* On bicycle
* 41.861454, 12.464238
* Thursday 22 August, 2024
* 418.77 ppm CO2
* OpenStreetMap
Not exactly exploring. Just happened to notice this Rabbit right by my usual route for a long bicycle ride, so I had to bag it on the way home.
Twenty years ago today, I was impressed with WordPress, the new kid on my block. https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/getting-to-grips-with-wordpress
It is still pretty impressive, if it gives you what you want.
A lot of Mark Nottingham's post about improving feeds is plumbing and protocols I scarcely understand. The thing that disrupts my feed reading most is feeds that resend the latest 20 posts each time there's something new. Might be related to doubled images. Whatever, I dislike it a lot.
2024-08-22
#rabbit_quest #geohashing 20240816-W-AY68OD
1 min read
2024-08-19
#rabbit_quest #geohashing 20240816-W-AYB8OD
1 min read
* On foot
* 41.88934, 12.46280 approx
* Friday 16 August, 2024
* N/A ppm CO2
* OpenStreetMap
Bagged this on Friday, and it had been so long since the previous Rabbit I clear forgot to take the screenshot that enables me to post a day later. Or three days later.
Rain at last, and it smells … like victory.
2024-08-16
Audio cleanup
1 min read
Editing audio, you accumulate so much cruft it is amazing. Out-takes, duplicates, alternative mixes etc etc. You pretend you might come back to them. But you don't. Eventually you decide to save only the final mix and the sound files it needs, and you spend about 90 minutes doing every podcast from 2014, and you reduce the size of that archive from 21.3GB to 9.1GB and that is a good thing.
2015 can wait.
That blueprint is at https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1824441.html which brilliantly analyses what made the original Patreon so attractive and how it has declined. As someone still able to use charge-by-item and someone who uses the support of patrons to make my stuff available to all, I really appreciated the piece.
Robert Kingett's heartfelt post about why he is leaving Patreon, coupled with my own attempts to streamline the support options for my own little endeavours, left me reminiscing about the original flattr and early Patreon itself. The blueprint for a replacement exists. Somebody, please build it.
Seven years ago I wrote a generally depressing piece about “science communication” and how little it seems to achieve. Someone please tell me how things have changed in the interim.
https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/scicomm-what-is-it-good-for
Maybe everybody who needs to has already seen this sound advice for Patreon — and Ernie is not the only one — but I still think it bears sharing more widely.
https://tedium.co/2024/08/13/patreon-apple-platform-risks/
ETN 248: Slow
Even the internet firehose seems to have slowed to a trickle in this northern heat. Still, one or two good dribbles to share, on new chocolate species, culture and cultured meat, and the man who ate all the UPFs he could in a day.
https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/etn248-slow/
@help Is there a reason I cannot paste into a reply (ios) or is it just me? I understand I cannot post because I am not a paid account, but I can reply from the app. But not paste into my reply.
Note to the new EU Transport Commissioner
[M]ake it easier to book international tickets, and that will mean more customers – and that should improve rail firms’ bottom lines. It is just that defensive, national monopolist thinking, and a conservative mindset, is rather too prevalent in the rail sector just now.
Bring it on!
The ending of Apple TV's version of Presumed Innocent is what we in the IANAL profession call "A Swizz". Nothing short of preposterous and vastly inferior to the book. Made me feel cheated after 7 3/4 fine episodes.
Current status.
A bright blue swimming pool backed by loungers under shade and beyond them a green hedge, trees and a spotless blue sky.
I can write Eat This Newsletter while on holiday. Promoting it, however, is another story entirely. BLTN, the latest offers food-borne illness, conspicuous fruit consumption, and plant-based meat ... for pets.
https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-245-fruity/
One of the questions not raised by the latest Eat This Newsletter, which drops tomorrow, is why people who clearly want to subscribe, and are real people, don't activate their accounts? Am I justified in doing it for them? Do people really not check their spam?
Japan did get an increase in Pacific Bluefin Tuna quota, but not as much as it originally wanted. Increase of 50% for big fish and 10% for smaller fish. They originally wanted 230% and 30% respectively, so that really is a win for scientific management.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/07/16/japan/japan-tuna-catch-quota-up/
2024-07-16
I’m not clever enough
1 min read
From An alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was like to build this site from scratch
“Yes, nearly everything about the platform felt worse than it did when I first started using it over a decade ago. ... Someone with even a modicum of clout should really coin a catchy term that everyone else can repeat ad infinitum until it loses all meaning. I’m not clever enough.”
Like, er, enshittification? Or was this an example of self-deprecating humour designed to flush out a reply guy?
I’m not clever enough to decide.
In the latest Eat This Newsletter, the surprisingly rapid recovery of Pacific Bluefin Tuna, more than 10 years ahead of schedule. Naturally Japan now wants to increase the quotas that enabled that recovery.
https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-244-tuna/
I would have replied to @thesiswhisperer@aus.social directly, but they seem to delete all their posts immediately. I would have said thanks for fixing the coding of your blog post, which I found interesting and thought provoking. Maybe they’ll see this.
My first thought was “false flag”. That’s what these times have done to me.
Yes: Looking forward to a Homebrew Website Club that doesn't interfere with my evenings.
#rabbit_quest #geohashing 20240709-W-B0O8O3
Described in more detail at https://jeremycherfas.net/blog/rabbit-quest-20240709wb0o8o3/
* On foot
* 42.759728, 12.353907
* Tuesday 9 july 2024
* 421.44 ppm CO2
* OpenStreetMap https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=42.759728&mlon=12.353907#map=14/42.7597/12.3539
Interesting article on whether LLMs are writing PubMed articles, that seems to conclude that on balance they aren’t. Yet. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a linguistic analysis, says nothing about the quality of the articles, no matter who might be writing them.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=64877
I wouldn’t be sad if all the mosquitoes in the world went extinct. Does that make me a bad person?
Can Starmer Save Britain? Why Labour’s Sweeping Victory May Not Reverse the Country's Decline
The cold reality is that Brexit has merely shown that the United Kingdom has no one to blame for its problems but itself.
Unmissable analysis from Fintan O’Toole in Foregin Affairs. The UK has a chance at reinvention, and it will not be easy, but it has to try.
Is this the most interesting newsletter ever?
No, of course not. But it does give me the opportunity to pour scorn on sub-editors who question everything.
Say Yes to ETN 242: Ontological uncertainty.
https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/ETN-242-ontological-uncertainty/
A nice article extolling the virtues of do-less gardening, both in the garden and on the planet, which I definitely appreciate. I will just say that all this is much more difficult with pots on a terrace, circumstances even less natural than a garden.
First time in my puttering I think I have a need to normalise my CSS. Any hints as to the best of the many options out there gratefully received.
Letters from an American
Just the facts ...
... not that the facts will change those whose minds care nothing for truth of any kind.
Tragically, Emeritus Professor Robert Eric Frykenberg has still not seen fit to correct the egregious howler he perpetrated in 2008, to which I drew attention back then. Talk about being a non-influencer.
https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/a-snaffle-bridle-on-a-17th-century-pit-pony
Sail Cargo Resurgence – Lucy Bellwood
Really great to see this little comic from Lucy Bellwood. A couple of panels to update some of the information would be the cherry on the cake.Is Ceiba operational yet? The website doesn't say, but I don't think so.
Latest episode: Palatable is not Potable
Whatever you think about bottled waters, the story of supplying clean, safe water that people actually want to drink is a fascinating one. Christy Spackman talked to me about her new book, The Taste of Water.
https://eatthispodcast.com/water