![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My hiking partner and I went to the DNR's Eddy Discovery Center on Sunday, had a little walk, and went to a presentation about vernal pools. I went ahead and signed up as a volunteer. It's pretty low commitment, just get assigned a pool, go there twice in March/April and once in the fall to get info. Also some training so you know how to gather the numbers and how to find and identify the critters living in there. The training is three online sessions and go back to the center for a hike where the coordinator for the area takes us to a pool and goes through it IRL.
I took my SLR out with me and got some nice photos. Mainly I need a LOT more practice. I'm shooting RAW and in manual mode now, which is cool but I need to stop feeling rushed and take time to think about my settings. I also need to learn a LOT about post processing. I've got Darktable installed and I'm learning. I'll go through some YouTube tutorials to learn, and maybe when udemy has another sale, grab a course there.
I paid for Gaia Maps, it's a pretty good outdoors-oriented GPS/map system, with a good offline mode and a lot of available topo and other maps, and the ability to build tracks manually at the browser then pull them into the phone later and follow them.
I also re-loaded Calimoto, which is a motorcycle oriented navigation app. Its party trick is to randomly generate round-trip tours on nice windy motorcycle-enjoyable back roads of any length you specify (I think tours over 100 miles are in the paid version). I previously paid for a year of Rever which is that and some other stuff but I don't think I used it a single time. But to be fair I was still working then. If you put Rever in full twisty roads preference, the trip to the bridge goes from about 4 hours to over 12 hours. I don't know if anybody's got that kind of time. However at least when I go up to the Traverse area for the ABC concert in August I'll use it, I hope to spend 2 or 3 days getting there.
I took my SLR out with me and got some nice photos. Mainly I need a LOT more practice. I'm shooting RAW and in manual mode now, which is cool but I need to stop feeling rushed and take time to think about my settings. I also need to learn a LOT about post processing. I've got Darktable installed and I'm learning. I'll go through some YouTube tutorials to learn, and maybe when udemy has another sale, grab a course there.
I paid for Gaia Maps, it's a pretty good outdoors-oriented GPS/map system, with a good offline mode and a lot of available topo and other maps, and the ability to build tracks manually at the browser then pull them into the phone later and follow them.
I also re-loaded Calimoto, which is a motorcycle oriented navigation app. Its party trick is to randomly generate round-trip tours on nice windy motorcycle-enjoyable back roads of any length you specify (I think tours over 100 miles are in the paid version). I previously paid for a year of Rever which is that and some other stuff but I don't think I used it a single time. But to be fair I was still working then. If you put Rever in full twisty roads preference, the trip to the bridge goes from about 4 hours to over 12 hours. I don't know if anybody's got that kind of time. However at least when I go up to the Traverse area for the ABC concert in August I'll use it, I hope to spend 2 or 3 days getting there.
