6FPS V8#2: Not a Diet

6FPS
Written By Chuq Von Rospach

6FPS V8#2: February 9, 2026

E-mail: chuqvr@gmail.com • Site: https://chuq.me

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

The days are getting longer, and spring is not too far away. We’ve survived another big dark. It’s been cold and wet around here — we finally had our first string of 20F lows, but it didn’t snow, so that’s something. Only one snow day so far, and it melted in a couple of hours.

We have convinced the raccoons that we are not the place for breakfast — the pepper-infused seed worked. We still get visits, especially late at night, but we’re no longer a regular destination. At this point, I plan to continue using the pepper seed for another month or so, and then see what happens.

There are a couple of squirrels that have decided to eat the seed anyway but are clearly not happy about it. I’m amused, and it’s not much fun for them and it’s not a lot of seed. So I’m declaring victory but waiting to see if I can transition back to regular seed, or some mix of that and the pepper seed, as we get closer to spring.

It’s been a productive month, with a good amount of time spent in the shop and much of the rest birding. I’ll have more to say about the shop hopefully next week, but there’s been a good bit of progress since the last time I mentioned it, and I’m happy with.

There are a few other things bubbling under the surface that I can’t yet talk about, so stay tuned. But all of it seems interesting and positive so far.

Reliving the past through USENET

I had someone reach out and ask if I was the same Chuq Von Rospach who used to post on USENET (note: I am). It turns out he’s one of a number of people who have been re-living what was posted on USENET 40 years ago, as if they were happening in real time. It turns out there’s a site that pulled the USENET archives and massaged them into a system that is posting them out as if they were new (but 40 years later). It’s a fascinating idea, although at some level being part of someone’s curious exploration into the history of the early days of the net makes me feel old. The site doing this is olduse.net and all you need is an nntp reader. It’s kind of a fascinating niche technology hack and I appreciate that. I’ve had a few weird niche projects I’ve considered doing for years and never got around to, because I was never sure anyone but myself would care (for instance: I’d love to convert my OtherRealms archives to proper HTML, and I’ve got the archives of the old semper.fi mailing list I’d love to put online in some way — and yes, that mailing list, today, is definitely a deep cut piece of trivia for Apple nerds)

If this piques your interest, check it out.

Apple Creator Suite released

Apple released a new subscription bundle, the Apple Creator Suite. Jason Snell has a good overview of it. Basically, Apple’s creator-oriented apps (Final Cut, Logic and the recently acquired Pixelmator Pro) have shifted from a purchase model to a subscription. Existing puchasters will continue to use the apps as normal, but at some point will have to shift over for new features.

Somewhat weirdly (to me) the iWork apps (Pages, Numbers, etc) were funded in as well if you want access to new advanced (read: AI based) features. This makes these apps now freemium, which is unfortunate, but given the AI features have ongoing costs, I see why they did it — but I do wish they add a second, less expensive bundle just of these apps.

Unfortunately, the initial launch seems a bit rough, but I expect it’ll get sorted out quickly.

My initial take: I’m going to get an annual subscription to them, because I want to take a close look at Pixelmator as a possible replacement for Photoshop. One app Apple bought that has disappeared from the landscape is Photomator, which if they choose to enhance it and add it as an addition to this bundle would be a legitimate alternative to LightRoom and would make this bundle a no-brainer for me, given that I made the shift from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom Mobile last year and suffered through that pain already, so shifting to a different photo platform again would be (relatively) easy.

Overall, it’s an interesting bundle. I want access to Pixelmator and I’m curious about the iWork enhancements, and we’ll se how this bundle improves over time. I know the subscription model bothers some people, but that’s the reality of software development these days.

The day the Mac was introduced

A fun story of the day the first Mac was introduced by long time Apple nerd Scott Knaster. This was a few years before I joined Apple, but I was aware of the macho and when I saw the 128K device, I was intrigued, but I didn’t buy my first Mac until the 512K model came out — and I’ve owned at least one since. And FWIW, I joined Apple around the time the first “open Macs” came out and ended up sticking around 17 years (through all the fun ones like Spindler and Amelio) to the first days of the Mac Pros.

Sebastiaan de Witt Joins Apple

I was a bit surprised at the announcement that Sebastiaan de Witt joining Apple’s design team. This is notable for a couple of reasons — it’s the first visible change in the design teams since Alan Dye left, and given de With’s opinions about things in design at apple, very notable both that they wanted to hire him and he was willing to come on board. I see this as a big positive overall.

That said, he was the key person behind Halide, the camera app, so I’m not sure what that means for it down the road.

Overall, though, this tells me of a big positive shift within Apple’s Design team and gives me hope things will improve as we move past Dye and the initial rough Liquid Glass release.

https://9to5mac.com/2026/01/28/halide-cofounder-sebastiaan-de-with-joins-apples-design-team

The two watch experiment is over

When the Apple Watch 11 came out, I decided to try living the two watch lifestyle, using it during the day, and my older version 10 while I was sleeping. I’ve decided after a few months to call it and I’ve retired the 10, going back to a single watch in my life. I’m not ending sleeping with the watch, I’ll be charging it a couple of times a day (for instance: when showering) and I think that’ll be sufficient to use without any real issue.

Why make the change? The two watch setup worked fine, but there are a few rough edges, especially when I need to update the watches to a new release. That process isn’t bad, it’s more than anything else annoying, and with a short trip pending, I was asking if carrying the second watch on the trip was worth it. The answer in my head turned out to be no. But it was definitely worth experimenting with for a while.

New Eeros

Our home network is built around the Eero system. For full coverage I’ve needed to use five of them (4 Eero 6 Pro, one Eer0 6), to get reliable coverage both into the downstairs offices and out to the garage and the nearby outdoor areas (for the security cameras). The downstairs network has long been problematic, with random poor throughput and general flakiness — not sure if that’s a misbehaving Eero or some other issue, to be honest, and so every couple of weeks I’d need to reboot the network to clear things up and get it back on track.

I finally got tired of the hassle, so I picked up 3 pack of the Eero 7 Pro units and decided it was time to upgrade the network. I must say I love how Eero has sweated the details on the user experience of installation and upgrades. The migration for me was almost trivially painless: replacing the gateway Eero hooked into the cable modem took a few tries, because the upstream server refused to give up the old connection and so wouldn’t attach to the new Eero. This was solved simply but unplugging everything for 15 minutes to let the connection reset.

These things are beasts. I’m covering the entire house with three of them, with a full five bars of signal out to the garage and downstairs, without the need to patch in bridging Eeros in the middle. Where it could take me 8-10 minutes to transfer a 2Gb file downstairs from the laptop, that’s now taking under a minute. And I was able to move the security camera on the driveway out another 15’ and still get a solid four bars of signal. I could have probably moved it 30 and still gotten decent coverage.

So year, now that I spent a few months wondering if the money was worth spending, I now wonder why I didn’t do it months ago.

See you next issue!

What’s New From Chuq

Not a Diet

I had a couple of people ask me if I was using GLP-1 and what diet I was on for my weight loss. The kinda complicated answer is — neither.

I am on Victoza (the daily version of Ozempic) and have been for a few years, but it’s not a new thing and it’s only indirectly part of the weight loss for the last few months. What I did instead was pull out the old standard — the food diary.

On IOS there are a couple of good apps you can use for this; I’m using MyFitnessPal, but LoseIt! is also a good choice. And when I decided to get serious about this, I spent a couple of days logging everything I ate, and then analyzing it.

The TL/DR is that I wasn’t eating badly — but just too much. I was averaging about 3000 calories a day, and about 1000 of that every day for lunch. There was an immediate and easy change to make: toss out th chips and cut portions on lunch. Today, instead of 1,000 calories and many of them poor quality carbohydrates, lunch is around 500 calories, and the carb component has been shifted to whole wheat bread (at 90 calories a slice).

Laurie and I have been making some other minor changes, but that one shift in the meal was 90% of the solution. The only change we’ve made that could be considered dieting is we’ve done away with the after dinner ice cream (typically 80-120 calories frozen yogurt; if you’ve never tried the Yasso! bars, they’re quite good). I expect at some point we’ll bring them back, but there’s still a lot of weight I intend to lose.

So back in July and August, I was eating 3000 calories a day. The last two months, I’ve been averaging 2300-2355. Pull 700 calories out of your diet, and you will lose weight.

That said, as a diabetic on insulin, the studies show weight loss on insulin is difficult, which is why I’ve taken the Victoza — it reduces that weight gain effect many diabetics run into; when I started it, it reduced my insulin usage by about 4%.

So this isn’t a diet, it’s a lifestyle change: I’m never going back to my old diet, and that’s how many people trip up on weight loss. If you go off your diet. your calories go up, and so does your weight. Studies have shown that losing and re-gaining weight is more stressful on your body than not losing weight in the first place, so I’ve always taken the position I’d rather lose weight slowly and permanently than do the yo-yo game, and ever since I hit my max weight, I’m rather proud that the worst gain I ever had was about 5 pounds.

When I kicked this off in August, I weighed 335 pounds. As of February 1, about six months later, I am at 311, down 24 pounds. That’s a reduction of about 7% of my body mass, and my BMI has gone from 50 to 42.

For what it’s worth, a BMI of 30 is considered normal, which for me indicates a weight of about 200 pounds. Now, BMI is a simple gauge for weight/health as has a lot of limitations, but for something like this, it’s a convenient guidepost to track.

I passed another milestone in February — my max weight ever was 412 pounds (BMI of a whopping 62), and so I have officially crossed the line and I’ve lost 100 pounds from my all time high. That means almost 25% of what I once weighed has gone away. When I stopped to think about that, it kind of blew me away.

A weight of 311 means I now weigh the same as I did when I was between 35 and 40 — I haven’t weighed this little in 35 years. That thought also blows my mind.

Have I noticed the difference? Definitely. I’ve taken off over an inch off the waist, and I’ve started moving from 3X or 4XL clothes to 2X. My knees are a lot happier, and I’m able to walk more with less pain. I am, I think, in the best health in the last 40 years.

There have been some interesting side effects to this: my insulin use is down 25%, while at the same time my A1C has dropped a few points.

I know I’m making this sound simple, but lifestyle changes are hard; remaking habits is tough. But back in my Apple days I was literally eating burgers and fries six days a week — a good way to end up 400 pounds, folks, and I do not recommend gaining that much weight. Digging my way out of this hole of neglect I’ve been in has taken years, and the best advice I can give is these two thoughts:

  1. Start somewhere (and a food diary will give you insights where to start)

  2. Take little steps, especially as you start out the journey: trying to make massive changes makes failure a lot more likely.

The key is to start. I suggest grabbing a diary app and logging your eating — snack and all — for a few days, then start looking at what you’re seeing and look for a couple small changes you can make to get started. Fewer chips at the Mexican restaurant, medium sodas instead of large, that sort of thing. It probably won’t be too hard to find 200 calories a day, and that’s enough to get things going. Once those early, easier changes show some results, it’ll be easier to keep finding and making changes towards a more healthy and sustainable diet.

Remember that big changes like this are stressful as you tear down old habits and build up new ones. The bigger that stress you create, the easier it is to fail, a small changes are easier to cope, and make future successes easier to tackle — and they all add up over time. You will also have setbacks and that’s okay. This isn’t going to be a straight line, but as you get it going, it’ll gain momentum and make future losses less stressful.

One aspect of this I hadn’t considered when I started is that your body has a basic requirement for calories to support it’s operation, and when you lose weight and there’s less of you to maintain, the amount of calories you burn goes down as well — another reason why weight loss is harder to maintain.

I’d noticed that my daily calorie usage had been doing down, and that was bothering me, until I realized that’s because there is less of me to burn calories — and that’s was a good reminder to me that eventually my weight loss will stow and stop because I’ll size myself to a diet of 2300 calories, and I’ll need to make more cuts to lose beyond that point.

My current goal? I’m looking at 280 pounds as my next milepost for a couple of reasons: it’s what I weighed when I was 30 years old, and that seems to be a nice thing to shoot for — and I have a legitimate shot at hitting that number before my next birthday. We’ll see what happens. Ultimately I know I want to be somewhere under 250, but I’m not looking that far out: I want my goals and milestones to be reachable not “someday in the distant future”.

The hardest part of all of this: making and keeping the commitment to get started. Once you do, over time it’ll get easier to keep things going. 

Recent Photography

As I create new images and re-process older ones, I post them on my site in the Recent Work area.

No photography with the big camera this month, but as I was out and about I did take a few shots with the iPhone I rather like. (the ship below is a vehicle hauler that makes a regular trip between Tacoma and Anchorage. I’ve found the diversity and quality of the ships moving through this area fascinating, so I’ve gotten in the habit of taking pictures and then looking them up later)

You can download this new set from the 6FPS Secret Wallpaper. The previous set of wallpapers are now with the full public set at Public Wallpaper page.

These are available only to you, my favorite people who happen to be subscribers to 6FPS. The previous set of images I released here are now available to the general public.

Download an E-book

I have eight e-books available. All are free for you to download and read with no obligation. You can download them from my e-book page on the web site.

These are the books that are available:

  • Birding 101: Hints and Tips for the New Birder

  • Merced National Wildlife Refuge

  • And the Geese Exploded: A Life With Birds

  • Birds of Santa Clara County

  • 2021.1: A Year of Transitions

  • 2020.1: Images from the year when Covid changed everything

  • 2019 (1)

  • 2019 (2)

About 6FPS

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqvr@gmail.com). 6FPS is Copyright © 2025 by Chuq Von Rospach. All Rights Reserved.

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

And with that, I'll see you in the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.  

Where to Find Chuq

Chuq Von Rospach

Birder, Nature and Wildlife Photography in Silicon Valley

http://www.chuq.me
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Winter Visit to Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge