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...
I dont really need to know who is visiting my websites, although it is an undeniable pleasure to see number go up. I certainly don't want to feed the beast with any information about my visitors, which is why I long ago gave up on GAnal and adopted Bise. It all worked swimmi...
In the End was the Word
I was so taken with Civilisations that I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to indulge in an earlier novel by Laurent Binet. Doing it this way round made a lot of sense, because I do not think I would have persevered if I had not already had a taste o...
Hooded crows are common round here and very entertaining. I took to offering them bits of old cheese, apple cores and the like, eventually settling on peanuts in their shell because they are inexpensive and handy. If the birds are hanging around, they come as soon as they se...
It was a toss-up between working on something a little more substantive or documenting February, and the more mechanical option won.
Highlights of the month:
Warm, cold, warm, cold. What's a poor seedling to do?
Tweaked my backup strategy to let Hetzner take care of more
S...
The clocks sprang forward Sunday last, putting an end to the delicious three weeks or so in which we here are an hour closer to our friends in the United States. My only reaction, as I wake up nominally later on Sunday morning, is to cheer loudly for the extra hour of light ...
A friend was bemoaning the fact that he would shortly be forced to work only from home and replied thoughtfully to my challenge to blog his reasons: Why I Hate Working From Home. I have to say, most of Larry’s reasons resonated for me, because I generally love working from h...
I am extremely happy and satisfied to have got Compass up and running on Hetzner. It was by no means plain sailing, so this is a trail of breadcrumbs for anyone who needs to follow me, like myself at some point in the future when I break it all. I’m going to skip most of the...
Joan Westenberg’s recent article The Noble Path has been getting a lot of interest from people who like and make software. My reaction was different.
“Scale Poisons Everything It Touches” is definitely true of some of the projects I have had to work on, in agricultural devel...
It’s now been a bit more than three months since I first opened an account on Hetzner and a week since almost everything (not the DNS for this domain) switched over, so I thought it was a good time to recap.
Pros & Cons
The main points in favour are:
Price is favoura...
One of the hard problems of moving website hosts is to know which version you are actually being served. This post will only be on Hetzner.
And it worked. I still have a fair bit of tidying up to do, but the basics are all done. All of my sites are now hosted in Europe and one immediate benefit became clear yesterday morning. My monthly bill from Amazon AWS dropped from around $40 to under $1.00. So far, then, I am quids in.
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
If you want to see the graphs, please enable javascript. Thanks.
Admin
Eat This Podcast
2018
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Admin
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...
IWC BER 2025
