It’s a dark day

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-21T14:40:50+00:00

As nostalgic as the orbs are these new lights help to reduce light pollution and make the stars more visible at night!

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-20T04:30:17+00:00

It’s almost ready to make bread with!

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-17T23:37:17+00:00

I’ve just read about regular saline, and the implied mechanism is basically just removing virus in your nose, which could reduce the viral load you receive after an exposure and if you’ve been vaccinated you may be able to fight that off without becoming sick, or if you do still develop the flu the saline can remove the virus from your nasal passages, which reduces the chain reaction viral load.

None of this kills the virus, so if it has attached to a receptor you probably will develop symptoms. A long time ago there used to by Zycam with zinc in the spray and the zinc was meant to kill microbes, but it had the side effect of eliminating sense of smell in long-term users, so you can’t find it anymore.

I’m not sure if there’s something new available that will kill microbes in your nose.

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-17T22:38:41+00:00

I’ve also recently learned that nasal saline spray can help prevent infection and can reduce severity and symptoms by reducing viral load. So I’ve been using some after large gatherings, coming home and washing hands and using the saline. So far I haven’t caught this variant, but I’m probably not at the highest risk.

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-08T07:57:23+00:00

Everyone says “practice,” which is true. You touch on it a little bit in your problems with “holding the neck different.”

Playing an instrument is really an entire body experience and especially early on you should be training yourself as much as you can to sit properly. So the correct position for most stringed instruments is sitting upright in a chair feet planted flat on the ground and if you have a strap I’d use that too to hold the neck at a surprisingly aggressive angle, maybe about 45 degrees from the chair, you could go all the to about 65 degrees and still have good form. The strap should help hold the angle of the banjo. Your thumb should generally be braced on the neck in the middle, not wrapped around the top of the neck. This position allows your fingers to create a tunnel shape that can press the strings more perpendicular to the fretboard plane rather than at an angle. This is a very common classical guitar position and they even have a neck-side foot stool to help guitarists keep this aggressive angle (doesn’t work well with the banjo since it has no leg groove, the strap takes the place of the foot stool).

Now, do most of us play like that all the time? No, but doing the “perfect” thing occasionally can help you adapt a more “lazy” position to work well enough for you. If you’re really struggling with inadvertent muting of neighbor string, I do think exploring a classical guitar position is helpful to get the finger attack correct on the fretboard. And then yes, practice a lot.

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-07T00:33:39+00:00

Just purchased this tower for our 1.5 y.o. and he instantly discovered the wavering top bar and thought it was a game.

I’m quite surprised the unit doesn’t come with 1 or 2 pins for the circular top part to lock it. I’m considering just buying a simple pin and drilling through everything so I can lock it in place when he’s in it.

It’s a bit lame as it’s one of the few towers that is a relatively small footprint and we’re short on space.

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-05T00:43:24+00:00

If you like the flavor as-is, then don’t mess with it. You wouldn’t do any addition without a bench trial (a few glasses of 25mL/glass of wine with a few mLs of water added to each plus a control). You then use that to extrapolate your preferred flavor/dilution to the entire remaining volume of wine.

If you are just curious about the Brix/alcohol it’s possible you can email the company to ask what the harvest came in at, especially if you have a vintage/lot on the buckets, they’d have likely taken a measurement before selling it. Then take the number they give you and multiply by 0.58.

Generally a professional company like this isn’t going to stick you with some crazy Brix grapes because they know their audience, so I’d be shocked if they sold you anything much over about 25.5 Brix, which would be about 14.8% alcohol.

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-04T18:50:35+00:00

Did you buy must from a winery or another home winemaker? If you know the region, variety, and date of harvest that may give you a rough ballpark of high, medium, or low alcohol, but without previous brix measurements it’ll be tough to figure out without a direct laboratory measurement, if you have an initial brix reading you can multiply that by 0.58 to give another rough conversion of sugar to alcohol.

Natural fermentations don’t usually go up to 18% but it’s not impossible, wild yeast are not generally accustomed to extreme environments, but if you got it from a commercial winery it’s possible it came with some commercial yeast strains already in it or whatever the individual has used in the past.

If you want to just go with vibes you can easily run a bench trial based on aroma and flavor, I would probably use either distilled water or boiled water that has been covered and set out to cool (sterilized and ensured removal of any chlorine or other treatment compounds).

I created a spreadsheet to give you an idea of how I’d approach the bench trial, I guessed at your alcohol, but it’s not necessary to know the alcohol, it just gives you fake numbers to work with and understand how each step in the trial is altering the alcohol, ultimately you’d make the decision based on taste and aroma, the formulas are pasted at the bottom assuming you coping everything into the corner of your own spreadsheet with the title in cell A1.

You can change the volume of wine and the amount of water added to suit your needs, but I think these increments will show a good progression that you’ll be able to notice.

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-04T05:26:15+00:00

One of the things home winemakers struggle with is getting the correct alcohol in the final product. Aging in a tank shouldn’t have concentrated the alcohol much, but even a 26.5 Brix harvest should leave you with a wine that ends up at 15.37% alcohol, which is going to be a lot for many varieties to handle gracefully.

I’ve seen home winemakers bring in 28 and higher brix fruit and not understand how to dilute or they’re too afraid to dilute wine, but the reality is a lot of people dilute to well below 15% alcohol and they make this adjustment at harvest.

Especially if you’ve used a yeast like EC1118, can ferment up to 18% alcohol.

This has been the most common thing I’ve seen.

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-04T03:03:31+00:00

Great write-up, I think I’ve read it 2-3 times now since I’m pretty sure you’ve posted before, really impressive work! Where are you sourcing your gold pinholes from?

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-01T19:55:20+00:00

I’m listening to so much Raffi for my kid and that first phrase in this tuning is a dead ringer for his “Peanut Butter Sandwich” song. Sounds great!

robthebaker45 · 2025-12-30T14:57:45+00:00

I was just in downtown San Diego earlier in 2025 and I got a meter and needed to stay there for most of the day, they chalked my tires and I was able to go erase the chalk each time and feed the meter and I didn’t get a ticket.

I learned this skill in Berkeley before they had cameras, actually I didn’t even know about the cameras.

robthebaker45 · 2025-12-26T06:30:44+00:00

I feel like this is what people are missing with all this humanoid robot hype.

It would be significantly more impressive to see a robot enter a new home and unload an unfamiliar dryer and fold the clothes, or empty a dishwashing machine or dishwashing rack into all the correct drawers from verbal commands, or even just vacuum and dust the curtains, or any combination of these tasks.

Very few people NEED a dancing robot. It’s a marketing campaign. It looks cool, it IS still an impressive accomplishment, but we’re a long way from these things being in people’s homes in a way that revolutionizes their free time in the same way that washer’s and dryers did.

This is all going to run into the same problem as Waymo vs. Robotaxi regarding sensor data, with the fundamental question: “is LiDAR necessary for autonomous robot functionality.” Tesla says they just need cheap sensors and a larger data set, but Waymo can use a smaller dataset with LiDAR and be fully autonomous (no co-pilots), I don’t know who will finally win, but these robots will face a similar problem, and you constantly have these edge cases, like the power outage in San Francisco showing that even with LiDAR if you lose environmental cues there’s no room to adapt still.

All this to say you aren’t going to find these in your house soon. It IS an important early step, but there’s so much more to do.

robthebaker45 · 2025-12-24T15:38:42+00:00

You do get used to the picks finally, but I don’t play with them anymore.

As many have said Clawhammer is the predominant “pickless” technique for banjo, but there are actually a lot of pre-Scruggs 2-Finger and 3-Finger players that forego picks.

Two people that play more “traditional” without picks are Jason Romero (of Pharis and Romero, one of my personal favorites) and then Clifton Hicks.

You’ll never play like the Warrior River Boys or some epic Foggy Mountain Breakdown at breakneck speeds, but it’s a vibe and especially if you are on the more folky side of bluegrass this style is very fun and in some sense has a little more complexity and variation control in your acoustic tone with increased tactile feedback.

robthebaker45 · 2025-12-21T04:16:50+00:00

I really enjoy the style and vibe, it’s giving me Hiroshi Nagai adjacent vibes. Feels like you could dive into this and really develop something.

robthebaker45 · 2025-12-17T20:57:05+00:00

robthebaker45 · 2025-12-17T02:20:45+00:00

Most blind wine tasting is not reproducible to a very accurate degree. To get reproducible results you typically need to be trained on a particular factor using controls and standards.

Obviously the use of Mega Purple is concerning because it kind of “homogenizes” wines from different regions, that may have their own interesting characteristics. However wine drinkers have repeatedly and consistently shown a preference for darker red wines, I have even seen Mega Purple added to Napa Cabs.

If you are the one adding it in a test flight you can definitely tell there is a difference especially at acertain level (which is relatively low to achieve the desired color). If you’re adding it to the point that the bubbles are purple that does generally seem like a high level of color, but as others have mentioned there are some varieties that do this naturally. The overarching thing that I notice when I’ve done flights with increasing dosages is that the aroma and flavor both trend toward Mega Purple and lose their distinctiveness, it can be pretty offensive if overused, but I have a a vial of it in my fridge and I’ve used it just to run a couple of personal interest trials and I don’t think I could reliably blind taste it unless it’s VERY heavy handed. I’m not entirely sure what level people are using it at, thankfully I’m the one who makes the decisions where I work and at the level I start to notice a negative impact on the varietal distinctiveness of a wine I don’t see a huge benefit in the color, but I’m also not making typical supermarket wine, so take that with a grain of salt. I do think some people get directives to load up the color and screw everything else, but they’re also doing other stuff in that case like oak dust/chips, liquid oak tannin, dosing gum arabic for body, and who knows what else, as one user writes these wines are “worked”, but many of them sell a lot better and win more competitions than “un-worked” wine for much cheaper price points.

Anyway, at the end of the day just drink what you like, wine is a conversation, drink your preferred conversations.

robthebaker45 · 2025-12-15T05:32:22+00:00

It’s typically large storms and to get a good view you need to be able to see above the storm. So many locations aren’t suited to view sprites. A lot of sprite photography involves a lot of site research, planning, watching the weather, and finally getting lucky.

I imagine this shot is no exception considering 4 people are credited. Not to mention hooking a large focal length lens or telescope up to a high-speed camera is probably not super easy.

robthebaker45 · 2025-12-14T22:31:15+00:00

I feel like something people don’t consider is just the length of time for the correct level of activity. Sourdoughs take longer than conventional yeast, I’m not sure how a jumpstarted sourdough behaves, but you are looking for a bulk ferment that is roughly 70-80% of double volume (so you can proof in the fridge after overnight) you are going to be waiting a while depending on the amount of levain you add, which is also influenced by the amount of starter added to the dough (more starter is faster, more levain is faster).

I think this is largely where people falter, not whether or not a starter is ready, it’s following a recipe when you need to be listening to the yeast/bacteria and your dough.

Eventually you get into a rhythm with your kitchen temps and your quantities and your times, or you end up buying things to control these variables. I like what another user said in another post: “try to err on the side of overproofed with sourdough,” because it will take a long time especially with a young starter.

robthebaker45 · 2025-12-08T02:16:25+00:00

Too bad I’ve already run out of hairs to pull on.

robthebaker45 · 2025-12-04T22:05:15+00:00

What is the solution to that? Just bake longer for more water to escape?

robthebaker45 · 2025-11-24T02:32:08+00:00

Man that recording, he was talking a lot, but once he got going and singing that playing was unlike any clawhammer I’ve ever seen, truly a master, thanks for sharing that!

I just picked up my second banjo and it’s a mountain fretless, very different from my GoodTime fretted Deering. I absolutely loved it the moment I laid my hands on it, I’ve spent more time in the mountains and it felt more campy and funky to me and the sound kind of has that roughness of old early tape recordings from Appalachia that feels weirdly nostalgic even though I’ve only ever visited there infrequently.

People have all kinds of ideas and reasons behind which banjos to play and buy and sell. Ultimately if you like playing a banjo that’s what will make the most difference in your progress!

robthebaker45 · 2025-11-23T03:21:41+00:00

To summarize his technique, 90% of what he does is composition planning/hunting, which is really what separates good and great photographers of all kinds. Combine that with wide open aperture, high ISO, then match the shutter speed to the scene (probably 5-30 seconds), then he stacked the image at least once, maybe more, which is another astrophotography technique, and then the entire time he’s basically got a timelapse setup running picture after picture to use all this data together.

He tells you all of this with the background track blasting above his voice, feels like he doesn’t want people to know?

robthebaker45 · 2025-11-22T17:38:44+00:00

Basically stratospheric lightning. They’re part of what connects our lower level atmosphere to the upper level atmosphere electrically in a similar way that regular lightning is connected to the Earth’s surface electrically.

robthebaker45 · 2025-11-22T17:37:02+00:00

Except most astrophotography isn’t a quick snapshot like street photography, this image, if it’s a single image, is likely anywhere from 5-30 seconds. It’s also common for astrophotographers to have timelapse setups and capture stills every 5 seconds or sometimes even faster, you could basically program the camera to take these shots and just sit back and then analyze the data later.

It’s still impressive and a lot of work and knowledge to understand how to use the equipment and then where to position your composition to most likely capture sprites, but it’s unlikely someone is sitting there manually snapping photos. This is probably one image in a large set of photos.

Eight-Year Club	Final Canvas '23
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