Author: David Faden
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Mr. Los Altos
Passing by the Chamber of Commerce on the way to Shoup Park, I’ve sometimes wondered about the statue with the big glasses near there. Reading Robin Chapman’s wonderful “The Valley of Heart’s Delight: True Tales from Around the Bay”, I found the answer. The chapter on Walter Singer begins: Walter Singer died in 1992, which…
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Failed replication and a germination mystery
In “The Nature of Oaks”, Doug Tallamy suggests an experiment: To be fair to worm catchers, many of the inhabitants of oak leaf litter are barely visible to the naked eye even though they are everywhere you look. But there is an easy way to observe some of the larger arthropods in the litter beneath…
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What the heck, Preview?
Occasionally, Preview gets persnickety about saving changes to images: Turning on streaming of log messages in Console, I finally got some details on it: Text from that: Other people seem to be complaining about a similar Preview issue here as well: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255194116?sortBy=rank. From that discussion, it sounds like certain images trigger the behavior. Hovering over…
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Caterpillars overwinter outside
One fact from Doug Tallamy‘s The Nature of Oaks that surprised me especially: Some caterpillars in colder climates overwinter outside! Bernd [Heinrich] decided to dissect golden-crowned kinglets that had been killed during the winter by window strikes in Maine. To his surprise and my amazement, their tiny crops were jam-packed with caterpillars — caterpillars the…
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Chrome crashing
I’m unsure what triggered it — updating Mac OS, updating Chrome, or something else — but Chrome has started crashing for me consistently within seconds of starting up. I haven’t figured out a fix yet so I’m back to my old friend Firefox, but I did learn a few things. Crash logs go in ~/Library/Application…
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Have any of the authors of “Attention Is All You Need” written a book?
Gemini doesn’t think any of the authors of “Attention Is All You Need” have written a book: Honestly, I didn’t know the answer to this when I asked it. I was curious about this because I was thinking of reading their books if there were some to read. It’s a nice answer at least in…
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Adding support for MHTML in Chrome’s Apple Script “save” action
MHTML is a handy format for archiving pages. In Chrome, you can get it by selecting “Save Page As…” and choosing “Webpage, single file” as the output format. In a Chrome extension, you can get it via chrome.pageCapture.saveAsMHTML, which is what I use in the gg_download extension I’ve been hacking on. In the project I’m…
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Fixing “xcode-select: error: tool ‘xcodebuild’ requires Xcode…” with one click
Going through the instructions for building Chromium from source on Macintosh, I ran into this weird error: This was (and remains) mysterious to me because I do have Xcode installed along with the commandline tools. I was also able to generate the same error message by calling xcodebuild directly: A Stack Overflow user mentioned that…
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Murdannia audreyae
I’m thinking of my aunt Audrey again today. In my previous post, I talked about a succulent named for both her and my uncle Bob, Kalanchoe fadeniorum. But she also has a plant named by Bob just for her, another one they discovered together: Murdannia audreyae. You can see a couple photos of it on…
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Kalanchoe fadeniorum
My uncle Bob is a botanist. Tonight he told me one small thing I want to remember. He has multiple plants named for him, but of all those, he said, Kalanchoe fadeniorum holds a special place for him because, unlike the others, it is named for both him and his wife Audrey (Archive). The ones…