Read: The Ghost of the Mountains by Kulbhushansing Suryawanshi ★★★★ 📚 Our review of the world's studies on snow leopard populations had found that less than 10,000 of the estimated 3 million square kilometres of the snow leopard distribution range had been surveyed by researchers using rigorous scientific methods. The total snow leopard habitat in […]

Read: Ubik by Philip K. Dick ★★★ 📚 Instant Ubik has all the fresh flavor of just-brewed drip coffee.Your husband will say, Christ, Sally, I used to think your coffee was only so-so. But now, wow! Safe when taken as directed. I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I […]

Park Pond, two young dabchicks with one or two parents. Never saw the parents at the same time. Fishing & feeding the wee ones. About 10 metres along another adult & young one. Was surprised as I've not seen many about over the summer. Nesting in the space between Islands out of sight I guess?

Lots of the ivy was alive with hoverflies wasps & bees on Tuesday. Lots of buzzing!

Blustery afternoon on path to Greenside, mostly blue sky. Despite the wind a few butterflies, peacocks, painted lady, red admiral & a few speckled woods. Goldfinch in the meadowsweet. A raven circled high in the blue. The news reported less speckled woods this year, but I’ve seem more than ever.

#silentsunday

I am experimenting with gathering links with rss.chat here. I am pulling a rough post together for some of the links gathered there. Education This looks like a very interesting book. As important as her deep reporting on the tech industry’s ruthlessness are Singer’s profiles of the inspiring cadre of academics, educators, and activists who […]

I've a new page: River of News an rss reader for some of my favourite feeds.

I've been testing Scott Hanson's plugin that pulls in a River of News from Feedland River Embed for FeedLand, for a while. It is now available on WordPress.org so easy to install. It pulls in news from a set of blogs on a Feedland server.

Just has an email telling me telex has been retired. Telex was built onto of WordPress playground and allowed you to crate with A.I. plugins and themes. I experimented and made a few.

The free event brought the H5P community together for a day of practical examples, product updates, thoughtful discussion and networking. Across the sessions, one message came through clearly: effective digital learning is not about adding more technology. It is about using the right tools with clear learning intentions. H5P is one of the features of […]

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.