Once again an awesome costume from my mother-in-law. Enjoy the gallery!

I was watching Gold Diggers of ‘49 the other day with my daughter as we made our way through old cartoon shorts. That’s how I grew up - on Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the other WB shorts along with the Disney shorts. Sometimes, late at night, they’d show the black and white cartoons like this one, but I mostly found the black and white cartoons boring. They came from a time when animation was very experimental and new so people were impressed that these drawings could move around. There often isn’t much in the way of plot and the jokes are usually broad gags carried over from vaudeville.

In the following video:

[video mp4="/images/2015/10/Scarlett%20rides%20her%20trike%20on%20her%20own%20for%20the%20first%20time.mp4"]

A fun little video of Scarlett going from QUITE far away to pretty local in demonstrating where we live.

In my ideal home setup, I’d have computers in every room. I’m not horribly far off, but it’s mostly via old laptops and computers that I’ve retired from regular use or had donated from family members. As more of our movie purchases become BluRay (and with 4k video around the corner), some of those old computers just aren’t up to snuff when it comes to 720P and higher. I have a Roku 3 in the basement for running on the treadmill and that’s capable of handling higher quality video, but it’s not compatible with the way I’ve ripped my media. After a bit of investigation, it looked like Emby might be the right choice for me. So I installed it on the CentOS VM that runs my homeserver. The first thing I had to do to get it to work well was to change the Mono garbage collection.

We went apple-picking just about midway into October, but this year only the Stayman apples had ripened by that time.

They had this creepy-looking building near the apples, so I decided to take a photo. While I was processing it, I couldn’t decide which look I liked best, so here are my favorites:

A while back I wrote about geotagging my photos when I was using Lightroom. I wanted to demonstrate how much easier it is with Digikam as everything’s built in and it works nicely and quickly.

https://youtu.be/mVgLWcRqfL4

Here’s how it can look as you click on each photo:

For the first time in something like 3 years I took my Sigma 120-400mm lens to the zoo. I had intended to get some Firefox (Red Panda) photos and videos, but they weren’t there. That was also a bummer for Scarlett as seeing the Red Pandas was the reason she’d asked us to take her to the zoo.

First off we saw one of the pandas:

But what was a lot of fun was taking photos of the birds; birds that would have been quite hard for me to see in the wild. I think they came out pretty nicely considering the darkness in the bird house and the fact that I was hand-holding the lens. It seems like some of the higher ISO photos didn’t even have too much noise, so I’ll explore using it in the future to get the exposure a little more correct in camera. (if the photos look blurry when you click on them, give it a little time to load)