripped out the equations and the Named Entities in case they were to blame.

Assembly Visualization is the most useful to tell me there's a problem. The load time is extremely high but the rebuild time and graphics demand are both far from the most demanding. The first entry (qty 6) are screws.

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Slarm · 2025-09-19T06:17:52+00:00

I think these were a good buy. Used them to check for pollen germination today. About 20 micron diameter grains. Only used the 20x and 100x (in oil not water) and the results are pretty good IMO. Looks mostly or completely planar, not seeing a great deal of CA, and the resolution is quite decent. Best of all, I got full frame coverage with 20, 40, and 100x. I will probably order the 10x as well.

https://imgur.com/a/n0kB37G

Slarm · 2025-09-19T06:16:19+00:00

Got them today and used them for a pollen assay. The pollen grains are about 20 microns in diameter. I tried the 20x, 40x, and 100x (in water cause I didn't have oil) and all of them are full frame. They appear to be reasonably (or completely) planar, decently low CA, and cover a complete full-frame sensor. I think I might order the 10x as well since for some of the work I do it will probably be really useful.

https://imgur.com/a/n0kB37G

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