Finlas Water Hills started bright, low (400m or so) clouds. Quite a few birds, ravens, crows, hoodies, buzzards, a kestrel, pipits. Between Creaghan & Ruisg put up a snipe. By then clouds thick, visibility 30-100 metres. Flora turning, lots of scabious, some grass of Parnassus.

Greenside morning. Sunshine brought out butterflies. Mostly Painted Ladies, a lot of Speckled Woods. One very battered Small Tortoiseshell. By the reservoir a flock of about 50 mixed goldfinch & linnets feeding among the seeded rose-bay willow herb and meadowsweet. Quite a few common darters.

Read: The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino ★★★★ 📚 The fact is that the whole time my brother had to do with it, outdoor Masonry (as I'll call it, to distinguish it from the kind that later met in closed buildings) had a very rich set of rites, which involved owls, telescopes, pinecones, […]

3 photos of a raven, imagemagick B&W & montage. #corvid #raven

Read: The Given World by Melissa Harrison ★★★★ 📚 Angela had realised with a start that despite being in her mid-thirties her daughter hadn't yet understood how fleeting things were, that cherry blossom and blackbirds singing weren't a constant backdrop but a clock that counted you through your life: each thing there for only a […]

#SilentSunday

Nature waiting, I call it: just sitting there, waiting to see what comes along. and That would be cool. Inevitably, my former favourite rock will continue to erode: like us (and everything else) rocks wage an ongoing, ultimately futile war against entropy. But I’m sure my old rock will outlast me. I’d like to develop […]

Victoria Park, drizzle them brightened, a couple of white butterflies over the flower beds. Went to investigate. Among the bright flowers were a few thistles. A couple of bees working over the thistles ignoring the other flowers. One butterfly came off a thistle too. Not sure which type of white.

Read: Land by Maggie O'Farrell ★★★★ 📚 A skein of marsh birds passes over his head, their cries a dissonant plucking on untuned instruments. Liam tilts his head, tracking their progress as they veer and bank over the green inclines and fields, towards the cragged cliffs that fall off into the pounding sea: a sole […]

#SilentSunday

Out to Greenside this morning, warm, close and sometimes sunny. Butterflies: Green-veined Whites, several spotted woods, peacocks, small tortoiseshells & painted ladies on thistles. I rather like this odd view of a painted lady. few more photos on flickr. My Butterflies by month continues to grow.

I love my RSS reader. It’s the first thing I reach for when I’m “catching up.” As I’m reading through my list of feed items, I often come across blog posts that do not give me any way to interact with the post!

Read: The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout ★★★ 📚 As he steered the sailboat back to his wharf, it came to him how he had once, when he was a kid, said to his father, "I'm going to have a boat one day," and his father had smiled and said, "No, Artie, you're […]

#bloomstrolling for #bloomscrolling in Glen Douglas yesterday. Lots of sparkles on the ground. #flora.

I prefer using Markdown over Word for document creation, it is simple and structured. Daring Fireball reported the integration of Markdown with OneDrive. I wonder if it could be used for teaching children before using more complex software like Word.

Read: The End of Everything by M John Harrison ★★★★ 📚 'Summer. I stood in a long shallow chalk valley half a mile from the sea, listening to the sound of the waves – the sound waves! – amplified by acoustic lensing conditions in the absolutely still air, and came to the inescapable conclusion: the […]

Read: The Captains and the Kings by Jennifer Johnston ★★★★ 📚 Taking Clare by the hand, he had begun to run. Now he realized that, in all their years together, he had given her nothing, only a child that he had not allowed her to enjoy. She had slowly died of starvation. In her whole […]

Read: Vigil by George Saunders ★★★ 📚 Ghosts gather round a dying oil billionaire, trying both to make him understand the damage and ease his passage. The deceased are almost comic characters, a couple reminding me of the two old guys in the muppets.

Some interesting links I've picked up recently. Topics include: IndieWeb, X, Butterflies, WordPress, micro.blog & A.I. in education.

Insects, from a walk round Ardmore point yesterday.

Thinking about teachers and pupils using WordPress, sparked, in part by Our Core Division posted by Matt Mullenweg

I've managed to make a small AppleScript that gets the selection from Safari & a link and post it to RSS.chat. I already had a script that copied the selection and put it and a link on the clipboard ready to paste into a blog post. I'd also tried out posting to RSS.chat with bash from TextMate.

A lot of white butterflies (mostly green-veined, large & small) out & about on Friday. Some flightily red admirals too. Later, beside the track an excited green-veined white butterfly fluttering amount the leaves. Underneath a leaf a small white hanging upside down. Misplaced affection?

I’ve updated my rss chat server on my Raspberry Pi: John’s Pi chat. A new feature is adding a menu of commands to the menubar. I followed the instructions. Just for fun I decided to edit the example in drummer rather than locally. This lead to a mistake where I used the link button to […]

Just updated wordpress-rss-chat after a couple of fixes.

Talking a short walk along the Kelvin between Kelvin Bridge & The Botanics while my wife was in the dentist. These sunlit leaves above the path pulled in this speckled wood. Another flew over some sparkling water through light & shade. A happy moment.

Read The Devils Footprints by John Burnside ★★★★☆ I am unsure how much to ‘believe’ of the main character’s narrative. He claims a childhood murder and the insanity of running away from his wife and life with a 14 year old girl who he thinks might be his daughter. The nasty side of a Scottish […]

♥ RSS – A directory of people who love RSS Put the badge on your homepage and submit your URL. Once we’ve checked the link back and found your feed, you’re on the list — and in an OPML subscription list any reader can subscribe to in one action ♥ RSS

Now posting to my new rss.chat account with the same email address as my blog admin. Just a quick late night test. Hopefully any replies there will come back here as comments. Using the new WordPress to rss.chat plugin.

I just installed the wordpress-rss-chat plugin. Linked it to my test rsschat site. This post should appear there and any comments returned here?