ydant

I agree so much with this comment. Including feeling like I need to switch back to carrying around a proper camera.

When I switched to the Google Pixel 2, the post processing truely was revolutionary compared to other phone cameras and I stopped using anything other than the phone to take pictures. Even back then, iPhone had post processing turned up to a level that most pictures looked a bit "off" to me in the background details, but most people didn't seem to notice it, even if I tried to point it out. Google's flagship camera seemed to avoid that over processing and the results were really good. Unfortunately, Google seemed to get cocky about it and just kept increasing the level of processing as the years passed.

Now I'm on a Pixel 7 Pro that I got specifically for the 5x zoom camera and I've been consistently pissed off by every zoom picture. Even though it's an optical zoom, the processing gets turned up so high that I feel like it's worse than early days low resolution digital zoom. The picture basically looks a pretty decent prompt generated picture vs. a camera shot. It's kind of ridiculous how bad details get just made up with the pictures out of the 5x zoom lens. The 2x and 1x lenses are substantially better, but still frustrating.

The annoying thing is every photo looks pretty good in the preview thumbnail and even usually looks pretty good in the phone gallery. But if you zoom in or view on a monitor, the digital slurry in the background becomes to apparent. I haven't tried to print a photo from this phone, but I imagine they would generally look pretty poor.

They've optimized so incredibly heavily for the common use case (browsing pictures on your phone) that they've forgotten everything else.

Kids in school was the primary reason for a printer, but the need has definitely decreased over the years. Our family is at about 5 prints per year at this point, which is exactly why a laser printer is so valuable. The same Brother printer ($150 in 2012) has worked for us for going on 11 years now with minimal expense on replacement toner. It just works when needed and never dries up or has issues.

But as much as you would like to be paperless, things come up. Some companies insist on wet signatures, other things need to be mailed in, etc. It's certainly becoming less and less necessary year by year, though.

I'm not sure if I would replace this printer if it fails, but it sure is nice to have around when I need it, without the hassle of going out to print something at a shop.

Thanks for sharing! I wouldn't have thought to use wood filler epoxy for this, but it makes perfect sense. I have a malm dresser that I think I'll try this approach on.

Wood repair epoxy putty is really useful stuff - I've used it to fix door jambs to repair a broken jamb and when changing out hardware, and with a little cleanup and paint you can't tell it's not wood.

I've had a lot of success using Merlin Bird ID (by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology) to figure out what birds I'm hearing around my house. It listens and detects likely birds based on the songs, and then provides a lot of additional information about the bird and sample songs. It also has other features for helping identify birds visually.

It's been very informative for understanding that many of the distinct sounds I'm hearing regularly actually come from the same bird. I didn't realize how much variation a single bird could have until I started using this app.

As for learning the calls, that's going to come down to standard learning techniques. Merlin Bird ID doesn't have any flashcard style learning built in.