#coffeeneuring2026 No. 3 20.1km round-trip
I needed some new inner tubes for the Brompton, and although local bicycle shops stock them in the right size, only the LBS seems to stock Schwalbes which, in my experience, are slower to degenerate. And nearby one can get a coffee ...
#coffeeneuring2026 No. 2 10.3km round-trip
Beautiful autumn Sunday afternoon, bright skies, warm, but not too warm, so out for a little ride to a new park along the Tiber. The Parco Marconi used to be a total tip 20 or so years ago when I sometimes had to walk my dog down he...
This is an experiment. At an online Homebrew Website Club on Wednesday talk turned to week notes, the ones we liked, why we liked them, and so on. Some are mostly personal reflections, others are mostly links, and naturally some are a mixture of both. The ones I like tend to...
It being a perfect autumnal morning, with warm sunshine, blue skies, and just a touch of freshness in the air, we took ourselves off to the Terme di Caracalla for a Cultural Quickie®. The primary purpose was an exhibit of photos by Frank Horvat but the ruins of the baths are...
#coffeeneuring2026 No. 1 16.3km round-trip
The Coffeeneuring Challenge 2026
kicked off a few days ago, and after dithering last year, this year I’m resolved to give it a go. So, between now and 25 November eight rides to seven (or eight) beverage-serving locations, no more t...
⏱️ ~05:30 total (? actual) ⇄ 57.7km ⌀ ?km/h ↗ 11m ↘ ?m
Group outing on Sunday with FIAB Ruotalibera, from Cesano di Roma station to Parco Leonardo station. Perfect day for it, sunny but not too hot, although the technology let me down.
I've missed lots of FIAB excur...
Travel at the start, travel at the end, and in between enjoying some slightly fresher weather at home.
Highlights of the month:
The Burrell Collection, my favourite museum in the whole world
Left my phone in a taxi. Recovered after we had left and retrieved by a cyberchum
...
I just listened to Avery Trufelman’s podcast Lace and Labor. What a banger. An absolutely thrilling episode for all sorts of reasons.
For a start, I loved the idea that just as the machines came for hand knitting, they have come for podcasting. So Avery Trufelman got two s...
⏱️ 02:17 total (1:40 actual) ⇄28.9km ⌀17.2km/h ↗109m ↘?m
At last, the weather was cool enough to go for a bike ride at a reasonable hour.
I stopped early on at the still new park along the river for coffee and a bun to fortify me. There was a gaggle of cyclists alr...
Further to yesterday’s post about improving this site’s performance, one of the lead developers of Grav was able to diagnose the problem. Turns out its an unruly plugin. Disable it, and rebuilding the site takes 2–3 seconds, versus the 15 minutes I was experiencing. Trouble is, that plugin’s author is less than responsive, so I’m not inclined to raise another issue or submit another PR. The developer did suggest an alternative, which I’ll try, but for now I am going to disable the plugin before updating the site and see what difference that makes.
Later: Confirmed. The rebuild is essentially instantaneous. I wonder what will happen when I re-enable the plugin after uploading this addendum.
Later still: What the heck. I asked Claude for help fixing the problem, and it seems to have worked. Still undecided whether to create a PR given the lack of interest.
Piqued by Peter’s recent post on Core Web Vitals I decided to submit my own home page and a post to PageSpeed Insights. The results were not perfect, but perfectly satisfactory; 99, 98, etc. But there is a bigger problem behind the scenes.
Any time I change anything at all o...
Another lot of travel in August bleeding into September which is why this post is later than usual. Very pleasant to be cool and rained upon a bit.
Highlights of the month:
Solid progress on fitness
First meetings of Homebrew Website Club Asia, most enjoyable
Updated this ...
I was thrilled (and somewhat mystified) when Hyde asked me to participate in his excellent Over/Under series. My effort — Over/Under #82 — went up yesterday, and I’m excited to add something I discovered the day after sending in my feeble response to Harry’s question about A-Team vs Knight Rider.
Mr T is alive and well and is apparently the subject of a new documentary. There’s loads more information in that Guardian interview, and it is a great read full of stuff about which I had no idea. That’s hardly surprising. I didn’t even know Mr T was Mr T’s name, rather than the name of his character in A-Team. I now also know why he chose it.
For a “dead” technology, RSS is currently stirring up a veritable storm in a teacup. Antonio thinks Your RSS Reader Is Robbing You, because it doesn’t let you experience the effort someone put into styling their site just so. It robs you of the personality behind the words. ...
Claude helped me build a thing. There, I’ve admitted it, not that my use of LLMs has ever been a secret. But this was a big thing, a thing I could not have done on my own. I know because I tried, some years ago, and even with good help failed. Then I thought, I know what I w...
I’ve been quietly seething for months now about the dumb emails I get from people wailing about my podcast’s invisibility on YouTube. Increasingly urgent, promises that this is the last time, more in sorrow than in anger, blah, blah, blah. I don’t reply, of course. That only...
As my interest in the micro-wildlife on our terrace has grown I have found myself wanting to know more exactly what I am looking at. I don’t have any way to catch things, but I do have a macro lens on my camera. Problem is, the focal length is quite short, which means that i...
A good month, much of it away from home where, happy to relate, most of the plants survived the endless heat; heat that has been the worst of the time at home.
Highlights of the month:
The Umbrian week continued into July
Real lamb for one dinner, not too-young abbacchio
...
Listening to James G talking to Rachel on the Wonders of Web Weaving podcast, one thing in particular caught my attention, and that was when she was telling James about her studio. It’s a 20–30 minute walk from home and she goes there in the evening after work to do creative...
The CMS engine that drives this site — Grav — has now been updated to version 2.0.18. Kudos to the Grav team for a very smooth process, very well explained. Of course I have a couple of niggles. It warns that there could be a problem with Twig content in a page, and handily flags up pages that might be problematic. But the warning does not take account for stuff that is enclosed in backticks, thus: {{ stuff }}. Also, inexplicably, the old comments plugin brings everything crashing down, so I need to fix that. And for some reason the link to my photo portfolio is displaying as a link rather than an image; that may take some time.
Everything else works fine, as far as I can tell. Of course, if it isn’t for you, I’d appreciate being told.
In a flash, I was 16 or 17, at my friend’s house round the back of King’s Cross, and trying to work out what in the world to do next. A link from Gwern had sent me to The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds, in which David Hill took his chances at a Diplomacy tournament.
Those day...
Having been away from home for a bit, and with nobody here to keep the crows coming by, it took a few days to reestablish our relationship. Truth be told, I'm still not that good at identifying individual birds to be able to say with any certainty that they are the same birds. Nevertheless, they're crows alright. And they like peanuts in the shell. And while some are quite timid, others are bold enough to visit when no peanuts are visible and wait until I produce some. So yes, we each have the other fairly well trained.
I knew a highlight in the eye would improve the image.
And of course just sitting there with the camera, other opportunities present themselves, like this collared dove entirely unsure what to make of the offering.
Last summer, I noticed an insect bringing a bit of leaf to plug the hole in a bit of bamboo that is part of one of those folding director’s chairs. Huh? A leafcutter bee, how interesting, and thought no more about it. I particularly failed to notice when, or indeed whether, ...
A podcast I just listened to raised again the thorny issue of blogger’s guilt, and tried to make it seem like nothing, that you are answerable only to yourself, that you can blog at any cadence that suits you. Almost all bloggers, however, know that’s not true. That’s why th...
Finally, I have embarked on the Augean task of dealing with my bookmarks and tags, a reminder that link rot is all pervasive and also that rot is evitable if you make the effort.
The worst is when entities that clearly could afford to fix their links simply don't bother. I'm...
The explanation is very clear and as a proof of concept it works well. However like the newsletter that sent me there, I do wonder, how long will it continue to work.
Absolutely fascinating article (as usual) from dynomight, about what they called Pseudpocalypse, and that's the lamest thing about it. I would have gone with Pseudocollapse. Give that a short o (dog) and stress the o and in my opinion it sounds more like what they were aiming at.
Also, I used to live one street away from via Lorenzo Valla, so have filed this part away:
The idea of attributing authorship using writing style features goes back to at least 1440, when Lorenzo Valla demonstrated that the Donation of Constantine—in which Emperor Constantine supposedly donated the Roman Empire to the Catholic Church—used a vernacular that came from 400 years after Constantine’s death and was therefore a forgery.
Feeling very pleased with myself after a major accomplishment, even though all it really proves is that I can follow instructions.
The problem, as I have noted before, is that my little Birdnet-Pi needs to connect to the internet to update its clock so that it offers the ...
A very fine month indeed, in all sorts of ways. There was a cinema visit, a birthday party, many meals with friends, and a growing sense of contentment with the life I am privileged to enjoy
Highlights of the month:
Guerilla gardening, still surviving
Moved from idno to mi...
Inspired by Rachel Roddy over on IG and the gorgeous apricots currently at the greengrocers, a small batch of preserve was on the menu this morning.
Apricot preserve, not jam, because it contains only 25% sugar.
Rachel pointed out that one can buy packets of pectin designed...
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