March was ... March. Changeable, erratic, unpredictable. Good things on the bicycle, taking the train somewhere and cycling to a different train station. Movement among the plants on the terrace. Good fun and some entertaining podcasts made. Highlights of the month: Home-made lem … | Continue reading
⏱️ 02:37 ⇄44.1km ⌀16.8km/h ↗170m ↘180m Friday is often bicycle day, and it was yesterday. Originally I thought of doing another train-based ride, but I changed my mind and stayed in the city. Well, sort of. Although there are now quite a few kilometres of dedicated cycle paths in … | Continue reading
My very first ride with Komoot was fine, and I appreciated the ease of saving a route and adding photos to it. At the same time, I moaned about wanting to own my narrative maps. This past weekend, with a bit of help from my mate ChatGPT, I reached a primary milestone.1 I can plot … | Continue reading
Of course, I sound like a grumpy old man. I am a grumpy old man. But I’m very seriously considering abandoning one of my favorite podcasts, to which I’ve been listening for a very long time. The presenter has possibly the most mellifluous voice of any I listen to, maybe even of a … | Continue reading
Last week, in an effort to keep riding my bicycle for fun outside the city, I put myself in the hands of Komoot. The app allows you to plan your own rides and use (and modify) rides that Komoot itself or other members have created and saved. It also offers a kind of online diary … | Continue reading
I went ahead and signed up for Komoot in an effort to do more and more interesting bicycle rides. After half an hour of somewhat serious play, I decided that it is really rather good. Right now all I have done is plan, but that was very easy. If you put in a start point and an en … | Continue reading
A couple of days ago I took myself off for a multi-modal adventure. Bike to the station, train to the countryside, bike to another station, train back to the city, bike home. This all happened because last week on Mastodon someone mentioned the bicycle map at cyclosm, which immed … | Continue reading
tl,dr; As soon as you notice, turn Airplane mode on in a device and recapture the note there. I use the Notes app as a kind of outboard memory. I save things there that I hope to come back to and sometimes I even do come back to them. But I also use one specific Note to store not … | Continue reading
Our lemon tree has had quite a few lemons hanging on it since before Christmas and they currently look like very sad decorations. It would be too easy to say make lemonade, but it’s cold outside and drizzly. and in any case the lemon tree won’t wait much longer. Time to do someth … | Continue reading
Wow, February went whizzing by. Managed to do something slightly clever with the subscription emails for Eat This Newsletter, and it paid off, at least this once. Mastodon is still fun and may be proving useful. Hard to say, until I polish up my thing for looking at logs. Highlig … | Continue reading
Digital relationships? That's the topic for February's Indieweb Carnival, and for a long time -- 28 days, in fact -- I did not think I had much to say on the topic. Sure, I've made a couple of real-life friends from people I originally met online. But no more than that. And then … | Continue reading
Yesterday’s graph from USDA is really interesting. It shows that the February 2022 recall of formula milk in the US, which compounded the supply chain difficulties of Covid, was associated with a striking increase in the number of infants fully and partially breastfed (and a drop … | Continue reading
tl;dr The images I lost from my installation of WithKnown are back, thanks to methodical brute force. At some point in late December I updated my installation of WithKnown and buggered everything up. Not quite everything, but all images from all posts were missing, and I am prett … | Continue reading
Yesterday was a perfect early spring day; clear blue skies, warm sunshine. Off to the countryside to visit my friend Bill and help him with his vegetable garden, and while I was doing that I had ample time to think once again about the differences between Italian and British appr … | Continue reading
I’m at a bit of a loss what to make of Jonathan Lethem’s latest. It’s definitely very clever. Maybe it does also capture growing up in Brooklyn during the earliest days of regeneration and eventual escape. Or not. I certainly enjoyed it one little chapter at a time. Overall, thou … | Continue reading
Here’s the thing: I honestly can remember only a single bad event during the entire year. It was very bad, and entirely personal, so I’m going to say no more. Even the medical procedures I underwent had happy outcomes, compared to what I was dreading. So, another great year. We t … | Continue reading
There’s an interesting discussion going on in the IndieWeb chat forums about signalling that your website does not use AI. JamesG, for example, displays a badge on each post (though not on his home page, that reads “written by human not by AI” and that links through to a site tha … | Continue reading
Bad news, Optimists. Latest data from USDA Agricultural Research Service shows a steep drop in agricultural output growth in 2011–2021. That despite an increase in land converted to agriculture. Hard times are coming, we just can’t be sure about when. | Continue reading
A fine month, not only for some great October weather but also for a long anticipated trip to Germany for the border:none conference and IndieWeb Camp Nürnberg. Highlights of the month: Great show of Robert Capa photos at the Hungarian Academy And an even better Don McCullin show … | Continue reading
It is 6:45 and I am on a high-speed train pulling out of Roma Termini. We have just passed the strange tall chimney with its spiral staircase wrapping around outside, though I can barely see it. The train’s final destination is Bolzano but if all goes well I will transfer in Vero … | Continue reading
At one time I hoped to be able to persuade people smarter than me to resurrect hosted domains for people to use WithKnown to blog. To that end, I bought the domain known.blog, which is now up for renewal. Again. By now I have mostly run out of hope, though not entirely. That is w … | Continue reading
Been thinking about these data, and generally concluded that speed is a very crude measure, depending as it does on starting and stopping tracking at the correct times. That’s OK for mechanised transport, usually, although I do tend to leave it running as I hang around at a bus s … | Continue reading
Had a wonderful bike ride this morning, effectively the same route as three weeks ago, and this time on the new old bike. It was supposed to happen on Monday morning, but life happened. Monday would have been better, because The Squeeze leaves early so I can get going too and avo … | Continue reading
This morning, alerted by a friend who is a keen birder, we abandoned our bed and customary two-tea lie-in and walked to the nearby park. Two of the entrances were still locked after they should have been open but the sight of someone walking a dog sent us round the corner to the … | Continue reading
Moved on to the downtube shifters, which are a bit of a mess. The clamp is Huret-Sachs, the shifters Shimano SY20, a very early index shifter that I dimly recall asking the bike shop to fit for me. YouTube told me that the clamp probably had to be re-tapped to accomodate the larg … | Continue reading
Our terrace is a constant source of joy, let me be upfront about that before I move to its failings, just one of which is that the space is so finite. In an actual garden, there’s always room to cram in one more plant. On a terrace, not so much, which inevitably creates trouble w … | Continue reading
As you drive on the A1 out of Rome (and especially when returning to the city, there is a hugely impressive mountain to the west of the motorway. It rises up, floating on the plain and dominating the landscape. This is Mount Soratte, which Wikipedia tells me is an isolated limest … | Continue reading
A few days ago, I shared some tribulations related to looking at the most popular requests to my websites, starting with all requests to Eat This Podcast in 2022. Of the top 50 resources requested, only 14 were actual episodes or articles. The rest were technical, behind the scen … | Continue reading
Only half a month, really, because we were on holiday from the 16th and there isn't much from that time that I care to share. Highlights of the month: Flu jab Second loosening massage Client website seems to have satisfied client, for now Digital hearing aids FTW Catalytic conver … | Continue reading