The reason why orchids are so special and rare is that they need the mentioned fungus to feed their children plants. In opposition to most other seeds that come with loads of nutrients stored in the first leaves (cotyledons), orchid seeds are microscopic and don’t have any nutrient storage. Only the symbiosis with the fungus makes them able to grow at first.

Search for orchids on iNaturalist.org to see where you can find them near your place.

In general they have three habitats. Wet meadows, dry meadows and woodlands. All these habitats need to be poor in nutrients, so usually they are not close to where industrial agriculture is practised.

They are not that rare once you know how to spot them.

Wow, I thought it was a real one at first. Be sure to report it on iNaturalist.org for most scientific benefit.

Unfortunately things are not that easy. At least in western europe, if you let a patch of land sit there for decades, it will eventually turn into a forest. While forests are nice, they are not necessarily the most biodiverse places.

Some regular destruction of plants (mowing, animals grazing, etc) is beneficial for biodiversity.

I kind of agree. I’ve used blender on and off for at least 15 years now, so I know how to do many things now by heart. But, yeah if you have less experience or use it infrequently, it’s tough. The more “recent” releases are more self explanatory though.

There might actually be good freeform tools in FreeCAD that I haven’t tried yet.

Luxembourg, central western Europe. We have seasons. The growing season usually starts mid May until some time in September. We have lots of rain

This is one of the things you might be better off modeling in blender.

Yes, great idea! I love having lil devices around that I can simply look at instead of needing to use my phone or a laptop.

It’s a pretty interesting concept. I don’t want it here though. I’m just building this for my own needs (mostly fun).

I’ll look into this as a consumer though next time I need to plot stuff on a desktop :)

Not yet. I’ll reply here once it’s published. It will be pretty crappy C++ since I don’t care too much about learning it properly. I’m just shaving yaks right now.

Thanks a lot. I mostly did it because I love the looks of it too (and because I’ve always wanted to build some kind of GUI library). I was also considering using it for something artsy. I like the idea of a watch!

Thanks a lot for having taken time to respond so thoroughly. I must say I haven’t thought about things from this angle.

The part about the book and the mediocre comedian definitely rings a bell. Getting stuck in stupid local extrema (like in optimization) more often than necessary is definitely a thing with me.

What of many of the things you’re “supposed to do” are things you don’t actually want to do and therefore you don’t do? What if it’s external circumstances define what’s called a mental disorder?

Would you feel like you have a mental disorder if you lived in some completely different context?

I’m just wondering if we can call things a disorder that might mostly arise because society is built around working better for more neurotypical people (it at all).

Would you call it a disorder being tall if for some reason most people were short and all our infrastrucure were built for short people?

I’m not questioning the difficulties many people have with their lives. I’m wondering what to do about it and where the threshold is.

I often wonder as well. Then I think: is this not just the human condition. In any case I seem to score pretty high on those online questionnaires.

Not bad for doing it yourself. My hairdresser usually uses a trimmer to clean up around the ears etc.

It’s not like there are no storage solutions available. They are not always very efficient, but if you have a surplus, whatever.

Nice work! What does the optics look like? Do you have a picture of the whole thing?

KDE Connect is amazing. Also works without KDE.

Not true about xmpp in general. There are modern clients out there.