I've used a shop vac as a first step, but if it's the only step, won't the queen survive and make more wasps? Unless you left it running for so long the queen starved to death, I mean.
My current approach is to wait until after dark, then fill up the nest entrance with spray foam (while wearing a beekeeper suit, just to be safe). I don't think that would work for walls, though - they'd probably find another way out.
In fact, that approach is explicitly warned against for walls. When they can't get out their former entrance, they will start to chew through the wall to make a new one - and there's no guarantee that new entrance will lead to the outside, rather than your living room.
My problem was the nest was hard to reach, and I was afraid that even if spraying did manage to kill the wasps, I would be left with a gross wet decomposing mass in the wall causing rot and water damage. I still need to figure out how to remove the existing nest but I'll wait until it's vacant :-)
My first time having yellow jackets in my wall, I sprayed poison in the entrance. They found a new way to leave the nest that was into my kitchen. That's when I stopped using poison.
I've needed two passes in the past, a few days apart. One to catch all of the adults, and another to catch any new wasps that emerged immediately after the first pass.
Maybe you have friendlier wasps in the UK, but the common ones in the US (yellowjackets, mud daubers, etc.) are generally very aggressive, and trying to coexist with them will end badly sooner or later.
I'm vegetarian because of personal ethics. I safely capture and release spiders I find in the house. I use live traps for mice and rats, and release them in the woods. But most wasps here are on my "nip the problem in the bud" list, along with termites, Scotch Broom, and a few other things.
I leave non-aggressive wasps, like Great Golden Diggers, alone.
In my experience (and wikipedia), mud daubers aren't aggressive. You may have misidentified a species or had an uncommon experience. They prey on spiders so I consider them beneficial. Only real issue with them is that they clog up mechanisms with mud.
In North America, Scotch broom was frequently planted in gardens, and was later used for erosion control along highway cuts and fills. Scotch broom is slightly toxic and unpalatable to livestock, and its seeds are viable for up to ten years, allowing them to regrow many years later, after extermination of the plant.
Feels like there must be some way to use "variability of colour by viewing angle" for tiny clusters of volumes in the object as a way to generate material settings when converting the Gaussian splat model to a traditional 3D model.
E.g. if you have a cluster of tiny adjacent volumes that have high variability based on viewing angle, but the difference between each of those volumes is small, handle it as a smooth, reflective surface, like chrome.
I wonder if one could capture each angle in a single shot with a Lytro Illum instead of focus-stacking? Or is the output of an Illum not of sufficient resolution?
I supported enterprise Windows systems for a decade, although I had Unix and Linux experience as well and liked all of them.
I skipped Windows 8 entirely. For the 10 era, I had at least one Linux VM on each of my systems, and migrated to open-source where possible even on the host OS (Blender, Inkscape, etc.).
Windows 11 pushed me to flip things around - Linux as the host OS, and a Windows VM or dual-boot if I absolutely need to do something with that system that only runs well on Windows. These days, that list is very short.
All of the many frustrations of 11 become much less pressing when it's just throwing a temper tantrum in its playpen instead of interrupting serious work; the effect is magnified by rarely needing to interact with it at all anymore on my personal devices.
Linux still has a few quirks, but IMO there are fewer and fewer of those every year, while they seem to be increasing on Windows. The most recent 11 update has made Windows Explorer unreliable for me. I'm still stunned. The last time I saw stability issues with Explorer was on 98 SE.
Regards " stability issues with Explorer", I doubt it is Explorer itself.
2 thoughts:
1. Possibly something hooked into Explorer. Not necessarily malicious but could be like an acrobat extension or image editor extension or similar that helps to make thumbnails/previews. Or a context menu hook in.
Use Sysinternals Autoruns [0] to have a look. It is a free diagnostics tool from MS that shows everything that loads on startup. It looks at Start menu Startup folder, registry run and runonce keys and a bunch more places where things are hooked in. No restarts or anything required simply to look. It will show plugins/addons to Explorer too. Easy disable/re-enable process allows for somewhat easy troubleshooting. You'll have to restart Explorer after a "disable" step to see the results though.
Be sure to use the "hide microsoft entries" option if you want to narrow it down some.
2. Filesystem filters - things like antivirus "scan on read". If a "scan on read" goes to an antivirus that is not playing ball it will halt the "file open" request for example.
The command "fltmc" will list filesystem filter drivers. But making sense of which one belongs to what software is a further exercise. Which is why I suggest this investigative path as number 2...
Same, on my laptop. Hybrid graphics destabilised both Debian (with Nvidia drivers installed) and the Windows 11 installation I have on there for SharpCap. Switching to Nvidia GPU only made everything rock solid.
This was my first experience with hybrid graphics, and so far I'm not impressed.
In my experience, the Amazon search feature is very unpredictable and confusing.
E.g. if I search for "<film or television series> blu ray" (no quotes), I will usually get only listings for foreign imports of the title sold by third parties, even when Amazon carries the item. If I want to get the US release in my search results, I have to leave out the "blu ray" string, which makes the search results less useful if Amazon carries a lot of non-BD versions of the title and I am looking for it specifically in that format.
Some items will be hidden when searching from Amazon itself, but can be ordered by doing the same search on DuckDuckGo or Google and finding a direct link to the product page.
TLDR: it's difficult to do a fair comparison between users' experiences, because their search feature (like so many sites - I'm looking at you, Etsy!) is completely broken.
Amazon hasn't done a great job of packing for item protection in ~20 years. I honestly don't remember now if they ever did, and I was buying books from them in the late 90s.
In my experience, small single items will usually go in padded mailers, which are the most effective option they seem to offer.
As soon as the item or shipment is big enough for a box, all they've done for as long as I can remember is add enough packing material to fill any empty space, so that items in the box are less likely to bounce around inside the box, but offering no protection against situations like the box as a whole being dropped onto a hard surface.
I stopped ordering hard drives from them about twenty years ago because they refused to pack them safely enough for UPS or FedEx standards.
I'm also in Washington, and delivery times are inconsistent. Sometimes it's 1-2 days. Sometimes it's 3-5. There's no way to tell in advance which it will be.
I haven't ended up with any fraudulent items, but I have had packages "delivered" and "signed for" using my name that never arrived, with the telltale being that my packages go to a business address, and someone else signs for them.
Around 1995 or 1996, a friend said he'd played a speederbike graphics/game demo running on an SGI system at some kind of touring SGI promotional event.
I've never been able to find screenshots or video of it, and was hoping it might be included here. No such luck. I don't suppose anyone remembers it?
I don't think so. His description was that it was speeder bikes in a forest, like Return of the Jedi, but it was mostly a demo of the graphics capabilities, not a complete game.
e.g. I remember he specifically said you could fly in any direction you wanted, but there was a wall at the edge of the forest, as opposed to it wrapping around or having a non-inmersion-breaking reason for being constrained to the one area.
Did you actually provide a shorts link? What's the world coming to? At first, I thought maybe it makes sense since it could be updated for mobile. Nope. It immediately changed aspect ratio so it is portrait oriented piece with letter boxing. :face-palm: yet another square peg/round hole example
otherwise, looks like it might be fun to play for a few minutes
My current approach is to wait until after dark, then fill up the nest entrance with spray foam (while wearing a beekeeper suit, just to be safe). I don't think that would work for walls, though - they'd probably find another way out.