biotinker

> Outside of Granny Smith apples the ones you eat are mostly the results of mutations in the grown plants that we cut off and graft.

Not sure where you're located, but this isn't true in the US. The vast majority of apples available here are seedlings of crosses by two other varieties. Examples:

Golden Delicious, one parent is Grimes Golden, the other unknown.

Fuji, Red Delicious × Ralls Janet

Gala, Kidd's Orange Red × Golden Delicious

There are certainly some sports (the technical term for for the spontaneous mutations) like you mention. Royal Gala, available in NZ, is a sport of Gala. But most are not.

An enormous amount of industry effort goes into crossing known varieties, growing the seedlings, and looking for the apples with the best traits. Cosmic Crisp is a great example of a recent one.

Do you have an idea of the R-value of the insulation you put in? I'm wondering what this will take to heat and cool during the peaks of summer and winter.

It's possible to get "lost" even with modern GPS.

My wife and I went on a backpacking trip in the wilderness some years ago. We decided to take a shortcut, bushwacking down a river drainage (1.5 miles) rather than taking the trail all the way around (7 miles) hoping to extend a later part of our trip.

We got downhill through the bushwhack to the bottom of the river valley just fine, but discovered at the bottom that a fire had come through the area a year or two prior. It had completely obliterated the trail, any markers, etc, and trees were fallen everywhere making moving in a straight line very difficult.

Despite having a phone with GPS and offline maps showing exactly where the trail "should" be, the lack of the trail actually existing combined with the challenging terrain made navigating out of the area a huge challenge. It was very easy to start wandering off in the wrong direction away from where the trail used to run without realizing and having to course correct back. I think we were moving at maybe 1/3 mile per hour, for 5-6 hours, until we finally made it out of the burn to where the trail existed again.

I was laid off in early June (was a staff software eng at Viam writing motion planning software for robots) and have been fiddling with electronics.

Most recently I made a portable AQI meter, since the air quality here in Central Oregon can quickly get bad.

It's a small 3d printed box containing a rpi pico, an 18650 battery, an e-ink display, and a SEN66 sensor.

I hit a button, it turns on, runs the sensor for ~40 seconds to get a good reading, displays on the e-ink, and then turns off. So there's zero power draw when it's off, and the battery lasts for ~1500 readings. Accuracy seems fine, the AQI, temp, and CO2 readings all match my permanently placed sensors inside and outdoors.

Other projects include using some of the old leftover robot scrap to automate irrigation in my apple orchard.

> For a lot of fiction books, my rule is to read the first 50 pages. If I'm not engaged, move on. Life is short.

Just encountered myself doing this. I was reading John Birmingham's Axis of Time books. The first three sucked me in and I devoured them in a day or two apiece. Starting the fourth...something was off. The writing felt stilted, like the author was trying to cram in too many pop culture references or something. I put it down and have given it two more tries since with the same result, so now I'm done.

I'm sad, because I was really looking forwards to having several more books in the series.

It's been that way forever. No apple reproduces true to seed, period. 400 years ago, if you wanted another of your apple tree, you grafted it.

It wasn't all that long ago that automatic transmissions had significantly worse reliability and fuel efficiency than manual transmissions.

There are some really nice things that home automation enables that was previously impossible.

I live in Bend, Oregon. We have hot summer days, cool nights, and sometimes really bad wildfire smoke.

I can save a lot of money on AC if I open the windows at night and use the attic fan to pull in outside air. But if smoke rolls in, then we'd all be breathing 200+ AQI air all night.

I have outdoor AQI sensors, which if the AQI spikes, will close up the house and turn on the air purifiers.

> Why would I want to automate lights?

We're bad at remembering to turn lights on and off. We like having our porch light on an hour or two after sunset, but don't need to leave it on 24/7. We also have stairwell baseboard lighting that's completely unnecessary during the day, but very nice to have already be on if we get up in the middle of the night. To each their own, though. These are just nice to have. The AQI automation is an actual health benefit to us though.