The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Tag: Wildlife

Other creatures in our world

  • Photo Tweakage: Mouse Tunnels in the Snow

    Mouse tunnels in the snow
    Mouse tunnels in the snow

    As the snow cover melts away in the spring, you discover how much activity has been going on.

    The mice make elaborate tunnels with spaces for seed stores, latrines, and numereous secret entrances near the bushes. For a few months, at least, they can scamper all over the yard without worrying about becoming snacks for owls and hawks.

    This kind of picture requires a bit of tweakage, because the default camera settings deliver an essentially gray picture with no contrast. The usual auto-exposure settings assume a more-or-less neutral background, so the camera adjusts the exposure to deliver a neutral result. Unfortunately, you really want most of the background to be white, so the default snow image will be grossly underexposed.

    Set the camera to overexpose the picture by 1 or 2 EV; if your camera has a histogram display, adjust the exposure to put that huge bump on the white end close to the right side of the histogram. It helps if you frame the picture before doing this, as the LCD monitor will be pretty much retina-burn white.

    Take the picture and get it into your PC.

    GIMP Level Adjustment Window
    GIMP Level Adjustment Window

    Now, in your favorite photo-editing software (The GIMP on our desktops), adjust the photo’s levels & contrast. This screen shot shows the logarithmic histogram; the linear one is basically just one peak 3/4 of the way to the right side with a little grass on the rest of the chart. The two little buttons in the upper-right choose linear or log.

    Drag the white point (the teeny white triangle on the right, just below the histogram) until it’s just a bit to the right of the abrupt dropoff’s foot. That sets the whitest part of the picture to real white, not half-a-stop-down light gray.

    You can do the same with the black point (the black triangle on the left), setting it to just left of the black dropoff. In this case, we have some genuinely dark areas, so leave it alone.

    Now, the key part: drag the middle triangle to adjust the gamma. Move it rightward to darken the overall image by decreasing the gamma and emphasize small differences on the bright end of the histogram. That makes the tunnels pop out of the image, although it also tends to make the snow look very contrasty.

    Don’t go overboard with this sort of thing, but a little adjustment can reveal details and bring pictures back to life. It’s not for Ansel Adams quality pix, that’s for sure.

    Here’s possibly more than you want to know about levels & gamma & contrast, but with much better illustrations and more descriptions: Unai Garro’s Blog. He has other useful tutorials, too.

  • They’re Getting Bolder!

    Turkey on the Patio
    Turkey on the Patio

    Got up this morning, looked out the kitchen window, and there stands a turkey on the patio!

    They’ve been edging closer and closer for the last week or so; we think the snow cover is making the seeds under the feeder look more attractive. As nearly as we can tell, though, they have yet to venture across the patio to the feeder: no tracks in the snow.

    What would be really impressive: a row of turkeys lined up on the patio railing, just like they do on our neighbor’s split-rail wooden fence.

  • Unusual Tea Additive

    Green tea is supposed to be good for you and Tazo China Green Tips is supposed to be pretty good tasting, so I’ve been sipping a cuppa or two in the morning. Teabags are a spendy way to buy tea, so I’ve been buying half a kilo at a shot from cooking.com, storing it in glass jars, and teaspooning it into a tea ball infuser over the course of the next year.

    This interesting additive appeared in one of my teaballs; fortunately I was awake enough to notice it before it wound up in hot water.

    Beetle found in Tazo Green Tea
    Beetle found in Tazo Green Tea

    It looked pretty much like the hull of a generic Asian Garden Beetle, although we haven’t seen anything quite like it in our gardens. Not a big deal, as garden beetles are fairly inoffensive critters, but not something that should make its way into a bag of lah-dee-dah tea. On the other paw, it’s hard to filter stuff like that out of the stream.

    Fought my way through the Flash-saturated Tazo site, sent a note to the Customer Service folks, eventually had a pleasant phone chat. After convincing her that I wasn’t rabidly angry and that it really was one of their beetles, she dispatched fifteen bucks worth of Starbucks gift card.

    It seems Starbucks either owns Tazo, both of ’em are controlled by the same outfit, or something like that. She was in the Starbucks Customer Service chain o’ command, anyway.

    Beetle bottom view
    Beetle bottom view

    So I picked up three boxes of Tazo tea bags at the local Starbucks: more China Green Tips and some Green Tea with Lemon Grass (which doesn’t appear on their website). Left me with three cents on the card; I’m not a regular customer, so it’s now in the pile of cards I use as measurement shims in the workshop.

    I’d been adding lemon grass from our garden to the morning cuppa for a pleasant lemon scent. The Tazo version includes Lemon Verbena, some mint, and other flavors that cranked the scent up to 11 and the taste far into my ptui range. Unpleasant, indeed.

    For what it’s worth, if you’ve tried & disliked other green teas, give Tazo China Green Tips a shot. It’s delicate and much better than the other (far cheaper) green teas I’ve tried; Salada Green Tea is particularly noxious.

    One of the China Green Tips reviewers on cooking.com comments “I found a rather long, nasty, kinky hair … I was shocked. I threw out the whole bag  … I was unable to drink tea for a week”.

    Mexican Bean Beetle on Soybeans
    Mexican Bean Beetle on Soybeans

    Now, party people, I’m here to tell you that food just doesn’t pop out of the ground in a pristine state. Maybe it’s because we eat a lot of food from our own gardens, but passengers like that, let alone the odd hair, just aren’t an issue. Consider, for example, this critter that made it all the way into the house on some soybeans: he’s likely related to the Asian Garden Beetle family and not all that far back in their family trees.

    If you want to really worry about something, ask yourself whether your tea grew downwind of, say, Zhejiang Happy Face Metal Refinery Complex Number Six. No way to tell about that, other than through a detailed chemical analysis of every cuppa.

    Bon appétit!