Apple does however provide a scripting interface, via AppleScript, for Numbers.app. Using a quick back and forth chat with ChatGPT, I was able to get an AppleScript solution working.

I've posted a new 2025 version of my wordlist to my GitHub repository. Compared to my previous list, the new one has fewer inappropriate words (for a passphrase) and significantly shorter words on average.

Once again, it's time for the annual NFL Elo update! I've completed my biggest model search yet,resulting in a more historically accurate model. Last year's model search used historic games goingback to 2010, but this year's goes back to 1992. See "The Search" below for more details.

The new 2025 season ratings and rankings page is now live!Previous season pages, starting with 2024, have beenupdated to show ratings and rankings calculated with the new model.

Happy new year! I've been out birding a few times here in the PNW, not dealing with cold or rain as much but instead... fog! When it's been clear I've enjoyed seeing lots of wintering waterfowl and gulls. Especially noticeable this year so far, for me, are the Belted Kingfishers. It seems like there's been one everywhere I go.

It's been cold and dry here, and I am fortunate to have seen a few good birds recently including Short-billed Gull on a brief visit to the coast and Snowy Owl on another trip. Snowy Egret and Barn Swallow were also flagged as rare in eBird. I also got good looks at a pair of lifer Trumpeter Swans!

A Golden Eagle was reported near town, and I was able to go out a couple times to look for it. On the first day, I found a handful of Red-tailed Hawks, some Northern Harriers, and a distant Bald Eagle. As I was walking back to the car, I spotted another eagle coming in low... it was mostly a dark bird, perhaps good for Golden Eagle. I only had time to get a few photos before I lost sight of it. Upon reviewing the photos it was a Golden Eagle! I got such a brief look at it I had to go out again to try to see it. Later that afternoon I went to a nearby location and found only a Bald Eagle.

I returned the following morning and found the Golden Eagle perched in the expected location. This time, I got scope and binocular views of it, and plenty of photos. It flew around for a while and eventually settled back down on the perch again. While not a lifer (I'd seen a distant soaring Golden Eagle in November) I really appreciated getting a much longer look at this bird.

On a side note, I've become less and less impressed by AI denoise (DxO, Topaz, and Adobe Lightroom) over the last few months. I'm not sure if the novelty is wearing off, but now to my eye the overly smooth look of denoised images doesn't look very realistic anymore. I also like to keep my RAW images as well as the denoised DNG, so there's a significant storage requirement when denoising many images. I've found myself doing targeted old fashioned denoise on many images that are "record shots" that are not "keeper" or "portfolio" quality images in the first place.

For some of these Golden Eagle images, and the Greater Yellowlegs images, I experimented with using Lightroom Classic's AI "Enhance" denoise with a very low slider setting. Compared to DxO PureRAW, this does leave some grain in the photo but also seems to preserve more original sharpness and detail in the image while also cleaning it up somewhat. One drawback of this method, over DxO PureRAW, is that it doesn't output a separate denoised DNG file. This saves a litle disk space, but it means that if I ever pause my Adobe subscription I'll not be able to edit the denoised version of the photo. To partially get around this, I output the denoised and cropped (to save space) RAWs as 16-bit TIFF files.

On a few recent outings I managed to find some target birds: Horned Lark out on a farm road and a lifer Long-tailed Duck at the coast. I was scanning a wide area on the coast, looking for a Long-tailed Duck, without any luck. I stopped to examine a few other birds in my scope, and I was surprised to see a Long-tailed Duck pop out of the water behind a grebe in my eyepiece!

On the astro side of things, I pre-ordered the Dwarf Mini smart telescope a few months ago, and it finally arrived. It is similar to the Seestar S30 I already have, but the Dwarf is easier to polar align with a mostly obstructed view of the sky like I have, and it has a newer and better sensor. I'm happy with the first shots I took of M 33 and NGC 1499.

I've been rushing to get my NFL Elo project into the phase that requires a lot of number crunching before the weather heats up. I was finally able to do that recently and get back to some photos from the middle of last month.

My favorite encounters here were a singing Bewick's Wren, a curious Hutton's Vireo in the same spot that came right up to check me out, and a pair of Fox Sparrows looking for food among the leaf litter.

This gallery covers much of March, where I didn't come across a whole lot to photograph. Highlights here include a Red-shafted Northern Flicker (the common subspecies here) excavating a cavity in a dead tree visible from our yard, a Yellow-shafted Northern Flicker (pretty rare here) chowing down on some berries at eye level, and a Hermit Thrush (which I hadn't seen all winter!).

This video was originally aired on OPB in October 2017.

Toward the end of March we made short trips to the north and south ends of Oregon. On our second trip to the south, I got a chance to go out and find my lifer Oak Titmouse, which I'm happy to have found in Oregon (they're much more widespread in California). It wasn't easy to find this bird — I spent a while out wandering around, hearing it occasionally, and had given up and was walking to the car when I finally spotted a pair. I followed it from tree to tree for a few minutes and got some photos, so I feel super fortunate for that.

Back home, we've had a pair of Cooper's Hawks in the yard often, perhaps looking to nest. We also had a pair of Northern Flickers excavating a cavity in a dead tree, but they don't seem to have actually moved in for nesting.

Migration season is in full swing, and it's been fun to get out and see some birds I haven't seen in months. The migratory birds seem to be arriving about a week earlier than expected this year, which is a bit interesting.

After three or four days of birding an open prairie habitat, I found a slightly early Western Kingbird. As expected, it was sitting up on a transmission tower, squeaking away. Other than that, this gallery is mostly zoo photos. As we were leaving the zoo I spotted a bird soaring quite high, and got a few bad photos of it. I figured it was probably a Red-tailed Hawk and didn't think much of it until looking at the photos on the computer — it turned out to be a Swainson's Hawk, a rare-ish bird in the area. I'd seen one before, but these were my first photos of one. Pretty cool!

I've been out birding quite a bit this spring. I've been trying, and failing, to not to take too many photos because of all the work I impose upon myself in dealing with them. There have been some good birds around, and some few other nice photo opportunities have come up including some hummingbirds and Bald Eagles flying low.

A neighbor alerted me to a Dusky Flycatcher just down the street, a great bird here, but the best bird of the gallery the Black-throated Sparrow (a lifer!). This bird was easy to find and was quite tame. What a nice-looking sparrow!