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...
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 ...
IWC BER 2025
