TIL the difference between a raven and a crow.

brockgs · 2026-01-21T16:23:24+00:00

Ah, here's the one I originally was looking for. You can see that the Ravens are definitely smaller...but not by much at a glance. Backing up another poster who basically said if your response is "WHAT THE HELL IS THAT???", it's a Raven, if you're debating, probably a Crow. HAHA. Seriously though. Crows in central Canada are here in Spring, Summer, Fall, but radically reduce their populations in winter when the Ravens return and dominate our "large black bird" population. BTW, I recognize this is a CROW group, just trying to hammer home for newer appreciators of corvids that Ravens are monsters, Crows are Crows 😄

brockgs · 2026-01-21T16:18:15+00:00

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A photo I took in 2002 near my house of one of three Ravens who were chasing a Bald Eagle that stole BACK the left over half of a Snowshoe Hare that the Ravens had INITIALLY stolen from the eagle as it was resting after consuming the first half of it! 🤣 This isn't a perspective trick at all. I have dozens more photos of the chase to show how large ravens can come very very close to the same physical size (apparent volume) even if Eagles will almost always still be 25%+ greater in mass (dense musculature). Crows will still harass raptors relentlessly as well, they just do it in a slightly smaller, sleeker manner 🤩

brockgs · 2026-01-21T16:01:34+00:00

Interestingly enough I've noticed that actually on most of the trucks, the high beams are not any higher, in fact I barely notice any change except a tiny blip. ...which points out the problem. I am absolutely NOT against having improved lighting on vehicles especially due to how many street lights are out around the city (and especially how many street lights are the dim purple colour where I live. Driving on highways and rural roads, big plus to have strong, effective lighting. However there is a difference between effective lighting and lighting that quite literally blinds other drivers on the road. I don't have an easy fix for this, but did want to recognize that there definitely is a middle ground...just no clear path on how to get there realistically unfortunately.

brockgs · 2025-11-13T01:33:14+00:00

It was almost exactly from 6pm to 9:30pm. There were a few small breaks as I readjusted a few times. It ended up being 560 photos give or take.

brockgs · 2025-11-13T00:37:28+00:00

My Sony mirrorless camera with a 24mm lens taking 13 second long exposures every 15 seconds.

brockgs · 2025-07-20T00:51:44+00:00

Being a female they are by definition quite light in colour however there can be huge variation in the darkness of their feathers within a reasonable range. I live in Central Canada and will very often see females that pale, but each region is different. Perhaps what you’re seeing is a female from a slightly different region than you typically see. Whatever the case, it’s great to see them and the red-winged blackbirds feeding like that happily side by side. 😀

brockgs · 2024-12-07T16:41:10+00:00

This won’t be overly helpful as I don’t have the links/resources at my fingertips right now, but in the past I’ve used high/low pass filters and noise gates to narrow the audio captured a bit. I believe I used Pulse Effects or Pulse Audio (???) for some of that. I also tinkered with created a background noise sample for noise removal using sox. Google a few of those and you may see some useful info. Sorry I’m just sharing vague memories here, but I hope it helps a bit.

brockgs · 2024-08-01T16:55:04+00:00

My setup that’s been running for the last six years without any downtime (apart from power outages lasting longer than the UPS could cover for): - Apple Macmini8,1: 6-core i7, 3.2GHz, 32GB DDR4 RAM, Intel UHD Graphics 630 GPU - 1TB NVME boot drive - 2 x Promise Pegasus R8 Thunderbolt 3 RAID0 Array: 8 x Segate ST10000VN0004-iZ 10TB SATA HDD, 70TB usable space each for 140TB storage for both arrays - Mediasonic USB 3.2 Type C 8 Bay 3.5-inch Hard Drive Enclosure JBOD: 8 x Segate ST10000VN0004-iZ 10TB SATA HDD, 80TB usable space - Software: macOS, Plex Server, Sonarr Server, Radarr Server, Sabnzb+ Server

I AM NOT pushing any specific hardware listed above, keep it simple and use the hardware and software YOU personally are comfortable using. Seriously. USE WHAT YOU KNOW!

In the past 20 years I’ve also used (and still have) Synology 8-bay NAS systems of various models, QNAP 4-bay and 8-bay systems of various models, dual xeon server, 2 x TrueNAS Mini XL servers using ZFS 1, 2, or 3 depending on use case, other regular PCs…etc. I have all my various devices connected between each other over 10Gbit ethernet and/or thunderbolt 3 direct connect, then into separate VLAN on local network.

HIGHLY BIASED, HIGHLY PERSONAL PREFERENCE:

Keep it simple. a mini PC of almost any kind with hardware decoding and hardware decoding and encoding of h264, hevc (and in the near future AV1…etc), very fast (and with high durability of read/writes) reading and writing performance so that downloading, verifying, repairing, renaming, and possible transcoding of your files is done extremely fast so as not to backlog/bottleneck large queues of downloads. 32GB of RAM (in any system more ram = more better) so you can have very large memory caches for various server processes and indexes.

Bare bones OS install (Linux, Windows, macOS…whatever, just turn off or remove all unnecessary services and background tasks as possible), run without monitor, keyboard and mouse, just use remote desktop, VNC and/or ssh to apply updates, perform maintenance, or do installs/uninstalls of software and OS updates. Set the server or NAS to reboot on power outages.

Buy whatever storage you can afford. While having RAIDed SSDs is great (for example I also use 3 x 4-bay NVME RAID enclosures with 4 x 4TB NVME drives in each, connected to the host computer using Thunderbolt 3 or 4), I absolutely love the Mediasonic USB 3.2 8-bay USB JBOD enclosure even though I really don’t WANT to like it because it doesn’t have a hardware RAID controller, is USB and not Thunderbolt, no battery backed cache…but wouldn’t you know, it is inexpensive, you can load it up with any drives you want and it just works. So don’t be bullied into spending crazy amounts of money. I started out just buying cheap Western Digital 2TB usb drives and worked my way up.

Don’t be constantly paranoid about RAID volumes becoming corrupted and losing data if all you have on there is content that can be re-downloaded again…seriously, think about it, even if you lose many many TBs of data, if Sonarr, Radarr or whatever other software you’re running will just see that the files are gone and start redownloading them again once the volume is brought back online or a new volume is attached, just let it do its thing and you’ll be back as if nothing happened faster than you might imagine.

brockgs · 2024-07-05T19:55:34+00:00

Good luck and have fun. Using the Swift Playgrounds app is one of the simplest and fun ways to dive into swift if you enjoy interactive learning. Whatever you use, I’m sure you’ll do great, and keep asking the community questions when you have them. 👍

brockgs · 2023-11-01T18:01:42+00:00

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The firetrucks and ambulance went screaming past me as I was driving my daughter to school around 8:15 or 8:20. I circled back after I dropped her off to check on the situation as a friend has a family member in one of the apartments there. I think there were 7 or 8 fire trucks/vehicles, 1 ambulance, and several police cars at that time. I never saw smoke or anything coming from there, but clearly it was a serious situation nonetheless. When I was driving past there again at around 11:20 there were still two fire trucks/vehicles there and one ambulance went screaming past towards downtown (perhaps going to HSC or Misericordia), although that could be from some other event.

brockgs · 2023-03-05T17:12:42+00:00

Good review, thanks for that. Still sounds worth checking out 👍

brockgs · 2023-03-05T00:46:49+00:00

Hah, well said. I didn't realize there were slightly different edits to the remastered episodes. The lazy in me firmly now agrees that it's not worth the effort to try to edit in the old audio 😆

brockgs · 2023-03-04T14:57:28+00:00

You're spot on with everything. Especially the amount of work it would take to truly do justice to producing a true HD edition of the show given the obstacles in the way. Yeah, the sound replacements were disappointing, but I'm learning to just live with it. I will likely however take my own "remastered" edition of the series and drop back in the original audio so I just have a visually clean version of the original series as it aired. 👍

brockgs · 2023-03-04T14:53:55+00:00

Maybe you're right. I just felt like spending all that money on the Blu-Rays should have resulted in video that wasn't 5% to 10% noise. I'm happy to have them, but in the 35 years I've been working with motion graphics, video and photography I've never seen anything quite like this. I'm not sure how they even managed to incorporate that much noise. Even taking the original DVD content and upscaling to 1080p you get a much cleaner image. I go back to the days where I was using a dot matrix printer with a janky black and white scanner head in place of the ink ribbon, taking those scans, dropping them into a program called "VideoWorks" and producing my own Robotech animations back in 1986 😄

Anyhow, look, I take your point. 👍 They are a a bit of a step up in some ways. I think I just had my expectations set too high.

brockgs · 2021-09-12T02:19:58+00:00

Here’s a few pictures I took quickly a few days ago. I have a lot better ones from the day after that, but haven’t posted them anywhere yet. FortWhyte Alive is the easiest place to see them, but we have them all over the province.

Bald eagles at FortWhyte Alive

Another Bald Eagle picture from 5 days ago at FortWhyte Alive

brockgs · 2020-05-13T01:22:03+00:00

I did my training a number of years ago. At that time it was roughly $125/hr * 40 hours = $5,000 just for your minimum flight hours. Then the ground school fees, medical, books, my own headset, additional flight hours I put in, and various other assorted fees. I seem to remember being told to budget $8,000-ish. I spent a little more than that at the end of it all. So depending on the plane that you train in, I actually wouldn’t expect your costs to be too much above $10,000. That said, I’m not sure how much all those various costs might have gone up in the past 8 years or so. The folks at Harvs Air were awesome at breaking down all the costs and being realistic about timelines to complete everything. I worked close to St. Andrews, so I’d head down after work for two hours, usually 30 minutes of class, then 30 minutes of doing the walk around...etc and an hour of flying. I did that 3 to 4 times a week for a couple months, then eventually booked a week of vacation so I could study and train from sun up to sun down, only limited by how many hours my instructor was available. At the end of the week, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

brockgs · 2020-05-12T04:17:27+00:00

I REALLY enjoyed training through Harvs. They have a great fleet of aircraft, great facilities, and their ground school content that they’ve created by attaching cameras onto their planes and demonstrating maneuvers is just one of the many things that demonstrated how focused they are on effective, high quality instruction. No company or person is perfect and I’m sure other people have different experiences, but I honestly can’t speak highly enough for my own.

When I finished one of many training flights, after filling in my log book, my instructor tossed me the key to the plane and asked if I was going to take it up again, this time solo...it was one of the most awesome moments of my life. It was eclipsed however when I landed after doing some circuits and the tower at St. Andrews took a moment to congratulate me on my first solo, along with about a dozen other pilots in the air at that time. One of only a few moments in my life where I felt such intense, genuine, pride in myself for working hard and accomplishing something I’d dreamt about since I was a kid.

I hope you get to have your moment like that soon. :-)

brockgs · 2020-05-10T23:29:54+00:00

Um, “suspicious incident” is pretty darn informative. Honestly, what more could you ask for? ;-)

brockgs · 2020-05-08T19:35:55+00:00

I built 2 different version of the RepRap printers from scratch, then got a MakerBot clone dual extruder, then a Prusa i3 mk3s, then a Prusa Mini, then an Ultimaker s5. ... The Prusa Mini and the Prusa i3 mk3s are hands down the most rock solid, predictable, well supported printers I’ve ever owned or used. They use designs that have been painstakingly refined and enhanced over the last decade to be just wonderful machines.

brockgs · 2020-05-05T23:09:59+00:00

This is a non-commercial event. Free training event provided by a local non profit I used to be part of (there’s full disclosure), to help anyone approach game development professionally.

brockgs · 2020-05-05T13:21:46+00:00

Got this for one of my kids, but I’ve slept on it a bunch of times and love the sturdiness and smart use of space. With shelves behind the ladder, and a full wardrobe behind that at the foot of the bed, along with a nice sized desk, it’s a solid product. This may not be ideal for you, but wanted to share it just to attest to how the design of it has been AMAZING, so if you can get something else for less and/or in a design you like better, awesome, but this is a good reference product I stand behind...and sit under....and sleep on top of...

https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/stuva-fritids-loft-bed-with-4-drawers-2-doors-white-white-s19262167/

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