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Drea

Drea

@drearicheli.bsky.social

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My random musings on a variety of topics that are too long to fit in a Bluesky post.

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7d agoLast active

Backyard Birdwatching

Eastern bluebirds are back!

Vegetable Garden Update

This season has been a good vegetable gardening season thus far. Pests have been minimal, aside from the occasional deer lurking around (but the fencing means the deer usually leave our garden alone). Tomatoes are now steadily appearing; I suspect we’ll be eating some within a week or two. Cucumbers and lettuce have done great and we even recently harvested our garlic, which is now drying out in our basement. I’m most excited about the jalapeño peppers. Those are always delicious.

vegetablegarden

Moment Pro ii and getting back to "real life" photography

I was doing some spring cleaning recently and came across old photos from the pre-mobile-phone-camera days (2000-2004 to be exact). These were photos taken with a very basic digital camera and then developed into actual, real-life photos! On paper! As I went through these “old” photos, there was feel to them that’s just not there with current iPhone photos. My iPhone 17 Pro takes amazing photos, but they come out looking good with little effort because of the computational photography. Computati...

iphoneographyphotography

The extremes of AI

At this moment, AI feels like a battle in the extremes, a war where you HAVE to choose sides. You're either team #truebeliever, believing that everything in the world must be solved or approached using AI, or you're team #resistAI, believing that AI is the downfall of humanity and should be annihilated. It feels like there's no nuance in this debate, no room for someone like me who sees AI as a tool, a step forward in the long road of human technological innovation, but not some earth-shattering...

Merlin Bird ID for the bird obsessed

I am not a seasoned birdwatcher by any means, but I love watching birds. I live near a very large state park that has undertaken extensive efforts to conserve birds native to our region, so we’re fortunate to have tons of birds right in our backyard When I discovered the Merlin Bird ID app a couple of years ago, I was immediately hooked. Made by the Cornell Lab or Ornithology, this app listens to the bird sounds around you and then (with a somewhat high degree of accuracy based on my experience ...

Reader by Readwise as my link-saving eveything app

Every week I save dozens of links - articles, funny YouTube videos, Bluesky posts, Instagram videos. The only thing there's more of than links I save is apps that promise to organize all these links. And I've tried many of them - Raindrop.io, Instapaper, Pocket, MyMind, KeepIt...just to name a few. And then I grew tired of these (and their subscriptions) and started dumping everything into a folder in Apple Notes, which was OKAYish, but made it difficult to find things when I went looking for th...

productivityreadwise

Journaling with Obsidian - Update

About five months ago, I made the decision to stop using DayOne for journaling and use Obsidian for journaling instead. It felt like a big decision at the time, as I had journaled in DayOne for over 14 years, amassing thousands of memories. I made the move to Obsidian not certain that Obsidian as a journaling platform would stick. But stick it has and I haven't once considered returning to DayOne. The biggest reason I made this move away from DayOne was to get my journaling under my complete con...

obsidianjournaling

I'm "Wispring" now

I started using Wispr Flow this week. I was potentially influenced by the YouTubers waxing about the incredible productivity gains achieved using AI speech-to-text apps, or I just like trying new stuff. Whatever it is, I am trying it. On a keyboard at the computer, I like typing. I'm a good typist and I love my mechanical keyboard collection. Typing helps me process information, think things through, refine what I want to say. However, lately, I really dislike typing on the iPhone. A big part of...

AI Whiplash and the Future of Humanity

These days, everything I read about AI gives me a bad case of whiplash. Educators are fed up with Ai, so much that they are going back to pen and paper assignments in class. At the same time, the government is investing untold sums of money so that AI can take over literal functions of the government, just one of many efforts to make it clear that AI is the future of work. College graduates are entering a workforce that is completely upended by AI, signaling that the ability to use AI is paramou...

aicurrent events

Beautiful azalea garden courtesy of our local water company

I was shocked to learn that our local water company, WSSC, maintains a beautiful azalea garden. We visited this week when the azaleas had just peaked and it was absolutely stunning. Five acres of nothing but azaleas bushes. The area is very accessible. There is parking just across the street near the WSSC facility, with a well marked crosswalk that provides access into the garden. Once in the garden area, you can traverse wide gravel paths. There are parts that are slightly hilly but it is fairl...

photographynature

AI tools are about to suck for most of us

AI tools are something I use daily. I am not an AI power user but more of an AI-tools-make-me-a-bit-more-productive kind of person. Personally and professionally I use AI tools like Claude and Gemini regularly for personal and work-related research, drafting, and summarizing information. Questions I used to drop into Google search are now dropped into AI tools. And I use AI tools to help analyze information, draft written work, and summarize information. All this to say, my AI tool usage pretty ...