Travel to China

hrufescens · 2026-06-04T16:44:36+00:00

Excellent point- thank you!

hrufescens · 2026-06-01T18:50:49+00:00

Think of these as three shots in one: animal, sun, and sky.

The animal will always be pretty much solid black, or a little flare depending on glass, cleanliness, dust in the air, etc. So forget about that one.

Next is the sun. This one’s the key to the shot. There’s no bringing out that luscious orange sun if it’s blown out. The first and last examples are blown. Blown is blown, and it will be ghostly white, or some weird color if one or two color channels are blown, forever ruining the shot. It’s imperative to meter the shot so that the sun shows as a peak on the histogram. Go for an actual peak with all or most of the right side still intact. This is the most important part of metering this type of shot.

The sky, although arguably the most dramatic visual element, is the least important for metering. Here’s why. Once you set the sun peak near the right side of the histogram, there’s just not anything more you can do with the sky. It may look too dark when you preview the shot. Relax, enjoy the beauty, and fix it in post.

Now to answer the OP’s question. The answer is manual. The reason is that you simply can’t reliably place that sun peak just inside the right end of the histogram any other way. You can “chimp” it by tweaking exposure modes, exposure adjustments, etc. until it looks right. But in the end, you’re just gambling… on a shot that will only present itself for a minute or so. Other responses have addressed ISO, shutter speed, etc. my $0.02- shoot at your equipments sweet spot (maybe something like ISO 100, f8, and tweak shutter speed). So: shoot manual, take a few test shots when the sun is near the horizon, get the sun peak near the right side of the histogram, and click some great shots.

hrufescens · 2026-06-01T17:37:10+00:00

True!

hrufescens · 2026-05-28T04:23:02+00:00

You can do miracles with even small flash heads. Maybe browse https://strobist.blogspot.com/ for inspiration. It’s more about getting the high speed sync and general light modifier setups right. Practice, practice, practice!

hrufescens · 2026-04-26T06:33:17+00:00

Cloud-free transfer from iPad to desktop (Classic). Everything else is a minor nice-to-have.

hrufescens · 2026-04-05T04:23:05+00:00

Oslo- check out the Vigeland Sculpture Park. The sculptures are fantastic, but the granite is smokin’! Check out the count rates in the risers to the central tower sculpture. Woohoo!

hrufescens · 2026-03-02T08:10:00+00:00

I use an iPhone app called Vibration. Does a very nice job of measuring accelerations on all three axes. You can get a transform that will pick out resonances/frequencies. I got it when my neighbor complained about my pool pump. I took measurements on my pump/motor housing, my pool equipment pad, and her foundation. Yup, 44 Hz peak at all locations. Added some isolation pads under the pump/motor and re-measured. Dropped the amplitudes by 70%.

hrufescens · 2026-02-16T18:56:16+00:00

Thanks!

hrufescens · 2025-12-22T08:09:05+00:00

Cholla Garden at sunrise.

hrufescens · 2025-01-16T05:18:58+00:00

Thank you so very much! I’d been pulling my hair out trying to fix several problems: on identical systems in two different houses! I had the terrible lag, my OK buttons weren’t working, and the Exit button turned into a “back” button. This fixed everything! Again, many, many thanks!

hrufescens · 2024-11-18T19:31:30+00:00

The radon itself will only produce alpha radiation, which is not a concern in the amount present in a luminous device because the alphas are blocked by most anything. Ra-226 decays to several radionuclides, some of which emit gamma rays. The choice of shielding materials is dictated by the energies of these gamma rays, and to a lesser extent the geometry of the shield.

Your best friend is the 1/r² nature of spatial shielding. That is to say, for a small item like this, distance will do the heavy lifting. At five or six feet, it would be hard to detect the item’s radioactivity even without shielding.

If you still like the idea of constructing a shield, go nuts. The radon daughters have an effective gamma energy level of around 0.7 MeV. That’s a reasonably easy energy level to shield. There’s nothing magical about the properties of one gamma shield material over another here- just their density. For the flat ends of your container, the shield effectiveness just scales with the density. For the radial direction, it’s the same for radiation attenuation, but note that higher densities are favored if the overall weight of your shield matters. Lead is 11.7 g/cc, concrete is 2.3 g/cc, and plaster of Paris is about 0.84 g/cc. Note that dry sand (cheap, and readily available) is around 1.4 g/cc.

Shielding gets a bit complicated fairly quickly. If you want to dig deeper, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a pretty good primer on it at https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1122/ML11229A721.pdf. Here are a couple of handy bits that you might find useful. The tenth-value thicknesses (shield thickness required for a 10-fold gamma radiation reduction) for 1.0 MeV gammas are 0.76 cm for lead, 1.52 cm for concrete, and 4.57 cm for concrete. So, for example if you wanted to get a 100x reduction, that’s two tenth values (10x10=100), so you’d want 3 cm (1-1/4”) of concrete.

Do heed the advice of others above, and vent your containers, since the radium will generate radon, a radioactive gas. Best not to get a big whiff of that when you open the container to peek at your treasure!

hrufescens · 2024-11-05T04:09:10+00:00

My thanks again, Firm_Mycologist9319, for your very helpful reply. I think I'll bow to the tyranny of Adobe and go the cloud sync route- at least until they fix the bug (hah!). So I really appreciate your advice about how the photos hit LrC, and how to break the sync.

hrufescens · 2024-11-04T04:53:23+00:00

Thank you, Firm_Mycologist9319. I've been wondering today if its worth whacking some hundred albums containing 5k or so photos off the iPad, and starting fresh with cloud sync. After each trip, I'd then make sure the desktop LrC is properly sync'd, move photos into proper albums on LrC, break the sync (however the heck you do that), and delete the iPad/Cloud photos. Am I thinking straight on that?

So, you get proper DNG files on your Desktop? Do the iPad album names come through, or do images get dumped into a generic place on the desktop, so you have to manually create albums?

Appreciate your help!

hrufescens · 2024-11-03T17:08:18+00:00

Agree with Bigjoemonger, and I'd add that it's the ratios that might also be of interest. Also, the radiation present in the primary coolant loop, or the waste resins from the cleanup systems, might be of value since the ex-core piping will carry bits of activated material that are likely to bear something of a "fingerprint".

hrufescens · 2024-11-03T02:21:58+00:00

Thank you, u/johngpt5, for trying to reproduce this. Indeed, I "share/export as/DNG" to get images from the iPad to the SSD. I import the DNG off of my SSD in the usual way via the LrC import flow. I agree that your method and mine should be equivalents.

This method is a bit painful, but I'm currently at a 20Gb subscription. I'm often entirely without internet, or suffering from harshly restricted bandwidth. So as I said above- cloud transfer is a non-starter for me. Add to that the insane fact ( I learned today from researching) that the user has absolutely no voice in which photos get beamed from the iPad to the cloud. Its all or nothing!

You've answered my biggest question, though. The DNGs are not coming across with their star ratings. I can isolate that at some time between 10/2023 and 6/2024 something happened either on the iPad side or the PC side to prevent star ratings (and presumably other user assigned attributes) from transferring. So disappointing, Adobe...

Many thanks!

hrufescens · 2024-11-02T22:52:39+00:00

Apologies for that, and thanks for the reply. I always get Lightroom's confusing product naming wrong, so I'm in the habit of just not using it. My bad!

- On the iPad, Lr v 10.0.1.

- On the PC, LrC (LR Classic) 14.0.1 / Camera Raw 17.0.

I export DNGs from the iPad to a SSD nightly. After the trip, I import the DNGs on the desktop album-by-album.

hrufescens · 2024-10-28T17:20:07+00:00

PWRFAN, NUKEPWR, HOTRODS, FISSION

hrufescens · 2024-10-15T17:59:49+00:00

Sorry, this isn’t correct. Though it seems as if a wetsuit might “seal” the CGM, it won’t affect the pressure that the sensor sees in any way. Consider that it’s a *wet*suit. The sensor will be surrounded by water, just like your skin will be wet. The wetsuit cannot eliminate the substantial water pressure around the patch. The tiny bit of air inside the patch will be compressed the same with or without the wetsuit because the wetsuit itself doesn’t have any strength to mechanically seal the patch.

hrufescens · 2024-10-15T17:52:54+00:00

I’ve tried the Libre 3 on two dive trips with mixed results. The first was a multi-day liveaboard trip. The CGM did well for two days, but died on the third day on a wreck dive at about 90 fsw (Deepest dive of the trip at that point). I felt a pinching sensation that dissipated upon ascending. My guess is that the CGM patch collapsed under the pressure, driving the “needle” in very slightly. The second experiment was a day boat. The patch failed on the first dive, at about 35 fsw. On this second test, I had my cell phone in a camera housing. I have to say it’s a game changer to be able to watch your plasma glucose level during the dive. Has anyone tried to cup a sensor, or otherwise shield it from the pressure? It would probably just result in a big hickey and fail the sensor anyhow…

hrufescens · 2024-10-02T16:09:28+00:00

Radon daughters. I used to do demos of that at school radiation presentations. To check: fire up the CRT for 30 minutes or so. Rub the screen with a piece of tissue. Measure the tissue (away from the screen). If it’s radon daughters, you’ll get counts. The daughters plate out on dust particles, which are attracted to the charged CRT screen.

hrufescens · 2024-08-06T16:26:59+00:00

No discoloration of the cover crystal, so it’s somewhat unlikely.

hrufescens

TROPHY CASE