All posts by Gary

Washington Pass, North Cascades

I love the North Cascades Highway (Highway 20) in Washington for breathtaking views and a peaceful retreat. The Washington Pass Vista Point offers panoramic views of majestic mountain peaks. Take your time and appreciate the splendid viewpoints, including the Washington Pass Vista Point. It’s a must-see attraction for nature and outdoor enthusiasts, tourists, and anyone looking to retreat from everyday hustle and bustle.

Getting a drone photo from the pass has been on my must-do list for several years. Finally, this past week, I got the opportunity. There was a little smoke in the air, making the air not quite as clear as I would have liked. But still, not bad. And we got some clouds to add interest to the sky. [Note: I did check to be sure there was no aerial fire fighting or TFRs in the area to be sure I wouldn’t be interfering with fire fighting operations.]

I had taken my almost new (to me) Mavic 2 Pro drone with me just for this occasion. Three batteries were charged the night before we left for the journey. All equipment was checked and re-checked to be sure I hadn’t left something out, or forgot to charge a battery.

We drove over the pass on Thursday and camped an Klipchuck Campground, a few miles west of Mazama. We stopped at the Vista Point on our way over Washington Pass. The sun was low in the sky and the valleys were in deep shadow.

If you have not driven over the North Cascades Highway, you really should add it to your to-do list. It is a spectacular drive any time of year. Earlier in the year all of the mountains around will be snow-capped.

Below is a photo of Diablo Lake from the Diablo Lake Vista Point.

Diablo Lake from the Diablo Lake Vista Point

The next day we spent the morning having breakfast and shopping in town – or towns: Winthrop and Twisp. If you haven’t been to eqpd in Twisp, you really should check it out. They make very cool bags. After this stop, we now own more than 10 of their bags in various sizes, colors and styles. In their manufacturing facility in Twisp they have a good assortment of bags you can purchase. There are also many seconds that can be purchased at a discount. Quite often the problem with the bag is difficult or impossible to spot. One of the bags we got on this trip (the one on the left in the photo below) had a very minor defect in the pattern printed on the bag.

eqpd bags, made in Twisp, WA
eqpd bags, made in Twisp, WA

After shopping we headed back to the Washington Pass Vista Point. Scattered clouds had come in, giving an interesting sky. We walked up  to the overlook, then looked around for a place away from people to launch my drone. We found a nice flat rock, probably 15-20 feet across, several hundred feet from the main viewpoint with no trees above it to snag the drone on takeoff.

I flew my drone for almost 20 minutes, taking a number of still photos and several panorama shots. The 360° panorama below was the best of the bunch. From where the drone was you can see both sides of the pass, including the hairpin turn of the highway south of the Vista Point.

Click on the image below and move your mouse to spin the image so you can look in all directions. To view full screen, click on the [] in the upper right hand corner.

The 360° panorama above was taken with my Mavic 2 Pro (26 RAW photos), edited with Lightroom to try to tame the blown-out sky, then stitched into a 360° Panorama with PTGui, and uploaded to kuula.co for viewing.

Seeing Whales

Anyone that has walked along the Edmonds, Washington, waterfront is familiar with the “Seeing Whales” cast aluminum sculpture located at the south end of Olympic Beach Park.

Seeing Whales Sculpture, Olympic Beach Park, Edmonds, WA
Seeing Whales Sculpture, Olympic Beach Park, Edmonds, WA

Above is a photo of the “Seeing Whales” sculpture. Below is a 3D model of this sculpture. I created this model by shooting 287 photos with a GoPro Hero 5 Black camera mounted on a selfie stick. I set the camera to shoot  an image every 2 seconds, then moved the camera around to get many different views of the sculpture. The selfie stick was so I could get the camera above the sculpture, and also more easily get the camera down low.

I then processed these 287 images with WebODM (Open Drone Map, web version) into a 3D model, then cleaned it up with Blender, a 3D editing and creation tool. The resulting model was uploaded to Sketchfab for viewing.

To view the model in 3D, click on the image below. It will take a little while to open the model. Once the model is open, use your left and right mouse buttons to spin it around to view it from all directions. Use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out on the model. For the best experience, view the model full screen – either click on the arrows at the lower right or press the “f” key.

If you are viewing this in your email client, you must go to the blog website or directly to Sketchfab to see the 3D model.

ChatGPT – What’s That?

If you’re paying attention to the news or social media, you’ve almost certainly heard about ChatGPT. Do you know what it is?

I created an account to play with it and learn more. I asked ChatGPT to tell me about itself. Here are the unedited results. The headings below are my questions to ChatGPT, and the text is it’s reply.

If you would like to play with ChatGPT, go here: https://chat.openai.com/. I had to try several times to get signed up, as their servers are very busy.

What Is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a pre-trained language model developed by OpenAI. It is based on the transformer architecture and is trained on a massive amount of text data from the internet. It’s capable of understanding the context and generating coherent, fluent and human-like text.

ChatGPT can be fine-tuned for various natural language processing tasks such as text generation, language translation, text summarization, question answering, text completion and more. It’s mainly used in conversational context, such as in chatbots, virtual assistants, and customer service bots, where it can generate human-like text and respond to user input. It can also be used to generate content for websites, social media, and other platforms, such as product descriptions, articles, and blog posts.

It’s a powerful tool for natural language processing and has a wide range of applications in industries such as finance, healthcare, e-commerce, and more. It can help businesses to automate customer service, generate marketing content, improve search engine optimization and more

What is ChatGPT’s Purpose?

ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI. Its primary purpose is to generate human-like text. It can be used for a variety of natural language processing tasks such as language translation, text summarization, question answering, text generation and text completion.

ChatGPT is built on the transformer architecture, which is a neural network architecture designed for natural language processing tasks. It’s trained on a massive amount of text data from the internet and it’s able to understand the context and generate coherent and fluent text.

One of the main use cases for ChatGPT is to generate human-like text in a conversational context, such as in chatbots, virtual assistants, and customer service bots. It can also be used to generate content for websites, social media, and other platforms, such as product descriptions, articles, and blog posts.

It can also be used for other natural language processing tasks such as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and text classification.

Overall, ChatGPT’s purpose is to generate human-like text and make natural language processing tasks more efficient and accurate.