Pros:

• Sharp
• Nice construction
• Effective VR/OIS
• Fast and accurate AF with good tracking. I've used it for a mix of birds, bugs, and youth sports. It's never failed to disappoint
• It's not white and collapses somewhat small for a longish FF lens. I like to believe the lens didn't stand out that badly when I use it to shoot youth sports. At least I had multiple parents tell me they appreciated the photos. The hood adds a decent amount of visual mass and it's probably not needed 95% of the time
• Decent pseudo macro, but only at the wide end (1:3.1 aka 0.32x)
• 500mm is 25% more reach than 400mm and is enough for my needs. I'm on e-mount and this lens combo is faster than Sony's 100-400 with a teleconverter
• Good price to performance ratio
• The lens has a focal length lock that uses a clutch like mechanism to lock the lens at any focal length. It seems a bit gimmicky, but I find it useful
• My copy appears fairly well centered, so yay

Cons:

• Stiff zoom action and somewhat front heavy when fully zoomed. There's no manual focusing this lens when it's fully zoomed unless you're using a monopod or tripod
• It's a bit heavy, but is on par for this focal length on a FF lens. If you only need 400mm, get a 400mm lens to save some heft. I use this lens exclusively hand held, but I'm also reasonably fit. I have sat on the ground and used a knee as a makeshift monopod at times though
• Somewhat slow aperture, but this also on par for the focal length. I only use this lens outdoors, so it's never been an issue. As far as consumer lenses go, there's not much faster out there at this focal length
• If you need a long lens you're going to need something longer than 500mm. There's obviously more reach here than a 400mm lens, but it's not that much more. This isn't a real con about this lens, just know what focal length you need and go from there
• No teleconverters on e-mount

Bottom line:

• If this focal length is your jam, this could be your lens
• If you don't need the reach, get something lighter and more compact
• If you don't mind walking around with a massive lens and you're on e-mount, Sony's 200-600 zoom action is really hard to beat

Vote in the comments! As a bonus, it appears to eat nectar.

Especially because they're not shy

One more pic:

I've been interested in photographing bees recently. Rather than buy a macro lens, I spent $32 on a 10mm and 16mm Meike extension tube. Photos are with an A9II + Sigma 35mm f/2, which normally offers a 0.18x magnification. All four are taken as close as the lens will focus. I'm very happy with image quality, especially given that this lens doesn't have a super flat focal plane at its minimum focal distance.

For anyone who tries an extension tube for their first time: you won't be able to focus very far in the distance (beyond about 1 foot in my case). Be ready to get up close and personal.

When I planned these beds I spaced them far enough apart to get my lawn tractor in-between them, but getting between them and the fence involved my weed whacker. As anyone with a fence has found out, maintaining the grass at the base of a fence is a pain.

I'm 3/4 of the way done with the edging. It's 10" tall with something like 6" or 7" of it buried. It does a good job of keeping grass out of our other beds, so I'm sure it will do a good job here. The downside is the most effective way of installing it is to trench first, put the edging in, and then refill the trench. If you try to use one of those big pizza peel looking things to make a narrow slide the will usually get wavy due to variation in trench depth.

I mowed to basically ground height between the beds, weed whacked around the beds, and put in a layer of that thick paper builders will use to protect flooring below the mulch. Some areas for cardboard instead, but we just didn't have enough cardboard to cover it all. Hopefully it will be enough to kill the grass and hopefully that results in less grass appearing in my raised beds.

Topped by deer and it looks like Lily beetles are a thing here now :(

I got tired of remaking my sisal trellice every season, and didn't like using nylon netting, so I went with something more long term. The downside? Vine removal in the fall will likely be a slog.

No banana for scale, but let's say that it's not too big and not too small. The dimensions are 295mm tall, 270mm wide, and 240mm deep. If I had to do it again, I would be tempted to go a bit wider and touch less deep. It's probably better to be large in one of these dimensions as opposed to both of them.

Here's the top. It has a jack for charging, a connector to program the DSP, a switch to turn it on and off, and a battery gauge.

The speaker also has a built in handle that's way chunkier than it appears, but is still particle.

The big BOM pieces are a Dayton Audio LBB-5Sv2 for the BMS (battery management system), a Dayton Audio KABD-250 2 x 50W for DPS, amplification, and Bluetooth, a Peerless by Tymphany BC25SC08 tweeter, and an Italian-but-made-in-India woofer (a Coral PRF 165).

The print itself is three pieces: the bottom bit (black), the middle bit (white, blue, and white again thanks to not having enough white left to do it all in white), and the black top. Here's a CAD view that more clearly shows the three pieces:

the three pieces are held together with heat-sets and m3 bolts. There's also a tong and groove like joint to help the enclosure leak less air. I haven't noticed any evidence of air leaks while listening.

The amplifier and battery board mount to the bottom like so:

The middle was printed with some supports for the driver overhangs, but the ports and everything else were designed to print in place without supports.

This is certainly not meant to be audiophile build, but it's surprisingly decent. This isn't my first blue-tooth speaker, or even my first printed loudspeaker enclosure, but it is the first that was somewhat intentionally designed to have OK bass response while also being reasonably compact.

It measures fairly well. Frequency response, along with harmonic distortion, is pretty good. There's zero windowing or smoothing on this plot. I suspect the distortion spikes at 1 kHz, 2 kHz, etc are induced by the Bluetooth stack the board is running since they've shown up in multiple different enclosures and with multiple different drivers.

There's no nasty ringing, caused by either the drivers or the enclosure, so life is pretty good:

I'm guessing this is the result of layers of slathering a fresh layer of finish on these tables. To be honest, I kind of like the look. Any idea what type of finish this might be?

Here's a slightly different angle: