Early because it was a pretty uneventful month, again
Highlights of the month:
Sweetpea seeds came up like a rocket
Steady progress migrating websites, backups etc.
WithKnown is getting some love (and changed its name)
Met up with a schoolfriend not seen in 55 years
Good m...
Someone linked to Bob Nystrom’s post about knitting, and it really struck a chord for me. My own experience, having started to crochet a little more than a year ago, exactly mirrors his, with one crucial difference. I decided to make something for someone who was dear to me...
It is definitely exciting to open the browser to my BirdNET-Pi as I rise to see what the past dawn has brought. The problem is, I’m not sure I can trust it absolutely. There’s the mystery of the Spotted Crake, which might just be migrating overhead to breed elsewhere. I’m doubtful. And then there are some that could just possibly be true.
We live near a large park with lots of old trees and open expanses of grass where I suppose a Tawny Owl might make a living, so it might not be unreasonable that one was detected. But listening to the recording, through headphones, I couldn’t hear a darned thing above the low hum of noise. Still, I wasn’t there at 03:39 this morning, so it might be correct and I’m going to let it stand, along with everything else.
You probably can run BirdNET-Pi on a Pi Zero, but it will work a lot better on a Pi Model 4B.
The great beauty of having done all the faffing about with the Pi Zero is that when the 4B arrived all I did, literally, was transfer the micro-SD card across, plug in the microph...
Got some very good advice about my BirdNET-Pi in reply to the issue I raised because the Analyser cannot keep up with Recorder. A cron job to delete recordings more than 10 minutes old every five minutes ensures that the Analyzer does not stalls.
Very neat. Also reduced the length of each recording from 30 to 15 seconds, and implemented the experimental ram drive, which sounds way scarier than it ought.
Everything has now been chugging along smoothly for almost three hours. Mind, it hasn't detected any birds yet. Not surprising given the foul weather this morning.
Our little terrace is not exactly a wildlife haven, though some birds do occasionally pop in to investigate, most notably some lovely hooded crows. Nevertheless, I quite liked the idea of a 24/7 monitor that would tell me what birds are around and that I could maybe take to ...
There was considerable excitement out on the terrace a couple of days ago, because The Squeeze had noticed two very definite flower spikes emerging from a plant that has mostly just sat there for the past couple of years. At first glance I thought it might possibly be Chinch...
Late because recovering my full WithKnown installation took priority. Also, it was a pretty uneventful month.
Highlights of the month:
Splendid unforeseen rest sitting with our favourite cat
Rereading Lord of the Rings (for the first time!)
Good start on moving web hosting...
An archive of some of the data I have recorded about how I spend some of my time.
Total hours worked per month
2025
2024
2023
2022
Percent of logged hours
2025
2024
2023
2022
2021
2020
2019
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Admin
Eat This Podcast
2018
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Eat This Podcast
Lots of people are far more diligent than I am about recording, critiquing, and sharing the various things they read, watched, litened to etc. over the previous year. I thank them for their service and enjoy reading their posts and, sometimes, following some of their recomme...
A demonstration in Florence, 1970
The story so far: WithKnown lost my images, and my previous experience was not as helpful as I hoped. Back to the blow-by-blow troubleshooting.
OK, so this
`filesystem = 'local'
uploadpath = 'stream/Uploads/stream.jeremycherfas.net'
resu...
Good news and bad on The Great Migration.
Good, I successfully moved my WithKnown instance to its new home at Hetzner. Bad, I had to dig deep to find out why it was looking for the wrong CSS stylesheet, and I still have not managed to connect any of the older entries to the...
I was having lunch with a friend and colleague at a highly rated local tavola calda. I expressed some sadness that although the food was wonderful, each of us was generating a small mountain of waste plastic -- plates, cutlery, cups, everything. My friend informed me that in 2019 the EU had implemented a directive to reduce single-use plastics, specifically to protect the environment.
But in front of use were our two small mountains. How come?
Ah, she told me, in Italy, many packages of plastic plates etc. are labelled saying they can be re-used. Problem solved.
Yes, they can be washed and re-used, but are they?
I wonder how many are actually washed and re-used, or even re-used dirty. And do other EU countries crawl through the same loophole?
All fixed now. Thanks to DonTheMaster on Mastodon, who suggested changing my local DNS to 9.9.9.9
I have been trying to migrate some sites to a new host, with all the attendant patience-trying delays while things like DNS propagate. So an email telling me that a spammer ha...
A piece in Anthropocene magazine pointed me to an interesting study just published at PNAS: Aging populations threaten conservation goals of zoos. It is behind a paywall, so I am reliant on the abstract and what I read at Anthropocene, although that doesn’t change my conclus...
Spent a more-or-less instructive week slowly moving this site over to its new home hosted at Hetzner. Not there yet, unless you’re reading this at some point in the future, but with a lot of help — and a lot of misdirection too — from ChatGPT we are getting closer. Some hard lessons to learn, which I will address in a more detailed write up, and despite a deluge of explanations, there are still many things about which my understanding is very shaky. Nevertheless, I am glad to be moving forward.
I don’t mind paying taxes. Governments need income to pay for the things they provide, and I am happy to contribute my share, even though I may not agree with everything government spends on and may not personally benefit as some others might. But I find myself fuming mad at...
A couple of days ago I noticed that 22 years before that, I had complained that one of two gizmos had proved a total bust. The Griffin iTrip was designed to transmit music from an iPod to a nearby FM receiver. I’m sure it worked, somewhere, but here in Rome there simply was ...
This post is for future frustrated me, though if it can help someone else, that's wonderful.
Somehow when I tried to access my new Hetzner service from my laptop I got myself in a terrible muddle. Despite a lot of song and dance with ssh-keygen and all that that entails, H...
The temptation, of course, is to review the book as one might a restaurant or a meal, to talk about savouring each witty gem while regretting that the meal must end, profess to being full without having overindulged, knowingly wink at past kitchen practices that today would ...
Janus incarnate; they get you leaving and they get you coming back. Not in living memory have I spent such a dreadful year end and start, restricted to my bed by a heavy cold and bronchitis. A couple of days after Christmas I could not catch my breath during standard, easy w...
I often say that I know enough about computing to be a danger to myself, and that was amply borne out a couple of days ago. Recently I had installed dawarich on my Raspberry Pi to keep track of where I have been.1 Unfortunately, in all the excitement of getting it working an...
As part of my continuing effort to build a decent portfolio for photographs, I've had to think some more about how best to handle the two essential aspects of image management, cataloguing and editing. For now I have settled on Photo Mechanic for the catalogue and Acorn for ...
Documentally, whom I have followed in various places for a while, alerted me to a museum that completely passed me by when I was in Berlin a few weeks ago: the Digusting Food Museum. I doubt I would have sprung for the €16 it apparently required, though I might next time if ...
Treasures of the Pharoahs is a stunning exhibition on at the moment at the Scuderie in Rome. Only a handful of objects, beautifully displayed and with glorious interpretation, unlike, say, the old Cairo Museum. One object in particular caught my eye.
Yes, a woman grinding ...
Cracking ride yesterday with RuotaLibera, the Rome chapter of FIAB that I belong to. It was billed as a Christmassy ride around the parks of the south of Rome, and it was a blast. The guides had mapped out a great route that had a few exciting moments — roundabouts where you...
Slightly conflicted. The spambot in October meant I was no longer recording my various forms of travel and the need for a new battery for my Apple Watch reduced my quantifiable self to a nubbin. And now I wonder whether I really care enough to do anything about that. Probabl...
Yesterday was the IndieWeb’s Black Friday Create Day, an excuse, as if one were needed, to spend the day making rather than buying something. I had set myself the Create Day goal of finishing the first stage of the task I set myself in Berlin three weeks ago; to publish a st...
Uptime-Kuma, a self-hosted internet monitor, will now send alerts to me using Signal. This is roughly how I did it, more as an aide-memoire for my future self, but perhaps it can help you.
The first thing is to install the Signal REST API and send a test message, as per the...
IWC BER 2025
