A Bit of Citizen Science

6FPS V7#5: May 12, 2025

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

I can’t believe it’s May. Time seems to be flying by, but spring is definitely here for good — although today is cool and damp, after a week of sunny, warmer weather. Life in the Pacific Northwest.

Here at the house the daffodils we planted two falls ago are almost done flowing, and the tulips are mostly out and looking nice. The azaleas are starting to bloom, the Rhodies are looking nice and a couple are in full bloom, and I planted eight Fuscias to get the spring planting going.

New Wallpaper Oopsie

Last issue I told you about new wallpapers for 6FPS subscribers — and then forgot to update the wallpaper section below. Oops. If you went to the page, you’d have found them, but I didn’t update the section telling you to do that. That has been corrected this issue, and the person responsible for not screwing this up has been strongly chastised.

Last issue I mentioned I was thinking of headed back to Silicon Valley in October to celebrate Santa Clara Valley Bird Alliance’s 100th anniversary, since I spent a lot of time working with the organization. As of right now, that trip is on, and I’m thinking the trip will be a bit more than a week, and will have me headed down I5, stopping in Eugene, the Sacramento area (for the Sacramento and Colusa NWRs), Los Banos (to visit my old friends Merced NWR and San Luis NWR), then a coupe of days in the Cupertino area, and then head back up up the coast via Arcata, Bandon, Newport and Astoria. It’ll be early for the refuges in terms of prime birding, but it’ll be awesome to visit my old friends and see how they’re doing.

Other travel? As of right now, nothing but day trips planned. I was thinking of heading to Newport/Bandon for a couple of days, but if I’m headed there in the fall, that’ll work.

Birding Notes

A couple of months ago I showed off some photos I took at a Bald Eagle nest I was shown. My plan was to visit it every couple of weeks and document the chicks like I did back in Santa Clara back in the day.

Unfortunately there have been no photos since that day, because the nest failed and the eagles dispersed. This isn’t that unusual for a new pair. but it was disappointing. But hopefully, next year they’ll try again, and I’ll keep an eye on the nest to see if it’s used again.

Overall, though, one of my goals this year was to bird more often and bird more frequently and more widely. If I look at the area around me and mark out what’s within 60-90 minute drives, the area covers about six counties, and I wasn’t doing a good job of monitoring all of that for interesting opportunities. I changed some things in my eBird alerts and now I’m getting a much better look at the area around me and starting to explore some new birding locations with some success.

I’m 15 species ahead of last year on my overall year list, and I’ve added four species to my Kitsap county list and three to my state list. Last week I found a nice place near Sequim that isn’t part of the Dungeoness NWR but overlooks it from the shore, and it looks to be one I visit fairly regularly moving forward.

Sensor Dust and Firmware updates

After my last shoot, of course the Sony had dust spots on the sensor, because I've found Sony sensors always have them (I never had them with Fuji, go figure). So this afternoon was cleaning the sensor again as the images uploaded on the Mac.

And somewhere along the way I decided I should check to see if there were firmware updates. Turns out, for the A7R4 I had firmware 1.05, and current is, um, 5. And for the 100-400 lens was at firmware 2, and current is 6.

Um, oops. My bad for not noticing this earlier. All now fixed, but the Sony update processes are not the best, and their support sites are somewhat chaotic. Didn't help that Google sent me to the wrong download page pointing me to older updates, not the most recent. But I got that all sorted out.

A pro tip that cost me a solid 30 minutes of "why the @#$#@# isn't this working?" -- you need to remove any teleconverter and make sure the lens is directly attached to the camera to update it. Since I never remove the TC, I forgot it was there, and hilarity ensued.

Check your firmware folks, and on the lenses, too.

This Month’s Minidrama

We had a bit of a mini drama this month — I took Tatiana into the vet for her quarterly hormone shot, and noticed the sign on the door.

Our vet practice is shutting down. This is an issue because Avian vets aren’t common, especially out here in more rural Kitsap. So we needed to find new vets.

The good news is that we got a recommendation and it matched my research on this, and so we’ve hooked up Tatiana with a new Avian vet. The bad news is it’s in the Tacoma area over the Narrows Bridge, so it’s about an hour away, where her previous vet was about 30 minutes away. They also do bird boarding, but that facility is aboutn 90 minutes away.

Now, this isn’t terrible — when we were in California, our Avian vet was 30 minutes away, and our cat vets about an hour (because they were also our cat/bird boarding facility). Just a bit inconvenient.

Since we just had Tatiana seen, we’ve set up a wellness check and her next implant with the new vet towards the end of June. And we found a nice local vet for the cats, and they’ve had their initial wellness checks and other than Buster being a chonky boy (24 pounds) all looks good. But it was definitely a bit of a scramble for a bit.

There is an opportunity here in Kitsap for a practice to decide to take on an Avian vet and there’s one that’s now unemployed, but I don’t expect that to stay that way long.

Social Media and Me

I’ve been trying to put more time and effort into social media, and to be honest, many days it’s hard to find the motivation. I just don’t find it that interesting.

But I do spend time monitoring (and sometimes doomscrolling) across the services, and I am trying to post more frequently and share stuff I find interesting. The challenge is there’s so much dogmatic yelling going on, and very little actual conversation, and I have no interest in getting involved with any of that.

One thing I’ve come to realize: I’ve completely lost interest Mastodon. I still post a few things there, but I rarely even remember to fire it up to scroll through it. Instead, I’ve found my time is going to Bluesky, primarily, along with a couple of private communities I’m a member of. After that, I scroll through Facebook and Instagram once or twice a day, but I don’t put any content on either (because, well, Meta).

So if you want to connect with me on social media, Bluesky is the answer. Meet me there and with any luck, we can have a real conversation about something…

Apple effed up big time

A judge threw the book at Apple, and it’s really, really bad. If you haven’t been following this case, these two articles will give you a good overview:

• Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers Rules, in Excoriating Decision, That Apple Violated Her 2021 Court Order Regarding App Store Anti-Steering Provisions

• The hammer falls on Apple’s malicious-compliance scheme

The ruling is scathing, and now former (retired? -ish) CFO Luca Maestri carries the brunt of that, but Apple VP of Finance Alex Roman was called out for lying under oath, and that was referred for possible criminal prosecution. Phil Schiller, on the other hand comes out of it looking like he was trying to keep Apple from ending up here, and got overruled by the money men.

How did we get here? Simple put, greed. Apple, even back in 2006 when I left the company, had clearly gotten into the mindset that every possible dollar deserved to belong to Apple. And ultimately, when you get too greedy and push too hard to capture every possible dollar, eventually others step in to take you down a notch — as the EU has done, and now here in the U.S. Apple has there “no steering” restrictions obliterated.

The crazy thing is, the amounts of money aren’t that significant. There’s no reason Apple needed to fight so hard to keep every dollar that the courts and the EU felt the need to step in and push them back. But now, Apple is losing control of its own processes and business policies, as the courts and governments step in to dictate changes, and the reality is, Apple fully deserves this.

And it was completely avoidable by being less greedy.

Does this change my attitudes about Apple? Not really, I’ve shifted those views over time as I saw the damage to its reputation (especially with developers) that this greed was causing. As someone who as a Developer Advocate in the past always argues about the need to honor and nurture goodwill in our relationships, watching Apple define that goodwill as valueless and trash it has long bothered me.

And now it seems like two of the people behind those decisions are now Apple’s former CFO, and someone who may well go to jail. And I don’t think Apple removing Luca from the CFO role is a coincidence, now that I’ve seen the data that came out in this ruling.

Sad. But Apple fully earned this kick in the knee. As a company, I think it needs to reconsider how it treats developers and examine how to start rebuilding goodwill and trust with them. But the exec team does need to sit down and let Phil Schiller do a “I told you so, you idiots” lecture and start listening to his advice.

Will they? Probably not.

My Latest Lego Build

The other big project in April was a new Lego build. They just released a new big project, a stern wheel river steamboat. I took one look at it and went “yeah”, and I wasn’t disappointed. I spent about 3 weeks building it, 2-3 hours a session a couple of times a week. It now has a place of honor downstairs in the office.

Next up? Not sure yet. I do have a Rokr build I haven’t done, so I expect I’ll do that one before diving into another Lego.