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...
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...
IWC BER 2025
