Most flower drying methods will take you about two weeks. However, Porta explains that there’s no harm in waiting even longer. “If you can still feel any moisture, then I would put it back, and then a couple of weeks later if it feels papery and dry and almost brittle, then it’s totally depressed and dry,” she explains. She usually waits about six to eight weeks when drying flowers for her clients.When is the best time to dry flowers?“If you’re drying flowers inside your home, truly any time of year works to dry flowers,” says Hayes. Just use a dry, shaded area.However, if possible, try to avoid the summer, says Porta. “Humidity is your worst enemy when it comes to any form of drying flowers,” she explains. “What you’re trying to do with the flowers is draw the moisture out, so if it’s really, really humid, there’s nowhere for that moisture to go and that’s when things start to brown.” To counteract humidity, Porta recommends running your AC.What are the best types of flowers to dry?Certain varieties of dried flowers such as lavender, daisies, and baby’s breath may be popular, but experts say the best way to learn which flowers work best for drying is through trial and error. “The fun part about flowers is that there’s never a hard-and-fast answer for some of these things because sometimes flowers will surprise me,” says Porta.For example, roses can be good for air-drying because they have many petals and a substantial stem. But if they’ve already been used for an event and are on their last leg, the petals can fall off during the drying process. Or, if there is too much moisture between the petals, they can get moldy while pressing. “Sometimes they’re so good, and then other times you just don’t get as lucky,” explains Porta.Olivia is a fan of drying grasses such as pampas, miscanthus, tropical leaves, and palms. “There are several varieties that dry very well, and some of them curl and twist into really interesting shapes,” she says, adding that alliums dry looking like fireworks. Hayes prefers air-drying strawflower and pressing clematis and anemones.What makes flowers dry faster?The microwave method—which speeds up the heat-drying process—is another common technique, but most experts don’t recommend it, especially if you are drying a flower with sentimental value that you want to last. “I personally don’t love using the microwave for pressing flowers because I feel like it speeds it up almost too fast and you just don’t get that natural look,” says Porta. “Sometimes they’ll go in for too long and they’ll come out almost bruised-looking.”Methods such as pressing and drying flowers yield the most vibrant and realistic-looking results and are generally worth the extra time. “You could leave them for too long really, the longer the better,” says Porta.Can you dry flowers in a vase?“I wouldn’t air-dry anything in a vase itself because naturally the stems are going to wilt,” says Porta. This would yield a curved stem, which doesn’t look as visually pleasing and has less longevity. “It just will dry in a wilted position,” Porta explains.

submitted by /u/atlasmountsenjoyer [link] [comments]

The latest update to Greyscalegorilla Studio adds smart tools and thoughtful improvements to your workflow. At the top of the list? Smart Send, a faster, smarter way to get your assets into Cinema 4D. We’ve also added updates that remove friction, reduce clicks, and keep you in the flow. This release is all about working faster with fewer interruptions. Studio Update Highlights Smart Send for Cinema 4D: Send more than just materials. The Send button now supports HDRIs, Gobos, Area Light Maps, and Surface Imperfections. It automatically imports these elements with pre-built setups, helping you work faster and more efficiently.Browser-Based Login: Faster sign-in. No app restart required.Copy Path for Models: One-click to copy the model file path.Drag + Drop Models: Works just like dragging in an FBX. Simple and familiar.UI Enhancements: Menus and navigation have been refined to keep your workflow moving smoothly. Meet Smart Send Smart Send is the fastest way to get assets from Studio into Cinema 4D. The Send button used to only handle materials and models. Now it’s leveled up. With Smart Send, you can drop HDRIs, Gobos, Area Light Maps, and Surface Imperfections into Cinema 4D, fully set up, connected, and ready to use. No extra clicks. No node wrangling. Just one button. Smart Send in Action: Send HDRIs → Drops into a Dome Light and connects everything. Send Area Light Maps → Builds an area light rig with your texture applied. Send Gobos → Adds a spotlight with the gobo applied and a look-at target for easy lighting. Send Surface Imperfections → Inserts into your node graph, pre-routed with a ramp. This isn’t just faster, it’s smarter. Built to anticipate the next step so you don’t have to. Why It’s a Big Deal Cut Setup Time: No more manual rigging or material graph cleanup. Reduce Clicks: One action, fully configured. Stay in Flow: Focus on your creative decisions, not the technical ones. Plus: Connector Preferences: Choose relative paths or copy textures to your tex folder. HDRI Link Integration: If an HDRI Link tag is selected, Smart Send updates it directly. Smarter Scenes, Less Setup If you’re working in Cinema 4D with Arnold, Octane, or Redshift, Smart Send changes the game. Load the asset, hit Send, and get back to work. 👉 Update Studio and Try the New Smart Send

In Brief Posted: 3:11 PM PDT · April 22, 2025 Image Credits:SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP / Getty Images ChatGPT’s responses will now include Washington Post articles OpenAI and The Washington Post just announced a new content partnership that will see ChatGPT summarize and link to the Post’s original reporting in its answers. This is OpenAI’s latest media partnership, with the AI giant inking deals with over 20 news publishers so far, including outlets like The Guardian and Axios. The Washington Post says it will benefit from ChatGPT’s vast audience, with the chatbot now counting more than 500 million users. Meanwhile, OpenAI will benefit from higher-quality answers based on the Post’s “timely, well-sourced reporting” per its press release. Financial terms of the deal are undisclosed and The Washington Post declined to share when asked. OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. OpenAI has been embraced by some newsrooms, but not all: The New York Times, for example, is suing OpenAI for allegedly using its copyrighted work, a charge OpenAI denies. Topics

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says he may keep doing work with the Department of Government Efficiency through the remainder of President Donald Trump’s second term, amid calls for him to step away from politics. Musk said he plans to reduce his role with DOGE to a “day or two” per week starting next month, “or as long as the President would like me to do so, and as long as it is useful.” The executive made his comments on Tesla’s quarterly earnings call, just about an hour and a half after Tesla admitted in a shareholder letter that “political sentiment” is harming the company’s sales. Combined with other factors — including increased competition and Trump’s tariff mess — Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration helped drive a 71% drop in profit compared to the first quarter of last year. Musk’s comments come just a few days after one of Tesla’s biggest supporters on Wall Street said the company is in a “code red” situation if the CEO didn’t pull back from his government work. The work Musk has done with DOGE to gut government agencies and — in his words — feeding one into “the wood chipper” has resulted in worldwide protests against him and Tesla. Musk tried on Tuesday’s call to blame the protests as being “paid for,” without offering any evidence. He claimed the people in attendance are “protesting because they’re receiving fraudulent money, or the recipients of waste,” again without providing any proof or trying to justify this line of thinking. Musk said the “major work of establishing” DOGE is over, which would allow him to pull back his involvement. He is technically a “special government employee,” which is supposed to limit his work to 130 days in any 365-day period. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Jack Wallen / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNETMuch to the chagrin of those who would like to malign the Linux operating system, it's actually quite easy to use. Thanks to modern GUI desktop environments and applications, anyone can jump into the fray and know what they're doing.On the rare occasions when trouble arises, you might want to know a few commands to help you out. The problem is that there are so many commands available within the realm of Linux, which makes it challenging to know which commands are the best options. Also: The first 5 Linux commands every new user should learnSure, you can learn any of the commands that display system information (such as top, free, iostat, htop, vmstat, and iftop), but those tools will only get you so far. What is more valuable is skipping to the command that can really help you if something goes wrong. With that introduction out of the way, let's get to the commands.1. dmesgBack when I first started using Linux, dmesg was my best friend. Essentially, dmesg is used to examine all messages that are created after the bootloader phase of the kernel. In other words, you might find a clue for anything you could possibly troubleshoot right here. Unlike the dmesg of old, you now have to run the command with sudo privileges, so: sudo dmesgThis will print quite a bit of output you can scroll through, making it a bit challenging to find what you're looking for, and much of what you read will most likely seem like gibberish. The good news is that errors print out in red, so you can quickly scroll to find anything that might be wrong. There's a way to make this even easier. Let's say you're experiencing an error, and you want to see if it is logged via dmesg as it happens. To do that, issue the command: dmesg -wThis will display the output from dmesg as it happens, so when an error occurs, you'll see it written in the terminal window and can troubleshoot from there. The dmesg command is a great place to start troubleshooting in Linux. Jack Wallen/ZDNET2. tailSpeaking of following output, the tail command allows you to follow the output written to any log file. Let's say you're having issues with your Samba share and want to see what's happening in real time. The first thing you would want to do is find out which log file to read. In that case, you could issue the command: ls /var/log/sambaIn that folder you'll find a number of log files (for the Samba server and any/all machines connected to the share). Let's say I want to view the content of the Samba daemon log. For that, I would issue the command: tail -f /var/log/samba/log.smbdAlso: 5 Linux commands for quickly finding the system information you need to knowAs the errors happen, they'll be printed in the terminal. As you can see, I have an unknown parameter in my smb.conf file, named share modes. I can open that file, remove the parameter, restart Samba, and the error is no more. Tail is a great way to view information written to a log in real time. Jack Wallen/ZDNETRemember, to get out of the tail command, you have to use the Ctrl+c keyboard combination. 3. psFor me, ps is a gateway to other commands. The ps command displays a snapshot of any given current process. You could use ps to list every running process or feed it to grep to list only specific processes. But what's it good for? Also: Two tricks that make using the Linux command line a lot easierLet's say you have an application that has crashed and won't close. You click that little X in the upper-right (or upper-left) corner of the window, but it just won't go away. The first thing you need to do is find the PID of that process so you can then take care of the problem. That's where ps comes in handy. But ps by itself isn't very helpful. Why? If you just run ps, it will only list the processes associated with the terminal you're using. Instead, you need to use some specific options, which are: ps auxa – all processesu – processes owned by the user running psx – prints applications that have not been started from the terminal The ps command is essential for finding information about applications that may not be behaving as they should. Jack Wallen/ZDNETThis command prints out a lot of information, all of it in columns. You'll see several columns, but the ones you'll want to pay attention to are PID and COMMAND. With the information from those two columns, you can locate the process's ID causing you problems. Once you've found that process, you can then kill it. If the output of ps aux is overwhelming, you can pipe that output to grep and list only certain processes. Let's say LibreOffice is causing you problems. You can list only those processes associated with LibreOffice like this: ps aux | grep LibreOffice4. killThe kill command is very powerful. When you have a stubborn application that has crashed and won't close (or hasn't crashed but is consuming too much memory), the kill command will force that application to close. But to use the kill command, you must first have the PID of the application in question (which you locate with the ps aux command). Let's say the PID of a wayward LibreOffice application is 604187. To kill that process, the command would be: kill 604187The app should close, and you're good to go. 5. systemctlThe systemctl command is not only good for starting and stopping applications; it can also help you troubleshoot. Let's say Samba isn't working as expected. Issue the command: systemctl status smbdThe above command will list whether the service is running, its PID, the number of associated tasks, how much memory and CPU it's using, and the CGroups to which it belongs. Even better, if there are any issues with the process, systemctl will give you the information you need to troubleshoot the problem further (usually with the help of journalctl). Also: Why I use the Linux tree command daily -- and what it can do for youThere you have it. These five commands will serve as a great place to start with your Linux troubleshooting. Yes, there are quite a few more tools that are available, but for those just starting with Linux, you might want to know these commands first. FAQs Show more What is the difference between cd and pwd?cd stands for "change directory" and allows you to navigate through directories. pwd stands for "print working directory" and displays the current working directory. How do I list all files in a directory?Use the command ls. How do I create a new directory?Use the command mkdir. What is the difference between the -d option in mkdir and creating a parent directory separately?The -d option creates only the top-level directory, whereas creating a parent directory separately ensures that all necessary subdirectories are created as well. If you use the -p option, it will create parent directories as well as the subdirectory. How do I navigate to a specific file or directory from within another directory?Use the command cd [directory_name]. What is the purpose of using ../ in navigation?../ refers to going up one level in the directory hierarchy, whereas ./ (dot/period) refers to staying in the same directory. How do I create a new file or edit an existing one?Use the command touch [filename]. What is the purpose of using the -e option with touch?The -e option allows you to specify an editor to open in place of creating a blank text file. How do I delete a file or directory?Use the command rm [filename] to delete a file and rm -rf [directory] to remove both the top-level directory and any child directory or file within. What is the purpose of using pipes (|) with commands?Pipes allow you to pass output from one command as input for another command, enabling complex data processing pipelines. How do I use redirection operators (> and >>)?Use > to redirect standard output and >> to append new output. Also, use << to read the contents of a file into a variable or pipe. Featured

With Wi-Fi 7 taking over home networking, I put a midrange Eero mesh router to the test to power my smart home setup.

Google Agentspace Ideation AgentGoogle Over the past couple of years, the frantic pace of AI innovation has had the big three cloud players vying to keep up with each other when it comes to AI capabilities. At this point, it’s pretty easy to say that if one cloud vendor has a new AI capability, your preferred vendor either already has it or will have it within the next few weeks. One would think that AI presents new opportunities for a vendor to differentiate itself and take share from its competitors. But what’s really happening is more a game of defense where the race for parity is about keeping existing customers. Heading into the Google Cloud Next 25 conference a couple of weeks ago, I was interested to see how Google would differentiate its AI offerings. I had some hope based upon its recent announcements about Agentspace (which I covered here) and the Customer Experience Suite (which I covered here). Both of those were notable in that the messaging was less about technology and more about creating business value and changing how people work. There were two key takeaways from the event. First, market execution is as important as technology in an ultracompetitive market like AI. Second, Google is using some proven but uncommon methods to differentiate its innovations. (Note: Google is an advisory client of my firm, Moor Insights & Strategy.) Executing Well In Competitive Markets Google Cloud has held the number-3 revenue position in cloud services for a while now, but over the past year it’s been taking market share from its competitors. It’s even feasible that Google Cloud could eventually take the number-2 position away from Microsoft Azure. Certainly some of that has to do with the technology, but I think that hiring a new go-to-market leadership team and investing more in training and certifications — a trusted blueprint borrowed from many other established tech players — also has a lot to do with it. The timing for these initiatives is good, given the business-value-driven product messaging. Google has also made some smart decisions when it comes to building customer confidence, such as 30-day commits on spot pricing, along with making investments in customer education and services. Google is proving that how well you educate and take care of your customers is a major ingredient for tech sales and retention in times of disruption. This may not have always been the case for Google Cloud, but at Next 25, I became convinced that my perception of the company needed to be updated. Providing A Curated AI Experience In terms of technology, Google, like all other AI vendors, delivered a full plate of new innovations at its marquee event. And there were a lot of aha moments, including the reverse engineering and re-release of The Wizard of Oz. But it wasn’t the technology itself that was amazing; it was how the technology is designed, how users are engaged and how solutions are deployed. That’s not to say the technology isn’t good. I would suggest that Google’s core AI tech is competitive but only marginally differentiated. Rather, what I saw from Google was a deeper degree of business thinking and user-centric design than its AI competition. This is something I would call a curated experience. I believe this is deliberate, because a curated experience is a critical complement to Google’s investments in improved market execution — not to mention how Google can gain new customers while retaining the ones it already has. To break this down a bit further, let’s consider three big developer-related announcements. Agentspace represented a well-thought-out user-centric design. Google has had some success when it comes to AI user experience with other technologies such as NotebookLM. But Agentspace is a new type of work interface. For starters, it’s personalized based upon the user’s individual profile or other contextual inputs. For example, maybe you are running agents for a specific task. In that case, Agentspace will have the ability to present other relevant agents and downplay those that are irrelevant. Also, the UI looks more like a consumer product than something you’d typically see in an enterprise. The Agentspace product management team shared that this was a deliberate choice, and that they collaborated with Google’s consumer UI teams to do it. The rationale was that AI adopters tend to get their initial introduction to AI from consumer-oriented projects. Therefore, give the user something they can learn more naturally — based upon experience rather than technical standards. To help drive further user adoption and engagement, Google also announced the Agent Developer Kit, which is an open source set of methods to foster collaboration between agents and other remote services. This makes a lot of sense because Google has leveraged open source to great effect in the past. The most notable example of this is Kubernetes, which is now the de facto standard in container management. Google’s biggest contribution in the ADK was the Agent2Agent protocol, which is provided only with an AI platform like Google’s own Vertex or Salesforce’s Agentforce. The ADK also supports the emerging MCP standard. By open-sourcing ADK, Google will be able to attract developers to code collaborative agents without a lot of extra software and cost. (Why am I so sure? Look at the whole history of open source adoption in the enterprise.) It’s a great way to get people to try out agents and, if they like it, to then consider Google’s higher-end agent capabilities in Vertex and other products. Finally, in terms of solution deployment, Google’s roadmap and packaging is quite clear. For example, in tooling there’s Vertex and Firebase for professional developers and Agentspace for the no-code development environment. Another example is Model Garden, which, with 200 models available, is not too constrained but also avoids the chaos of more than one million models on Hugging Face. Google’s simplicity here is quite refreshing, especially compared to the other cloud providers, which have more complex and entitlement-driven solutions. But Is Curation A Meaningful Value Proposition In The Enterprise? A curated experience is not a new idea. In fact, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the poster child for the whole concept 20 years ago. By providing enterprises with gated access to the best of standards and open source and a world-class support team, Red Hat gave customers a feeling that they were tapping into both meaningful innovation and sensible risk mitigation. But we also have to be honest that RHEL was a lot cheaper than the Unix systems it was initially displacing. Eventually, as cloud came to the fore, open Linux also became more mainstream, and new competitors to Red Hat emerged (including cloud-specific variants from AWS and Google). Fortunately for Red Hat, it was able to transfer the RHEL thought process to other areas like virtualization and DevOps. (In this context, it’s worth noting that Kubernetes is core to Red Hat’s OpenShift cloud management platform.) Based upon this example, one can assume that curation can be a meaningful value proposition — but it may not be sustainable. Given the level of fragmentation, low standardization and user confusion about AI in the marketplace today, now is a good time for users to consider a curated experience. But how long it will last remains an open question. Additionally, Google’s timeline may be different than Red Hat’s, because Google is also tapping into something of a different positioning that may achieve a better result. Instead of providing “leading-edge but not bleeding-edge” AI, the company is conveying a sense of “Let’s get going.” And for many mainstream companies and users, that may be the right type of encouragement to choose Google — particularly given how early we are in the age of AI. So, is Google’s new TPU 10x faster than two years ago? Is Gemini better at a given benchmark this week? Yes to both — and those tech milestones certainly have their importance. But Google’s real bet is that your experience in learning about and using AI is more important than those types of headlines. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.Moor Insights & Strategy provides or has provided paid services to technology companies, like all tech industry research and analyst firms. These services include research, analysis, advising, consulting, benchmarking, acquisition matchmaking and video and speaking sponsorships. Of the companies mentioned in this article, Moor Insights & Strategy currently has (or has had) a paid business relationship with AWS, Google, Microsoft, Red Hat (IBM) and Salesforce.Editorial StandardsForbes Accolades

Looking for help with today's NYT Strands puzzle? Here's an extra hint to help you uncover the right words, as well as all of today's answers and Spangram.

GeForce Hotfix Display Driver version 576.15 is based on our latest Game Ready Driver 576.02. A GeForce driver is an incredibly complex piece of software, We have an army of software engineers constantly adding features and fixing bugs. These changes are checked into the main driver branches, which are eventually run through a massive QA process and released. Since we have so many changes being checked in, we usually try to align driver releases with significant game or product releases. This process has served us pretty well over the years but it has one significant weakness. Sometimes a change that is important to many users might end up sitting and waiting until we are able to release the driver. The GeForce Hotfix driver is our way to trying to get some of these fixes out to you more quickly. These drivers are basically the same as the previous released version, with a small number of additional targeted fixes. The fixes that make it in are based in part on your feedback in the Driver Feedback threads and partly on how realistic it is for us to quickly address them. These fixes (and many more) will be incorporated into the next official driver release, at which time the Hotfix driver will be taken down. To be sure, these Hotfix drivers are beta, optional and provided as-is. They are run through a much abbreviated QA process. The sole reason they exist is to get fixes out to you more quickly. The safest option is to wait for the next WHQL certified driver. But we know that many of you are willing to try these out. These hotfix drivers represent a lot of additional work by our engineering teams, I hope they provide value for you. We'll try it out and see if people like the idea and want us to continue. What's New: This hotfix addresses the following issue: [RTX 50 series] Some games may display shadow flicker/corruption after updating to GRD 576.02 [5231537] Lumion 2024 crashes on GeForce RTX 50 series graphics card when entering render mode [5232345] GPU monitoring utilities may stop reporting the GPU temperature after PC wakes from sleep [5231307] [RTX 50 series] Some games may crash while compiling shaders after updating to GRD 576.02 [5230492] [GeForce RTX 50 series notebook] Resume from Modern Standy can result in black screen [5204385] [RTX 50 series] SteamVR may display random V-SYNC micro-stutters when using multiple displays [5152246] [RTX 50 series] Lower idle GPU clock speeds after updating to GRD 576.02 [5232414] For questions, please visit the FAQ below: Nvidia DCH/Standard Display Drivers for Windows FAQ