jeremycherfas.net

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…

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 of Red Sun sunflower seeds. She sowed them, potted them on, planted them out and waited patiently for them to bloom. This they did a couple of days ago. They were not Red Sun. They were sunflower yellow. All of them. That’s…

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 than actual loyalty or anything, and it is by no means over, but so far I do prefer the experience. The biggest single difficulty has been posts that contain photographs. At first, they looked fine, but that turned out to be…

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 CSS selector of first-of-type. Fine, I thought. Done. But then I checked the site this morning on my iPhone 11, and the problem was still there. Caching, I thought, so I looked again in desktop browsers. There, it looked OK.…

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 up a log to see what I could see. What I saw was that all attempts to locate tombstones in my Instagram graveyard were coming up empty. === Sure enough, when I went to take a look, all the media files and most of the…

⏱️ 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 going mostly flat, the wind blustery at times, but manageable, and I managed to take in the world’s best roadside food. All good. Naturally I have a complaint. I didn’t really need turn-by-turn navigation to get from Parco Leonardo…

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, which did eventually recover the space I needed. Rather than repeating all those steps as an aide-memoire, I asked ChatGPT to go through the entire exchange and prioritise the various steps. This (lightly edited) is what I…

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 tinkering, but as you move into the upper echelons of independence, so too the admin tax rate goes up. And there’s another weird thing. If you’re doing this for love rather than as a job, paying the tax gets harder and harder…

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 again; still no impact Good visits with several friends passing through Exciting, inspiring, recreational visit to Hearsay audio arts festival in Ireland One good and long recording that will Take Work™ Some good bicycle rides…

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 the presentation, for example by separating and grouping the various kinds of reaction, taught me only that I have far too much to learn about doing that in a browser. So I turned my attention back to a plugin that I last…

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 the site, and not only because of the occasional clash with microformats. It was just messy. At the end of February 2024 I started an effort to redo the underlying CSS, this time trusting more in the browser, as taught by…

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 fully understand at any level. However, I kept digging around in the router settings, and found something odd. An old machine, one I no longer own, seemed to have a specific IP. So I tinkered, and this is the note I wrote to…

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 meals outdoors Good bike rides Visit to the firefighters’ museum Sinners in the cinema at midday 300 issues of Eat This Newsletter Started on a Melt the ICE hat with yarn selected by The Squeeze A few days away as designated…

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 connection. So, what the heck, I stuck the microphone out of the window on a couple of nights. I shouldn’t be surprised, but what a treat; 39 species, many for the first time. === Time of day is obviously not entirely…