Nebulizer

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

Allegedly gold finches are around me year round but I never see or hear them in the winter. I get so excited to see their bright yellow faces with black unibrows. Glad you're seeing their colors pop too!

 

Bonus photo of mama bird protecting her babies!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It's getting a little frustrating that every company seems to want a few dollars per month from me. I get that it is expensive to maintain servers and keep programmers on staff to write and maintain the software, but I really hate being nagged by everything I own to buy more stuff.

I also wonder how silly all of these subscriptions are. Especially for running. Do you need your Garmin or Polar watch to tell you what workout to do and when? Or should you follow a well established routine like Pfitz or Daniel's running formula (or something more casual)? Do you need your data synced to the cloud and shared with Strava? Are the virtual "kudos" from others what's keeping you motivated? Do you need your watch to tell you how that workout went compared to past workouts? Or should you figure out how to listen to your body and make that evaluation yourself?

Maybe these subscriptions are useful for beginners who don't know how to do the above. I'm just a little curmudgeonly and I really just need a watch that gives me distance and time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Maybe their diet would shift but a lot of animals eat ticks. Frogs and toads, many smaller birds like warblers and probably house sparrows and robins, chickens love them, and of course opposums and mice.

Similar for mosquitos. I see the house sparrows around here catching mosquitos all the time. I'm pretty sure dragon flies feed heavily on them too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Wow I haven't read a good chunk of this list, and I thought I was a sci-fi book afficionado. Thanks for adding to my summer reading list! Might start with either Parable of the Sower or Never Let Me Go.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I tried that out and posted the picture in another comment in this thread (https://lemmy.world/comment/10346090). I think it's better but I have some more to learn. Your photo is brilliant!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Thanks, that's exactly how I took the photo. It was approaching sunset so I think the colors are a little yellow because of that and just how brown the river is. I adjusted the colors like the other comment suggested and I think it looks better:

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Thanks, I've been practicing getting the focus sharp. It's a tough battle between my phone's autofocus vs manual bino adjustments and keeping the phone+bino stable. I still feel I have more work to do on that too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

I see cormorants all the time here too, I just loved how this one was screaming at something. On this walk, I saw only one cormorant but 60ish Canada geese (with a ton of goslings!), so the cormorant felt rare today. I also saw a blue heron but he flew too far away for me to get a good picture.

 
 

Spotted in the Ottawa wildlife refuge in Ohio, USA

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

One more thing. Running hydrogen, even in blends of 30% hydrogen/70% natural gas, creates a large amount of extra NOx production. NOx, of course, is a pretty nasty pollutant. We need to redesign our current natural gas burners to help control NOx at high hydrogen blends.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Also, I think we need to be moving towards 100% hydrogen if we want to use combustion as a green replacement for natural gas. However, I don't think many of the appliances that currently use natural gas could safely use 100% hydrogen because of the properties of hydrogen gas. Primarily, I think the flame speed of hydrogen would require us to redesign the various combustors that use natural gas currently so that we don't have flashbacks. Additionally, the hotter burning of hydrogen might cause material failure issues in our current natural gas burners. The research I've done is shown that we could probably get away with 30 to 40% hydrogen, maybe dependent on the exact burner. I don't think moving to 100% hydrogen is feasible without a massive replacement of all of our gas burning appliances.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Oh neat, I actually know a lot about hydrogen-natural gas blends!

I read the report because of this claim:

And now, a team of British researchers has found adding hydrogen to natural gas actually increases how much natural gas leaks from stove burners and boilers because the smaller hydrogen molecules help the larger methane ones escape.

I've never heard of small hydrogen molecules helping larger molecules leak. I was curious what the mechanism for this was. It turns out the report does not make that claim at all. In fact, the report claims the additional leakage from hydrogen blends is most likely just the hydrogen leaking. I didn't run the numbers myself but the data presented seems approximately aligned with that. Hydrogen leaking through fittings is already a well-known and established challenge of blending hydrogen with natural gas. So the central thesis of this news article is completely fabricated.

I am a little surprised the utility companies are going to soon be mixing in hydrogen. I didn't think we we're quite ready to blend in hydrogen into natural gas for the leakage reason, and also because of production scaling issues that we haven't resolved yet. These challenges are likely within reach soon. For example, the United States department of energy has a large research initiative right now to help lower the cost of hydrogen production to be more competitive with natural gas. We also need to make sure that hydrogen is produced in a carbon-free or carbon neutral way, which is probably going to be dependent upon our electrical grid becoming carbon free.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I would also recommend checking out SALOME for 3D modeling. I've been using the shaper toolbox to create geometry for fluid simulations and it's worked well for me. The shaper toolbox is parametric (as opposed to SALOME's geometry toolbox which is not).

After you've created your geometry in shaper you switch to the mesh toolbox to create your stl file. I think there's really good control over the triangle creations with SALOME. For example, you can specify edges and faces you want smaller triangles in (like around tight geometries, holes, etc). I've been able to get much higher quality stl files with this method than with freecad.

SALOME is free and open source software.

 

I've been passing by this house once every few weeks on a walk, but the chickens have always been near their coop in the back. One of them finally came up to say hello!

 

I was a little surprised by the beauty in Shawnee National Forest. Lots of rock outcroppings and long trails to be found. At least, compared to the rest of Illinois!

 

This is one of my old neighbor's chickens. She is probably one of the prettiest I have ever seen. I forgot her breed, anyone know?

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