John's World Wide Wall Display

Read: Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson ★★★★ 📚 Great fun as the author plays with the conventions of the country house mystery. The characters in the big house are particularly awful and often laugh out loud funny.

#SilentSunday

Likes The RSS Universe by Readers, Tools & Standards. No algorithm, no timeline, no engagement bait. Just feeds you chose. Here’s the whole ecosystem — readers, feed generators, monitoring, directories, and the standards that hold it together. Great looking set of RSS tools. Via Joe and Alan.

Read: Ashland & Vine by John Burnside ★★★★ 📚 Now I was beginning to wonder if she had just been bluffing. Maybe there wasn't even a Wes, though I'm not sure about that. She'd had a look in her eye, a mix of apprehension and pride, like you see in certain types of pit-bull owners, and I really didn't want to test her story. Film student Kate, bit of a mess, starts listing to an older woman Jean's stories of her family and life. American history, WW2, Vietnam, culture & counter culture is only a…

Likes 📑 llamafile by Aaron Davis. I am also not exactly sure which models I should be using. From that perspective, it was a useful reminder to be clear about what my purpose is. Ironically, having waited an hour for a response to a task associated with a series of documents, I was left wonder if this is what it felt like using punch cards? Not sure where this will take me, but it is interesting to at least tinker. I got quite confused trying to hook up llama with WordPress studio. Gave up in…

Read: When will there be good news? by Kate Atkinson ★★★★ 📚 A complicated multithreaded mystery. A delightful, unbelievable young girl mixed with characters from previous Jackson Brodie novels weave stories that somehow come together. Unlikely coincidences mostly. Great fun on lots of levels.

Read: The Ghost of the Mountains by Kulbhushansing Suryawanshi ★★★★ 📚 Our review of the world’s studies on snow leopard populations had found that less than 10,000 of the estimated 3 million square kilometres of the snow leopard distribution range had been surveyed by researchers using rigorous scientific methods. The total snow leopard habitat in the state of Himachal Pradesh alone was 25,000 square kilometres.The largest area to have been surveyed was a mere 1,500 square kilometres in the…

Read: Ubik by Philip K. Dick ★★★ 📚 Instant Ubik has all the fresh flavor of just-brewed drip coffee.Your husband will say, Christ, Sally, I used to think your coffee was only so-so. But now, wow! Safe when taken as directed. I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one…

Park Pond, two young dabchicks with one or two parents. Never saw the parents at the same time. Fishing & feeding the wee ones. About 10 metres along another adult & young one. Was surprised as I’ve not seen many about over the summer. Nesting in the space between Islands out of sight I guess?

Lots of the ivy was alive with hoverflies wasps & bees on Tuesday. Lots of buzzing!

Blustery afternoon on path to Greenside, mostly blue sky. Despite the wind a few butterflies, peacocks, painted lady, red admiral & a few speckled woods. Goldfinch in the meadowsweet. A raven circled high in the blue. The news reported less speckled woods this year, but I’ve seem more than ever.

#silentsunday

I am experimenting with gathering links with rss.chat here. I am pulling a rough post together for some of the links gathered there. Education This looks like a very interesting book. As important as her deep reporting on the tech industry’s ruthlessness are Singer’s profiles of the inspiring cadre of academics, educators, and activists who are documenting and resisting the likes of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Oracle — and now, too, OpenAI and Anthropic — that are “capturing” the…

I’ve a new page: River of News an rss reader for some of my favourite feeds. I’ve been testing Scott Hanson’s plugin that pulls in a River of News from Feedland River Embed for FeedLand, for a while. It is now available on WordPress.org so easy to install. It pulls in news from a set of blogs on a Feedland server. A river of news is: River of News is a kind of RSS aggregator.# Items are presented in reverse-chronologic order.# Each item has a headline, short description, a link to the story,…

Just has an email telling me telex has been retired. Telex was built onto of WordPress playground and allowed you to crate with A.I. plugins and themes. I experimented and made a few. Kept a bit of a record of the prompts I used and the problems I came across on a blog: Telex Testing. It felt a bit like some of the work I did on Glow Blogs in the early days, back and forward with a developer. I didn’t make anything earth shattering but enjoyed it somewhat. Was interesting because you didn’t…

Likes H5P Community Day Sydney: Better Learning Together by H5P. The free event brought the H5P community together for a day of practical examples, product updates, thoughtful discussion and networking. Across the sessions, one message came through clearly: effective digital learning is not about adding more technology. It is about using the right tools with clear learning intentions. H5P is one of the features of Glow Blogs I’d like to see more of. I used it a lot, in the most simple of ways,…

Finlas Water Hills started bright, low (400m or so) clouds. Quite a few birds, ravens, crows, hoodies, buzzards, a kestrel, pipits. Between Creaghan & Ruisg put up a snipe. By then clouds thick, visibility 30-100 metres. Flora turning, lots of scabious, some grass of Parnassus. Finally an eagle. Turned round at Creag an Leinibh as I didn’t fancy the walk down to the Finlas Water from the South in the mirk. Map and more photos: 14-09-2026 Finlas Water Hills.

Greenside morning, brighter than expected. Sunshine brought out the butterflies. Mostly Painted Ladies with a lot of Speckled Woods. One very battered Small Tortoiseshell. Near the reservoir a flock of about 50 or so mixed goldfinch & linnets, seemed to be feeding among the seeded rose-bay willow herb and meadowsweet. Most headed for the power lines when we passed. Quite a few common darters.

Read: The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino ★★★★ 📚 The fact is that the whole time my brother had to do with it, outdoor Masonry (as I'll call it, to distinguish it from the kind that later met in closed buildings) had a very rich set of rites, which involved owls, telescopes, pinecones, hydraulic pumps, mushrooms, Cartesian divers, spiders, Pythagorean tables. There was also a certain display of skulls, not only human but also craniums of cows, wolves, and eagles. Such objects and still…

3 photos of a raven, imagemagick B&W & montage. #corvid #raven

Read: The Given World by Melissa Harrison ★★★★ 📚 Angela had realised with a start that despite being in her mid-thirties her daughter hadn't yet understood how fleeting things were, that cherry blossom and blackbirds singing weren't a constant backdrop but a clock that counted you through your life: each thing there for only a moment, and then gone until next year. Some events in the novel are leaving forever not just till next year. Chapters go through the seasons and characters. Each having a…

#SilentSunday

Likes When rocks take a walk. Nature waiting, I call it: just sitting there, waiting to see what comes along. and That would be cool. Inevitably, my former favourite rock will continue to erode: like us (and everything else) rocks wage an ongoing, ultimately futile war against entropy. But I’m sure my old rock will outlast me. I’d like to develop some of that patience, I generally keep on the move. Maybe getting older will strengthen the ability to wait.

Victoria Park, drizzle them brightened, a couple of white butterflies over the flower beds. Went to investigate. Among the bright flowers were a few thistles. A couple of bees working over the thistles ignoring the other flowers. One butterfly came off a thistle too. Not sure which type of white.

Read: Land by Maggie O'Farrell ★★★★ 📚 A skein of marsh birds passes over his head, their cries a dissonant plucking on untuned instruments. Liam tilts his head, tracking their progress as they veer and bank over the green inclines and fields, towards the cragged cliffs that fall off into the pounding sea: a sole geometric shape moving among grand and yielding irregularities. How radiant, how lovely is the land and yet how empty. It is as if he has passed through a rent into another realm where…

#SilentSunday

Out to Greenside this morning, warm, close and sometimes sunny. Butterflies: Green-veined Whites, several spotted woods, peacocks, small tortoiseshells & painted ladies on thistles. I rather like this odd view of a painted lady. few more photos on flickr. My Butterflies by month continues to grow.

Likes Please let me interact with your blog post! by Michael Harley. I love my RSS reader. It’s the first thing I reach for when I’m “catching up.” As I’m reading through my list of feed items, I often come across blog posts that do not give me any way to interact with the post!

Read: The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout ★★★ 📚 As he steered the sailboat back to his wharf, it came to him how he had once, when he was a kid, said to his father, "I'm going to have a boat one day," and his father had smiled and said, "No, Artie, you're not ever going to have a boat." This did not hurt Artie to remember. Rather melancholic novel. Older teacher Artie, goes through things in a Strout-ian way. Some rather dramatic twists, turns & happenings. Sadder than I expected,…

#bloomstrolling for #bloomscrolling in Glen Douglas yesterday. Lots of sparkles on the ground. #flora.