my parents had gone to baifu this morning. had i known i would've gone as well, but they left by 10am, and i was still in bed at that time. when i biked to belmont they'd just come back. i had thick noodles for lunch along with some youtiao. after we finished eating i went outside with my father to take his passport photo. the grey sky was perfect lighting. my mother stood in the back with a white poster board background. i also used another poster board as a reflector to take some shadow away from the face.

while we were eating my mother told me the imac was broken. she could hear sounds but the screen was blank. even after restarting the computer, the fan would turn on meaning the imac had booted up but there was nothing on the screen. so i brought out the imac and my father and i took it apart to see if we could fix it. having taken it apart before when we replaced the hard drive with an solid state drive, this time around was much easier, although i did have to consult an imac teardown video. when we removed the LCD screen we saw what the problem was: the video cable behind the screen was only partially plugged in. while it failed now is a mystery (a miracle that it even worked for this long), but after plugging it back in, the screen started up just fine. we put the computer back together and gave it back to my mother who was waiting in her bedroom.

i flew the drone again, to fresh pond, across the farm, around burbank school, then back to the house. i'm trying different techniques, one of which is flying sideways and filming forward. the app did freeze one time, while i was over the fancy fresh pond pool house, but after waiting for the phone to become unstuck, i got back into the app and regained control of the drone. total flight distance was 2.9km (1.8 miles).

flying in the air gives me a better appreciation spatial distances. when i'm on the ground, it's a completely different feeling than when you're in the air. one thing that's really surprising is how close everything seems from the sky, but seem farther away from the ground. when your on the ground you can't see your destination until you arrive, but 400ft in the sky you can see everything. there are also no traffic in the sky, everything is just a straight distance away. if i wasn't so worried about losing the drone, it's actually kind of tranquil flying overhead. there's also a voyeuristic component, since it's virtually impossible to see the drone when it's that high. even if you have amazing hearing, trying to pick it out from the the air is impossible unless it's lower to the ground. it really does feel like a spy plane.

all the orchids in the bedroom seem to have mealybugs. it's not an infestation, just a few, but something to keep an eye on. i brought everything into the bathtub and sprayed them with neem oil, as well as the chili pepper plant from the basement (that one has a touch of aphids, but father has been spraying when i'm not around). the mealybugs on the orchids like to congregate on the flower stems, i haven't seen them anywhere else. hopefully some weekly neem oil treatment will kill them off.

my mother found a passport photo that my father took before they went to taiwan that he can use for his passport renewal. not only is it a better photo, but it means i don't have to fix the one i have, which i realized was going to be difficult because the background wasn't a uniform color. later i realized because i was using a 28mm lens, the portrait didn't look flattering; i should've used a longer 85-100mm lens for better portraiture. hopefully i'll remember that for next time.

my father made another batch of shaobing for dinner. this time he used a lot of buttered dough mixed in with the regular dough to give them puffier layers after we watched a few shaobing making youtube videos. the ones he made on saturday were more like dried shells, these new ones had some chew on the inside.

i biked home after dinner. the more i bike, the better endurance i have. today was the easiest ride back ever, i wasn't even tired, just leisurely pedaled back to cambridge.