Seems like it, yes: https://lansinggardendesign.com/blog/2020/9/6/arctostaphylos-bark

The old bark cracks into sections as the trunk expands. This ability to shed is part of the plant’s defense against insects and disease. When each year’s skin is shed, insects and disease are shed along with it. As opposed to the skin/defense of thicker, rougher bark, as most other plants have, Manzanitas are able to have the thin, sleek, smooth bark they are famous for.

A very related question to ask is: did your parents, or extended family, ever help you financially?

Here’s my answer.

Have I ever received help from my parents and/or extended family? Yes. I was able to live rent free after high school while I found my way. When I eventually started college I was able to live at home and commute. My family started a college fund for me when I was little, so I was able to cover about 15% of my in-state tuition. We also got a cash loan from my Grandma to put toward a down payment that we paid back over the course of a few years. Without it we wouldn’t have been able to buy our house.

Am I getting help from my parents or extended family now? No, I haven’t for years. Money and support have started flowing the other direction. I’ve given my mom a (used) car and also let her live with us for a year and a half while she switched careers.

It is all about trade-offs, but the tradeoffs have to be situational.

Considering only shutter speed and a “static” subject, you have to consider whether or not your subject is actually static. For example, are there flexible things present (plants, etc) and is it windy? For something like a desert landscape with zero motion your shutter speed can be as low as you want it to be (note that you might need to block some light from reaching the sensor using a ND filter). For “still” people you probably don’t want to go too low because we’re constantly in motion. That said, ever rule was made to be broken. Want to photo stars? Don’t use a super long shutter speed - you’ll get star trails. What’s that, you want star trails? Bump shutter speed even more so they look intentionally vs somewhat smeared balls of light. Sports and wildlife are basically the only scenario where you need a fast shutter speed… until you want some motion blur. Granted, motion blue and sports will still probably be a fairly fast shutter speed.

Aperture follows a similar arc - do you want shallow depth of field, do you want to see more of the foreground/background, maybe you forgot your ND filter and want a slow shutter so you have to stop down, maybe it’s really dark so you have to use a fast (wide aperture) lens wide open.

The only thing you universally want to take one way is ISO and that way is low. Unless you want some grain. Or you’re shooting something with motion indoors and you can’t compromise any more on shutter speed or depth of field. Or your lens aperture is already wide open and you still need more light.

When staring off you might want to try shutter or aperture priority, based on the situation, and let the camera handle the other two values. Heck, I still do this 95% of the time 15 years later.

I’m currently rocking the stock acrylic panels. I do have ACM panels, that I plan to insulate with that radiant bubble insulation stuff, but haven’t gotten around to printing new (deeper) magnetic panel mounts.

I’m running a PEI bed and recently had a part pull the spring steel up with it, so adhesion isn’t my issue. Tossing some blankets and sweaters over the printer cured my warping with a (just barely) 60° C chamber.

I’ve been trying to keep printer fiddling down, but it’s easy to get caught up in tune this, macro that with the goal of reducing fiddling in the long term. Speaking of which, I really need to do input shaping…

Thanks! That’s exactly why I asked. I figure if I am going to get one I’ll need to shell out some $$ if I want it to last.

Or random application availability and/or ease of use.

Two cases in point:

• Photo Mechanic. It makes it really easy/fast to sort through tons of photos. There are some Linux compatible alternatives, but they’re just not as good
• Fusion 360. There are a couple of things you can do to make it work, but since Linux isn’t officially supported the install process can be a bit fiddily and there’s no guarantee that an update won’t break things.

Things are certainly better now than they have been in the past, but if you’re somewhat time limited (eg your computer is more of a tool than a thing to spend time tweaking) Linux can still be a bit offputting - especially if some of the core applications you use aren’t officially supported.

Nice build! It’s also nice to see 4x bedfans (2 are in a filter, but still). I wish more people talked about bedfans, especially with larger printers and ASA/ABS. The other unspoken secret is chamber insulation if you want to do big ASA/ABS prints.

First, nice photo! Even “old” gear can take great photos. Throw motion and/or low light (with a fast lens) into the mix and you’ll beat a modern smartphone.

The quick lead into the exposure triangle is:

• ISO is basically “gain” applied to the photons that hit the sensor. Some gain = fine. More gain = you start to run into signal to noise ratio challenges
• shutter speed helps you freeze the action, or can also let the action blur on purpose. Examples of intentional blur include panning photos (think auto racing) and long exposures (at night or during the day with the aid of a ND filter)
• aperture. This is the ratio of focal length to lens aperture. Keep in mind it’s 1/x, so as x grows the actual aperture is getting “stopped down” (aka closed/smaller). Wider aperture (aka small denominator) = less depth of field and more light will hit the sensor. Stopping down = more depth of field and generally more sharpness/less vignetting, but if you take this too far you’ll hit diffraction and lose sharpness

You wind up trading values against each other in various scenarios, which is why it’s called the exposure triangle. It’s very much a “you pick two and deal with the third” situation. Which two you prioritize really comes down to what you’re trying to accomplish.

For your barn photo’s exposures, let’s talk tradeoffs. It sounds like you know that your ISO value was too high, especially for a static subject and good light. So how to get it to go down? You could do a mix of:

• using a slower shutter speed. Unless you have a tremor, the rule of thumb is minimum shutter speed should be more than 1/focal length. You could have easily shot this at 1/100, if not lower. That would cut ISO down to around 1600
• open your aperture. f/14 is very closed and likely isn’t needed unless you really want to see something deep in the background/foreground. You’re also likely losing some sharpness due to diffraction

Happy shooting! Feel free to ask follow ups.

Looks nice! Details on that green house? I would really like to jump start my season here if I can…

Very cool. Was this a test piece or do you intend to do CNC carving like this in the future? What finish do you think you’ll use? Any surface prep ahead of time like sanding? Details on the CNC?

So many questions!

What was preventing you? Photo uploads from my phone are super flaky.

You’re four forks deep now Slic3r to Prusa Slicer to Bamboo’s slicer to Orca. It also borrowed a lot of ideas from Super Slicer. Since it’s open source, and has been gaining some momentum, it seems to have a decent amount of contributors

Why Orca?

• all the features you know and love from things up the tree
• a revamped UI
• built in tuning tests (temp tower, extrusion multiplier, volumetric flow, pressure advance, etc)
• great Klipper integration if that’s your jam

I hope you’re back to your normal physical self soon.

As far as the 3D printer goes, there are three main types of categories of people with printers at home:

• Tinkering with the printer is the hobby. This can be a mix of tuning for better quality, faster prints, etc as well as physical modifications to the printer. One of the extremes of this is the speedboat race where people go all out for the fastest print of a common model
• Modeling things and then printing them. I fall largely into this camp. I’ve made many a replacement part for a kids toy, jigs/fixtures, brackets, printer mods, speakers, wagon wheels, a thing to keep cats out of potted plants, even a tiny toolbox for the minimal amount of tools I used to carry at work
• The printer is largely an ends to printing free/paid designs from the Internet. There are tons of designs out there that are a mix of cute (but probably throw away), functional/practical, things you could sell, etc

If you’re modeling it will be mouse and keyboard, but a SpaceMouse will improve ergonomics. All you’re really using the keyboard for is number input.

If you find yourself in the functional print crew, don’t be surprised if you wind up printing things to help in your garden. Some of the PVC fittings holding together my arch are now printed parts (less effort to model and print a replacement than drive to the store) and the hooks the “gates” to my fence hang on are also printed. Once you get in the habit of finding things you can print you’ll be finding them everywhere.

It’s all tradeoffs. I’ve been too busy with mulching to cover my squash vines and it’s vine boarer season here :( it’s on the list for this weekend.

Michigan, US

Excellent photo! I fell into team photographer for my kiddos T-ball team and the parents really liked some photos of the kids being kids during games - playing in the gravel, making faces, etc. Many people appreciate well executed “normal” phoses, but it seems like well executed photos of not quite normal activities get more appreciation.

Thanks! For either mulch or pavers you’re going to have some level of maintenance. My personal take is that the maintenance for mulch is more frequent, but less intensive, than pavers. Both will benefit from a boarder to keep roots out.

This fence has been in place for at least four years, so this has been a very long time coming. I went with mulch because getting rid of rocks is really annoying should we want to change the area again in 5-10 years.

If mildew doesn’t get them, vine borers will :(