In what seemed a colder than usual August, the budding of my mulberry tree is significantly later this year compared to last year.
Checking the weather data for Williamtown shows that average daily maximum temperatures for August 2024 is unchanged from last year, and the minimums are were on average 1.5 degrees warmer than last year. This is a good reminder that impressions/recollections about weather are not the same as data about weather.
Data from my solar panel system however, shows that Lambton received 19% less sunshine in August this year compared with last year, so maybe that accounts for the later budding.
Following my usual custom of noting the start of Spring when the first leaf buds appear on my mulberry tree, this year is unseasonably early. One could almost say unreasonably early, coming 15 days earlier than last year.
This is now the seventh year I’ve photographed the first buds of spring on this tree. I’ve graphed the results below, and while this is admittedly just one collection point of climatic related data, the trend is clear.
For several years at our church we’ve been using Zoom to live stream our church services, using a Canon digital SLR camera as a webcam connected via an Elgato video capture interface. Recently we started having problems where the video feed would randomly stop during the Zoom meeting. The indicator at the bottom of the screen would show that the video was stopped, and clicking on it would start it again. This would happen at random intervals, sometimes every few minutes.
At first I thought it might have been the length of HDMI cable we were using between the PC and the camera causing an unreliable signal. I tested with the camera located adjacent to the PC with a short HDMI cable and the problem persisted, so it wasn’t the cable.
I checked in the Windows event log and discovered an “Information” message from EOSWebcam was appearing at the same time that the video had been cutting out.
A quick Google revealed that the EOSWebcam utility is software from Canon that allows the camera to be used a webcam by plugging the camera directly into the PC with a USB cable. As we were connecting via HDMI into an Elgato capture device, we didn’t actually need the EOSWebcam driver. After uninstalling it, the problem of the random dropouts of video during our Zoom livestream was solved.
I’ve been roasting coffee beans at home in a popcorn popper since 2006. I thought I was doing well when I had a popper machine that lasted for 3 years. Today my popcorn popper burned out after 9 years of service, having done over 1100 roasts.
Thankfully I had a spare machine ready in the cupboard to replace this stalwart of roasting goodness.
