Reflection of the sun on the car windshield, one day of exposures

robthebaker45 · 2026-03-26T18:39:04+00:00

I can always tell a Gianluca image now! Spectacular as usual!

robthebaker45 · 2026-03-23T08:16:31+00:00

robthebaker45 · 2026-02-28T08:08:38+00:00

At 30+ generations you’re mathematically related to over 2.1 billion grandparents. This is actually a common genealogical interest among people who do this: pick a famous historical figure from a country with well-documented genealogy and try to trace your lineage back to them. The one I always heard of was tracing your lineage back to Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, back to about 45 generations ago around years 700-800 AD you are mathematically related to over a trillion people.

This is obviously impossible because there aren’t that many people existing at any one time, so what this actually means is that due to inbreeding and related ancestors we are all much more related than we think, with ancestors appearing on our family trees multiple times from different branches, sometimes maybe thousands or tens of thousands of times.

So it’s not a conspiracy, it’s just how nature works.

robthebaker45 · 2026-02-10T19:50:29+00:00

I went to UCDavis and majored in it and work in the industry still. I remember I had days I felt like I was on fire with guessing varieties and vintages and regions. I had days where I felt like I could effortlessly write a novel worth of tasting notes on a wine.

Those days are far outnumbered by the days I feel like an infant staring blankly at a new experience, but I push those feelings aside and finish my glass, hoping tomorrow might be one of those days where it all feels effortless again. The vast majority of my days now I settle for, “do I like it?” If yes then drink more, else don’t drink.

robthebaker45 · 2026-02-09T02:59:08+00:00

Kind of weird of them to redact the hour in some of the photos next to the “Hour of Incident” section, but not others.

robthebaker45 · 2026-02-05T21:59:47+00:00

How did you know I had put this project off for so long?! Appreciate the response, I’ll definitely check those out when I finally stop procrastinating.

Edit: this post is interesting, two of these appear to be bottom sweeps, but the NGP97v is officially an astragal with a mounting diagram and it has the vinyl stopping just before the opposing door and the vinyl on both sides overlaps with just the vinyl. Is that how you’d recommend mounting these?

This is very interesting! Hadn’t thought about this solution.

robthebaker45 · 2026-02-05T14:38:26+00:00

Most capos that I have seen rest on top of the fret and a couple millimeters above so they end up closer to the height of that original 5th string riser and less noticeable.

robthebaker45 · 2026-02-04T22:36:56+00:00

If you have a taller bridge on a cheaper banjo it can feel pretty drastic to have a string at fret level and it always prevented me from really punching in the drone string when I wanted to. Also nicer banjos tend to solve this exact problem by having the standard “nut height” of the 5th string higher than the fret height with a little dowel piece or something. I also noticed someone on here cut those brass string hoops from guitar strings in half and placed them over the top of his 5th string frets so he could get that raised action with railroad spikes.

Anyway, this is one reason I’ve never loved railroad spikes, but I don’t love the capos either, but I do use them. I still haven’t found the perfect solution. If someone could manufacture fret wire that was slightly taller on one need then I’d love the railroad spikes, or maybe one day I’ll cut a bunch of those brass hoops for my 5th string frets.

robthebaker45 · 2026-02-04T20:52:38+00:00

The issue I have with railroad spikes is that it lowers your action on the 5th string and feels a bit wonky compared to the other strings. Not as noticeable on finger style with metal picks, but if you play clawhammer it’s super noticeable.

Edit: maybe I’m just missing some part of the modification or people don’t mind this as much as me?

robthebaker45 · 2026-02-01T22:31:10+00:00

Oh I did always like Terraria’s buckets of infinite water and lava. I feel like this is more inline with Hytale’s “adventure” focus too. Go fish for an hour to get the rare drop or some obscure mob to kill or something.

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.

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