jeremycherfas.net

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…

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 swimmingly with a mix of automation and manual drudgery for about six years. Then, when I started to move my hosting from Dreamhost to Hetzner, it basically went ...

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 of Binet’s brilliance. There is absolutely no point in trying to summarise the plot or even to understand everything. As with Civilisations, some events are...

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 see me raise my arm. If they’re some place else, it may take a while for them to latch onto the treat. Over the weeks, they have definitely become more relaxe...

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 Splendid return visit to Naples, including Oplontis Forked over the big bucks for a new iMac screen Installed Compass on Hetzner and it works, and well Brief outing to Umbertide on the Tiber...

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 at the end of the day. And yet, for the past three weeks, as every year, my socials have been full of people wailing like banshees. On both sides of the fence. I just don’t get it. The cha...

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 home, even though I barely do any paying work these days. I am sure that under his constraints, I would hate it too. 1. Loss of separation between work and home This is always a challenge, ...