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#coffeeneuring2026 No. 3 20.1km round-trip I needed some new inner tubes for the Brompton, and although local bicycle shops stock them in the right size, only the LBS seems to stock Schwalbes which, in my experience, are slower to degenerate. And nearby one can get a coffee and more besides at Necci dal 1924, an extremely hip joint despite being 102 years old. Necci is in the heart of an area called Pigneto, which is hemmed in by railway lines and major roads and is extremely charming, in a…

#coffeeneuring2026 No. 2 10.3km round-trip Beautiful autumn Sunday afternoon, bright skies, warm, but not too warm, so out for a little ride to a new park along the Tiber. The Parco Marconi used to be a total tip 20 or so years ago when I sometimes had to walk my dog down here. Used needles, human crap and crap, lots of litter of all sorts of broken stuff, from fridges to bicycles. Anyway, it is just one example of the buckets of money spent by the city for last year's Jubilee and it is now a…

This is an experiment. At an online Homebrew Website Club on Wednesday talk turned to week notes, the ones we liked, why we liked them, and so on. Some are mostly personal reflections, others are mostly links, and naturally some are a mixture of both. The ones I like tend towards the linky, but when challenged to share some of the links I had myself enjoyed I couldn't. So, an experiment. Each week or thereabouts, a few links I have enjoyed for one reason or another. Here goes, with no promises.…

It being a perfect autumnal morning, with warm sunshine, blue skies, and just a touch of freshness in the air, we took ourselves off to the Terme di Caracalla for a Cultural Quickie®. The primary purpose was an exhibit of photos by Frank Horvat but the ruins of the baths are themselves always worth a visit. The Terme has a unique approach to photo shows, mounting large prints, made specifically I’m sure, on both sides of a free-standing transparent block of plastic. How they stand the heat, I…

#coffeeneuring2026 No. 1 16.3km round-trip The Coffeeneuring Challenge 2026 kicked off a few days ago, and after dithering last year, this year I’m resolved to give it a go. So, between now and 25 November eight rides to seven (or eight) beverage-serving locations, no more than two a week, and despite clocking the first ride today, I’m saying the week started on Monday 12 October. One reason I didn’t participate last time was because it really is no big deal getting an excellent coffee here in…

⏱️ ~05:30 total (? actual) ⇄ 57.7km ⌀ ?km/h ↗ 11m ↘ ?m Group outing on Sunday with FIAB Ruotalibera, from Cesano di Roma station to Parco Leonardo station. Perfect day for it, sunny but not too hot, although the technology let me down. I've missed lots of FIAB excursions this year for a variety of reasons, mostly being too busy at the weekend, but this was one I was looking forward to. I know the area well, having lived nearby for a while before moving into Rome, and was excited to see what…

Travel at the start, travel at the end, and in between enjoying some slightly fresher weather at home. Highlights of the month: The Burrell Collection, my favourite museum in the whole world Left my phone in a taxi. Recovered after we had left and retrieved by a cyberchum Provisioning a new iPhone is remarkably easy A couple of days meeting new friends, with music Slow Horses Worked with Claude to fix various comments problems The Echo Chamber was the worst film I have endured in a long time,…

I just listened to Avery Trufelman’s podcast Lace and Labor. What a banger. An absolutely thrilling episode for all sorts of reasons. For a start, I loved the idea that just as the machines came for hand knitting, they have come for podcasting. So Avery Trufelman got two smooth-talking faux-hosts to talk about the history of knitting. No idea what kind of prompts she used, but the results were both fun and indicative of the vast distance between Trufelman’s own art and a stochastic parrot’s…

⏱️ 02:17 total (1:40 actual) ⇄28.9km ⌀17.2km/h ↗109m ↘?m At last, the weather was cool enough to go for a bike ride at a reasonable hour. I stopped early on at the still new park along the river for coffee and a bun to fortify me. There was a gaggle of cyclists already there, mostly MAMILs, and I was dead chuffed when one came over and asked if he could lift my bike. “Complimenti,” he said, then beckoned his friend over to guess how much it weighs. His friend was more interested in the suicide…

Further to yesterday’s post about improving this site’s performance, one of the lead developers of Grav was able to diagnose the problem. Turns out its an unruly plugin. Disable it, and rebuilding the site takes 2–3 seconds, versus the 15 minutes I was experiencing. Trouble is, that plugin’s author is less than responsive, so I’m not inclined to raise another issue or submit another PR. The developer did suggest an alternative, which I’ll try, but for now I am going to disable the plugin before…

Piqued by Peter’s recent post on Core Web Vitals I decided to submit my own home page and a post to PageSpeed Insights. The results were not perfect, but perfectly satisfactory; 99, 98, etc. But there is a bigger problem behind the scenes. Any time I change anything at all on the site -- a new post, a minor edit, major upgrades -- it becomes unreachable for about 15 minutes. The log files tell me that the maximum time allowed, which is 4 minutes, is exceeded, often 2 or 3 times a minute. Then,…

Another lot of travel in August bleeding into September which is why this post is later than usual. Very pleasant to be cool and rained upon a bit. Highlights of the month: Solid progress on fitness First meetings of Homebrew Website Club Asia, most enjoyable Updated this site's engine without too much trouble August in town is so good, despite the heat. Parking! Paid for Claude and started using it to help me code a plugin for webmentions Dumped Collabora and returned to LibreOffice; a joy…

I was thrilled (and somewhat mystified) when Hyde asked me to participate in his excellent Over/Under series. My effort — Over/Under #82 — went up yesterday, and I’m excited to add something I discovered the day after sending in my feeble response to Harry’s question about A-Team vs Knight Rider. Mr T is alive and well and is apparently the subject of a new documentary. There’s loads more information in that Guardian interview, and it is a great read full of stuff about which I had no idea.…

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. And a good thing too, says Christian Cleberg, who finds your choices of fonts and colours too jarring. Then comes a small flurry of additional posts leaning one way or the other, and through them all, one key fact emerges.…

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 want and I know how to break the overall task down into chunks and I know how to check that each chunk works the way I want it to before moving on. So I bought into a month of Claude. I also took the trouble to read a bit…

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 encourages the bastards. But if I did I would probably say something elitist like, if I wanted people to “listen” on YouTube I would have done that now without your help. Why stop seething quietly now? Because this post…

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 in macro mode the subject can be about 1cm from the front of the lens. In addition to sometimes blocking the light, it alarms most insects. It’s fine for things that aren’t moving, and though the auto-focus is reasonably…

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 Kinda sorta got into attempted macro photography Bad computer trouble with overheated SSDs, but recovered Grape harvest; a little sharp but better than letting the birds feast A night in Bari and a week in Puglia BirdNET now…

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 things; woodworking, writing, other stuff too I imagine. I’ve long wanted a place like that myself. In fact, The Squeeze and I talk often about a joint space where we could each do our physical thing, but it is all talk.…

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…

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 days, we didn’t know we were nerds, let alone alpha nerds. But we did play Diplomacy whenever someone could persuade their parents to let us have the run of the house for as long as it took. I don’t remember much about those…

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…

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, any adults emerged earlier this year. They must have done; I think that’s some debris just visible in the hole on the left. Vacated nest on the left; currently, maybe, occupied nests on the right. Then, a few months ago, I…

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 there are so many blog posts that consist of little more than an apology for not blogging. As I woke from my nap, I thought I may as well get out of my rut of blogging about only the geekier things in my life. While I was…

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 thinking of one in particular that migrated away from TypePad. The original link was to: http://example.typepad.com/hand_picked/2009/10/url.html The new link, which I eventually found because I really wanted a record, was…

I love this demonstration from Ghost Font: The Anti-AI Font Only Humans Can Read. Your browser does not support the video tag. 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…

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 correct time of day for each bird it detects. But if I don't have the WiFi details of wherever we end up in advance, there's no way to edit the Pi's configuration. Even a virtual connection requires it to already be online. I…

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 micro.blog BBQs on the terrace Snagged a lovely bamboo stick for Qi Gong Dogsitting for a weekend Open studios at the Spanish Academy Wandering the old neighbourhood for three hours while the car was serviced Almost private…

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 to confer success on small batches. At the supermarket, I discovered that they come in four distinct varieties, tailored to how much sugar you like in your jam: 2:1, 3:1, and 4:1. That's very appealling because with low…