I saw php error logs cause a full disk in a few minutes (thankfully on a shared dev server), thanks to an accidental endless loop that just flooded everything with a wall of notices…

And, working with a CMS that allows third-party plugins that don’t bother to catch exceptions, aggressive web crawlers are not a good thing to encounter on a weekend… 1 exception x 400000 product pages makes for a loooot of text.

*Looks guiltily at the kalimba sitting on her bookshelf.* I absolutely do not see what you mean. At all.

Reflective surfaces are horrible to photograph through and I have no tips. For the low light, is it because brightness might disturb the tarantulas? Otherwise, DIY photo light boxes might be of help and they are cheap-ish to make. Maybe try to put your phone on a stand/bean bag, adjust the focus (if your phone lets you), and set a timer, so the phone will not move while it takes the picture (if the spiders are very mobile, you might be out of luck).

On the tarantulas: that’s fantastic. Will you be posting pics somewhere?

On photography:

So I started out with a an entry level canon camera (eos 4000D) which was only 280€.
I immediately discovered that wasn’t good enough for birds, so I ordered a 55-250mm telescopic lens two days later.
I then saw a heron on the other side of a river and I was salt incarnate because I couldn’t zoom enough, so I impulse bought a 1500€ 150-600mm lens (and a tripod because that stuff weights around 2.5kg).
The whole process took two weeks. Then, maybe a month later, covid hit and I remembered I really like being inside and the gear collected dust for three years.

Cue this summer. “You should go outside and take pictures again,” I told myself. And so I started taking pictures of bugs. But I was not satisfied with the quality of the pictures: bugs need a really fast shutter speed and an aperture that will allow to get more than a 2mm slice of them sharp.
So I ordered a 1500€ semi-pro camera.
But that camera came with a different type of mount, so my existing lenses were not compatible! And the adapter ring was out of stock for the foreseeable future!
So I bought a 600€ macro lens.
And then a led light to use with it on cloudy days.
And a monopod.
I might need a polarizing filter, a sect of reflectors, and extension tubes to get higher magnification.
…

I hope that horror story helped keep you (and anyone who reads this) away from photography. ADHD people especially: NO. DO NOT. DON’T.

This is AMAZING! Thank you! Gosh, those translucent jelly babies. Fascinating video (also TIL the “egg” becomes the abdomen, which is really cool).

As an aside, looking at the man’s setup, I’m starting to think that bug keeping might just compete with photography in the “bottomless money pit” category. Tell me it isn’t so.

Not iNaturalist, but observations.be, where I’ve been playing real life Pokemon for a month or so now. For the most part, I found myself a nice overgrown spot between a parking lot and train tracks, and I’m documenting everything I find there.

I had to google this one to make sense of what I was seeing. Pretty amazing looking insect.

Define “slow creep”, because my experience has been “Wednesday, get into photography again. Saturday, buy a Canon R7 and a macro lens.”. Which is roughly the spending timeline of that time I got into bird photography and splurged on telescopic lenses. Hyperfixations are fun! (And educational!)

The plastic containers are genius. I’ll bookmark that!

Stellar explanation, thank you! Those wasps are absurdly cute for creatures born of baby murder, by the way. The link you gave is fantastic, too.

As for “hardly noticing”: macro photography fixes that problem, for better or worse (nothing like noticing a parasitic worm coming out of a cricket’s butt while reviewing your pictures in full 4k :D ). I take photos of everything even mildly suspicious, just in case.

Thank you so much! Those are fantastic tips, I’m saving them. Hopefully, I can find another bundle of eggs and try them out soon, although I haven’t seen too many stink bugs mating lately. The height of the season seemed to be early to mid-August (with Graphosoma lineatum orgies galore). The plants they favored have wilted or are starting to, however. I’ll have to look around :D

(Can I take a moment to consider how quickly I went from ‘taking macro pictures of bugs’ to ‘I’m gonna be raising them now’, because I only got back into photography like late July and now I think stink bugs eating caterpillars are worth sitting in the mud for half an hour for. I plan to make butterfly lures with rotten banana and cat poop. I find argiopes cute now.)

Thank you so much for the ziplock bag tip, finally one non-expensive piece of gear, BTW.

Since my endgame is to be able to get ‘clearish’ pictures, I had planned to get cheap glass jewelry boxes and make them into mini-terrariums, with whatever I collect around my bug-spotting area as ‘decor’. The idea was to only collect invasive species (like asian ladybugs or brown marmorated stink bugs). Apparently I’ll be doing stink bug eggs and their wasps, too!

Little question about disposal, while I have you: for invasive species, can I just freeze them to kill them, then drop them back outside? Thanks ♥

Thanks! Your answer is already a big help, and pretty instructive!

Unfortunately, I have no boxes for collection ( yet ), or I’d have done a kidnapping. Hopefully I’ll find the plant again, or at least a similar bundle.

That’s a shame… I saw a few asian lady beetles too, but the native ones are thankfully much more numerous. I had no idea they were invasive, though. Good to know.

I’d have entirely missed it. That’s some good camouflage.

A index.html file that says “There’s nothing here”. Not even a special http status. I have subdomains with freshrss, dokuwiki, XBackBone, and whatever I’m tinkering with, but I can’t be bothered to maintain anything public. I guess I have personal websites I haven’t touched since 2012?

“We will take facebook pixel and tiktok and klaviyo for the events, and oh our chatbot, google analytics, this other analytics thing, and…”

I routinely have murderous urges. Ma’am, your site crashes my 6yo phone’s browser. Stop. I beg you.

Great!

I was compiling a list of news and magazines feeds. It’s far from complete, I don’t know if it can help but here is the opml.

There is a lot of overlap between the feeds included because I grabbed the main feed and the categories wherever I could.