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...
After some discussion at IWC Berlin and online, I decided to download Sunlit to ease sharing photos. The good news is that it just works, out of the box, to send images to my stream. Once there, I can edit to enable sharing to Mastodon and off they go. I have not yet tried adding my Mastodon account as a second destination, because I want to be at least a little mindful and not post everything everywhere. One tiny criticism: when you add Alt text, the input box obscures the image. That makes it a little harder to describe the contents. Other than that, I'm very happy, and happy to move another step away from IG.
Both of the tasks I set myself for the second day of IndieWeb Camp Berlin came good, though the easier one was hard because I made it so and the hard one was easy because I spent too much time on the easy one. Confused? So was I.
The tasks I wanted to accomplish were to bri...
The highlight was a lowlife spambot attack that I could counter only by putting the site behind CloudFlare, and don't get me wrong, I'm glad I could do that, but I wish I hadn't had to. Also, somehow in that process, while one of the subdomains came through with no further e...
After far too long, I was once again able to attend an IndieWeb Camp in real life, and it was another great experience. Old friends and new, old problems and new too. And some great adjunct events.
The most exciting of those was the journey there, specifically the stretch ...
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my photographs, why I take them, why and where I share them, and how to do that from now on.
One trigger has been Instagram’s slow slide into irrelevance. I regularly miss photos from the people I follow, and vice versa, plus if I wan...
A couple of days ago I tackled some salt-preserved lemons I had made about a year ago, just my terrace-grown lemons and salt. I had failed to notice that the air-trap fell out some time ago and the top layers, where more oxygen was available, had played host to a grey-green ...
“It’s a lot like the old days of trying to get a good colour print at home,” was the best I could come up with. “You print one of those test images that came with the printer, with all those different skin colours, and you discover that the pretty pink baby actually has a sl...
Since June, I have had occasion to visit a part of Rome I barely know, way on the other side of town, literally. Coming back on the bus one time I happened to glance up at the buildings and was absolutely amazed. Decorative friezes, fancy brickwork, ornate balustrades and ba...
Marieke Hendriksen, of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam, told me in a recent conversation that her new junior researcher had “got an allergic reaction and ended up in A&E” as a result of eating too much fermented food. In the past, Marieke added, “beca...
I thought I might get this done two days ago, and then yesterday arrived with an onslaught of Russian spambots abusing the comment form. I think that’s fixed, at least enough to recall the glories of September.
Highlights of the months:
Got back into the podcast season
Loc...
Yesterday arrived with an onslaught of Russian spambots abusing the comment form here, and nothing seemed able to stop them. Cloudflare worked, then it didn’t. Slightly panicked here, I might have slowed the flow by adding a block on 11 IP ranges. And still they seemed to ke...
I’ve been helping the Squeeze update her website to show new work, a lot of which requires me to rightsize the image files she produces as part of her practice. Normally not much of a problem but occasional enormous TIFF files cause all the tools I have to stutter and fail. Fearing I might have to install ImageMagick or similar, I cast around online and found Use sips to quickly, easily—and freely—convert image files. Bingo!
I did one run of a straight TIFF to JPEG conversion and it worked, but the JPEG was still too large. So I actually read sips help and discovered the -Z option to specify a size in pixels for the largest dimension.
Naomi Duguid is just one of the writers I enjoy who has succumbed to the lure of Substack. I’ve made my brief pitch to each of them to consider some other place, which generally falls on almost-deaf ears because of the supposed network effects: “the building of visibility an...
“I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”
The famed Field Notes tagline is all very well but what if, even having written it down, you fail to remember it? Quasi-disaster ensues, if you’re me. As usual, the culprit is past me not...
IWC BER 2025
