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...
There is a strand of thought out there that believes any and all legislation to do with seeds is evil and unnecesary. It is wrong. Here’s why.
This is not the sunflower we were looking for
This spring, The Squeeze, who delights in dark-coloured sunflowers, bought a packet o...
A little while ago I decided that paying micro.blog to host my, er, micro blog was probably a better bet for my mental health than continuing to plug away at my self-hosted idno (aka WithKnown). It was not an easy decision, which probably owes more to the sunk-cost fallacy t...
A kind cyberchum alerted me to some mobile display issues, initially with my podcast website and then this site. I set to yesterday and with the help of the developer tools in Firefox and Safari, managed to diagnose the problem and find a fix, which involved the new-to-me CS...
It all started a few weeks ago when I noticed an unexpected spike in the number of pages that could not be found on my website. For a few days I let it ride in the hope that it would resolve itself. Pesky agents, I thought. That didn’t happen, so I bit the bullet and opened ...
⏱️ 04:06 total (1:45 actual) ⇄28.5km ⌀16.1km/h ↗89m ↘?m
Good ride yesterday, to deliver some seedlings I have been growing to a friend who lives under the Fiumicino take-off flight path, just across from the excellent cycle path. It was hot, but not too hot, the goin...
I had a lot of trouble on my Mac with Time Machine telling me the disk was full and yet I could not find huge wins just by inspection and deleting things that looked too big. I drafted ChatGPT in to help diagnose the problem and it had me jump through all sorts of hoops, whi...
There’s this idea in IndieWeb circles of the admin tax. That’s the work you have to do in order to be somewhat independent of the big silo platforms, the price you pay instead of paying with your attention. Mostly, I not only don’t mind, I quite enjoy some aspects of the tin...
There is not a lot of external evidence for what has been a very busy month one way and another, but I know.
Highlights of the month:
Garden on the terrace growing fit to bust
Visit to a fabulous paeony nursery; mine still blind after all these years
Tried an audio clip ag...
A little while ago, I decided that I would really like a better webmentions experience on this site. I’m currently indebted to Pelle Wasserman’s app to collect them for me and deliver them here, which I appreciate very much, but my effort to understand how I might improve th...
In August 2019 I discovered Tailwind, the CSS framework that makes responsive design relatively easy, thanks to an enthusiastic post by Julia Evans. I immediately adopted it to redesign this site. Over time, however, I found it harder and harder to maintain the styling of th...
A week ago, I moaned that my Fastgate router kept re-assigning IPs after a power failure, which made my Pi-hole less than wonderful. I could not see how to force the router to assign a specific IP. Many kind people replied with suggestions that, if I’m honest, I did not ful...
On the road, as it were, right now, so this report will be updated with the necessaries when possible.
Highlights of the month:
Published a link to Photographs on the main site
Seedlings still having a hard time of it, but other stuff on the terrace flourishing
Sporadic me...
We were lucky enough to spend the weekend at a medieval castle deep in the Umbrian countryside. I look my portable Birdnet-Pi along, completely forgetting that it needed to connect to the internet to set the correct time. I remembered, however, that the analyses require no c...
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