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Jeremy Cherfas

2024-01-18

rabbit_quest #geohashing 20240118-W-AY680D

1 min read

Composite image with my location on the left and the rabbit quest on the right.

* On bicycle
* 41.85935, 12.483711
* Thursday 18 January 2024
* 422.47 ppm CO2
* OpenStreetMap

I was out on the bicycle running errands, so it was an extra delight to bag a rabbit-quest.

Jeremy Cherfas

2024-01-08

1 min read

Eat This Newsletter 227: We have a winner!

A round-up of the Xmas Quiz. There was one question that stumped everybody, and two others that only one person answered correctly.

The quiz is still available, and if you enter, you will see the correct answers once you have finished.

https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/winner/

Jeremy Cherfas

2023-12-24

Rabbit-quest reached during a 16km ride

1 min read

My black 5-speed Brompton bicycle leaning against a wall between two brown-shuttered doors

rabbit_quest geohashing 20231224-B-AYG8O8. 

  • On bicycle
  • 41.913869, 12.457505
  • Sunday 24 December, 2023
  • 421.91 ppm CO2
  • OpenStreetMap

Map showing my position relative to rabbit-quest marker

Jeremy Cherfas

2023-12-19

1 min read

Storefront of a mini-market, the owner peering suspiciously out of the door

rabbit_quest geohashing 20231219-W-AY68OD. 

  • On foot
  • 41.881408, 12.454396
  • Tuesday 19 December, 2023
  • 421.73 ppm CO2
  • OpenStreetMap

 

Jeremy Cherfas

2023-08-30

Ready for the shake-down cruise

1 min read

Aluminium handlerbars ready to be wrapped with tape.
Before

After

Handlerbars wrapped more or less neatly with black tape.
Final work on fixing up my 1979 steel bicycle. 

Jeremy Cherfas

2023-07-30

1 min read

Always a thrill when I have to delay publication of Eat This Newsletter to respect an embargo. Sign up now to have it drop into your inbox at 17:00 CEST tomorrow and be the first to read about the truth of microbiome studies.

Jeremy Cherfas

2022-03-15

1 min read

I find it strange, and deeply ironic, that a year on, an otherwise fine article still boasts an obviously doctored photograph of NI Vavilov. Seriously, who thought that was a good idea? See Nikolai Vavilov as he never was: A true scientist does not deserve a fake photo.

Jeremy Cherfas

2021-12-09

On Wikipedia

1 min read

John Naughton's online diary contains a good piece on Wikipedia.

Me: “So you’ve found a glaring error on a subject you know about?”

Critic: “Yes. Elementary mistake”.

Me: “So why haven’t you corrected it?”

Critic: Flustered (sometimes), irritated (often), defensive (much too busy)

But there's another aspect to this, which is the wiki-zealots, who are all-too-ready to block the Critic who does have expertise on a topic precisely because they are not members of the Wikitribe.

Eventually, those people give up and keep their expertise to themselves, doing Wikipedia and the world a disservice.. Well, Wikipedia is doing itself a disservice, but let's not quibble.

Jeremy Cherfas

2021-10-01

International Coffee Day

1 min read

 

 

It's , the whole point of which is promotion, right? So here's a link to all previous episodes of Eat This Podcast on coffee https://www.eatthispodcast.com/coffee/

 

Jeremy Cherfas

2021-09-09

1 min read

Correctly attired for editing next weeks episode with @dianaegarvin on some fascinating aspects of coffee history. 
Wearing a T-shirt from tazza d’oro

Jeremy Cherfas

The horror, the horror

1 min read

Dirty keyboard with key caps removed.


21 months worth of filth. 

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

2021-05-18

Higher blood levels of omega-3 fatty acids from prescription fish oil showed no effect on CV events

1 min read

Bummer! Or maybe not. Hard to say.

Higher blood levels of omega-3 fatty acids from prescription fish oil showed no effect on CV events

"Fish oils increase the risk of atrial fibrillation substantially, and there is no solid evidence that they help the heart in any way ... It's a sad story for cardiology."

Jeremy Cherfas

2021-05-15

Pockets!

1 min read

I made some trousers with unusual pockets, and I think they’re good.

On Trouser Pockets

I came to this via John Naughton's website (he doesn't say how he got there), and I have no idea who Sam Bleckley is, but in re-thinking the trouser pocket he has done something rather wonderful, maybe even genius.

I'd buy a pair in a flash.

Jeremy Cherfas

2021-02-04

1 min read

Everybody and their dog has suddenly recognised Substack and its ilk, which is not unexpected. But I particularly liked what Robin Sloan had to say in a recent newsletter of his:

The rush will come, the rush will go. We’ll still be here.

Maybe its because I am older and slower, but I feel this more and more these days. Fads come, fads go, and some things endure. That suits me just fine, even if some of those enduring things are only a couple of decades old.

Jeremy Cherfas

2020-11-08

1 min read

This is odd. The previous two posts have failed to post to m.b and I have no great expectation that this one will get through either. @help

Jeremy Cherfas

Just fancy that

1 min read

But in practice, Trump campaign officials were supporting continued vote counts where the president was behind and vigorously opposing them where he was ahead.

From today's Guardian. 

Jeremy Cherfas

Troubleshooting blues

1 min read

It can be so hard to debug IndieWeb problems when they arise in Known. For now, this should be a webmention of the linked post, because Chris Aldrich reported a problem. But even if this works, I may need to go outside this installation to test properly. Or, perhaps, try webmention.rocks.

Jeremy Cherfas

One step closer to PESOS from Instagram

1 min read

I had been barking up the wrong tree, trying to address `photo/edit` in order to create a photo post in WithKnown. Going through my old notes, I figured out how to do it through `micropub/endpoint` instead, which makes a whole lot more sense. Probably I should have started there.

Anyway, I know have the bare bones of being able to post automatically to WithKnown from the RSS feed of my Instagram account. Now I "just" need to build out all the rest; read the RSS feed, extract the relevant bits of data, construct the API request and bung it off.

Which will probably take forever, but hey.

Jeremy Cherfas

PESOS from Instagram?

1 min read

At last night's online HWC we talked a bit about getting pictures in and out of Instagram, now that they have become so much stricter about the API. Getting images into Instagram except through approved apps seems to be getting harder and harder, and is probably impossible by now. Getting images out of Instagram is also not obviously easy. But ...

A new (to me) thing, called Bibliogram, can, under the right conditions, create an RSS or Atom feed from one's profile. I poked around, and the feed contains a link to the image, caption and  date and time. The link to the image works. So maybe ...

I could send the feed to IFTTT or Zapier or similar, and have that create a post via Micropub to my instance of WithKnown. Or even, if I ever get it working, to my main site, which uses Grav.

But I can't even try for a couple of days.

Jeremy Cherfas

2020-05-09

1 min read

I'm not saying I agree with absolutely everything in these two articles, but The Economist has an Editorial and a Briefing on what it calls "the global food supply chain" and "the world's food system". They make for interesting reading.

Spoiler: The Economist doesn't think it's broken.

Jeremy Cherfas

An ad-hoc meeting of the WithKnown Open Collective

5 min read

The past 24 hours saw perhaps more activity in the IRC channel (yesterday and today) and than I have ever seen before. Near the end of it all, jgmac1106, having previously voluntold me to be the first rotating organiser, voluntold me to “call all of today a meeting of the Open Collective”. Obviously you can’t have a meeting without minutes,[1] so here they are.

It all started with jgmac1106’s heartfelt plea that he just wanted to publish his site, “not learn backend engineering” and contemplating starting afresh. LewisCowles raised the question of how to reward Open Source software developers and maintainers, and that started a discussion of what it would take to put Known on a commercial footing.

Jgmac1106 was of the opinion that easier install with auto-update was needed. Lewiscowles and jeremycherfas thought that better direction of the project was needed, with a model that offered installation, domain management and updates, for a fee.

“Make it Known would be such a great tagline if we could get Sir Patrick Stewart on board.” Lewiscowles

There followed further discussion of operational models, including micro.blog; pay for hosting, including updates, and some backfeed, with a free offering open to IndieWeb if you have a capable site elsewhere.

On funding, jeremycherfas related his early experience hosting through IndieHosters and jgmac1106 talked about applying for grants to fund specific pieces of Known development. We played around with numbers, concluding that nobody knew enough to build even an outline business plan. There did seem to be agreement that venture capital should be rejected from the outset, while collectives and cooperatives could provide a more desirable structure, and that any kind of structure needs direction.

After a gap, some other people joined the channel and mapkyca explained that right now, a bigger block than money was time as he is working flat out. He also said that the maths does not work out for SaaS.

Benatwork then rejoined the meeting and explained in some depth the history of Known, including funding decisions and his original vision.

The original intention was to build a community platform that could be hosted securely, with discussion not monitored by the likes of a Facebook. … [I]t was never built to be an indieweb platform or an individual blogging engine from the start. The core idea was: flexible, social feeds that one or more people could contribute to, with per-item access control and integrations both in and out. I still believe that it has most value as a multi-user platform.

Major problem: we gave our entire platform away as open source, and it turns out there was a strong correlation between people who wanted to use it and people who didn’t want to pay. Although they were happy to pay for an account on a shared host, which of course didn’t go to us. So it didn’t really work as a scalable business.

Benatwork then filled us in on recent developments and why his direct involvement has dwindled, all of which is very understandable, closing with his belief that SaaS is not the way forward.

Jgmac1106 then voluntold jeremycherfas to take the lead on setting up monthly meetings for the next three months, as the first rotating organiser.[2] He also shared his idea of having something like Known to offer local media as something they can sell to subscribers as a built in social platform.

In response to a question from Aaron_Klemm, Benatwork shared the Known roadmap on github. He also explained some of the past technical decisions and that maybe some of those should be revisited to improve the product as a whole.

People shared their different ideas of what Known could become for them, with the question of the current admin tax prominent. Cleverdevil said he would be happy to pay mapkyca to update his site, raising again the potential demand for SaaS.

Benatwork’s vision is Known not as a blog CMS exclusively, but rather:

What Known can do is create a stream of many different kinds of content, and present it differently based on context. Filtering is a similarly powerful idea. “Show me all posts that are sensor readings and photos tagged with bats, from January 1st.”

There was some discussion of other aspects of Known that need attention, including the templating engine, which mapkyca said he hopes to separate completely from the back end.

Chrisaldrich raised the possibility of working with Reclaim Hosting to devise a package similar to what Reclaim offers universities, i.e. Reclaim does the heavy lifting for turnkey Known installs while allowing a small group of others to support people who signed up. Aaron_Klemm supported this idea strongly.

There was a lot more discussion of various ways in which Known could contribute to community internet literacy and how it might be used alongside other web publishing tools.

This summary is an entirely personal capture of the discussion; corrections and comments welcome. (You know how to do that, right?) I’ll suggest some times for an online meeting through the channel.


  1. Though apparently you can have one without an agenda.  ↩

  2. Which I will do, bearing in mind that, with exceptions, I am really only available Monday to Friday from 08:00 to 19:00 CEST.  ↩

Jeremy Cherfas

CSS Naked Day 2020

2 min read

I'm not actually a designer, and never will be, but I do enjoy trying to make my website pleasing on the eye, even if it is only my eye. So I was happy enough to go along with CSS Naked Day yesterday, not by removing all the stylesheets but by using `View>Page Style>No Style` in Firefox. And there was only one glaringly obvious problem: a hamburger icon that would choke the entire world.  Eric Meyer explained:

But take away the CSS, and the SVG will become 1200 x 1000 again.  That might tell you to resize it for production, sure, and you probably should.  But it also points out that browsers will not constrain that image, not even to the viewport.  If your window is only 900 pixels wide, the SVG could well spill outside, forcing a horizontal scrollbar.  Is that good?  Maybe!  Maybe not!  We might wish browsers would bake something like img {max-width: 100%; height: auto;} into their user-agent stylesheet(s), but maybe that would have unforeseen downsides.  The point is, this is a thing about browsers that CSS Naked Day reveals, and it’s worth knowing.

At some point, then, I ought at least think about defining the size of that monster. The rest of it, I'm OK with.

Jeremy Cherfas

A bigger photo post

1 min read

Here's that piece of pizza again, trying to decode what happens.

Jeremy Cherfas

2020-03-17

1 min read

There's no way I know of to find old spam that came into WithKnown while I was not getting notifications. I had thought that my scheme of jumping on spam as soon as possible after receiving (restarted) notifications had found them all. But no. Today surfaced a bookmark post that had accumulated 10 spams since August 2018.

Lotta continua!

Jeremy Cherfas

2020-02-19

1 min read

Today I learned I have been utterly underusing Rogue Amoeba's SoundSource app. For that I have to thank Brett Terpstra's post Enhanced music listening on macOS.

I'm sure it is just a coincidence that we have the exact same speakers.

 

Jeremy Cherfas

2020-02-16

1 min read

Are unsecured cafe wi-fi networks deliberately hostile to VPNs?

I’m in Bill’s cafe in Cambridge, which offers ‘free’ Wi-Fi — which of course I don’t trust. So I switch on my VPN to find that, mysteriously, it can’t connect to its server. And I’m wondering if this is just some kind of glitch, or a policy by the firm that provides the Wi-Fi. After all, they don’t want clients sending communications that are encrypted and therefore inscrutable for advertising and tracking purposes. In this stuff, only the paranoid survive.

I had the same experience as John Naughton yesterday and Friday, signed in to the wifi in a bed and breakfast. No matter what, my VPN (Mullvad) would not connect. Rather than go unsecured though, I signed out of the wifi, but it definitely is strange and I think I am seeing something similar more and more often.

Jeremy Cherfas

Rye (or spelt) ???

1 min read

Thanks to an unfollowable stream on Twitter, I came upon the website of Joshua Nudell, an historian with an interest in ancient Greek breads. A post of his, translating from Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae, refers in passing to "the loaf from rye (or spelt)". That's strange. So I left a comment on the post, as follows:

I don't know Ancient Greek, but I do know some ancient and modern cereals, so I am hoping you can elaborate on this. Does the list mean two different loaves, one of rye and one of spelt? Or does it mean that rye is sometimes known as spelt, which would be a very interesting reading indeed.

Thanks.

This could be interesting.

Jeremy Cherfas

2019-04-15

1 min read

'Debatable' List Of '100 Most Jewish' Foods Leaves Plenty Of Room For Kibbitzing in The Salt is an interesting review. Makes me want to read the book. Also makes me want to promote today's episode about one Jewish food and one arguably Christian food. Coming in a couple of hours.

Jeremy Cherfas

2019-04-12

1 min read

People in NYC probably already know of this astonishing resource but in case you don't, or are just visiting, you should.

https://www.eatingintranslation.com/2019/04/new-york-area-food-events-april-11-18.html

Jeremy Cherfas

2019-03-05

1 min read

There is order in the universe. I know, because on the very day that I finally knuckled down and wrote a pathetic little spreadsheet to do some bread calculations for me, the Gods of Serendipity put Running a bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL in one of my RSS feeds, and my gob is smacked.

Jeremy Cherfas

2019-02-12

1 min read

“Amazingly, the link still works” 

Two amazing things

1) In a piece looking back over 1000 of his linkblog posts, Charles Arthur finds it remarkable that a link from 2010 still works.

2) The piece seems to be on Medium and nowhere else.

I reckon the two observatiuons are linked (haha). Which makes me wonder whether to even share this link. Will it still work in 2028? Or would Charles be better of owning his stuff somewhere else?

Jeremy Cherfas

#Hashtags & HTML

1 min read

Once again, there is chatter about how @Withknown deals with hashtags and HTML I still believe that it often removes a hashtag from the content of an Instagram description, sent here by OwnYourGram. I'll test that in a moment. And there certainly were problems with certain characters in Titles and body. So this is a test of this <- and that.

Jeremy Cherfas

2019-01-24

1 min read

Learn something new every day. I can use email to post to this site with Quill. Never needed it before, but good to know.

Jeremy Cherfas

Absolutely sublime Nancy

1 min read

This is perhaps the single best strip I have seen all year.

Jeremy Cherfas

How Long Should a Podcast Be?

1 min read

Podnews has a piece that many podcasters could usefully read. The bit that resonated was this quote from Roman Mars:

If you have 100,000 listeners and you edit out one useless minute you are saving 100,000 wasted minutes in the world. You’re practically a hero.

Not quite a hero, I can at least count myself a mini-hero.

Jeremy Cherfas

2018-12-11

1 min read

Spammers say the sweetest things:

Jeremy cherfas is the well known writer of this century. He is famous for the suppleness that are still like by many of the people. We should also read the blogs about him to gain knowledge for our own self.

Jeremy Cherfas

2018-12-10

1 min read

cover art for podcast episode

New podcast episode out now, tasting the delights of Nürnberger lebkuchen, at https://www.eatthispodcast.com/lebkuchen/

Jeremy Cherfas

Great shame I'm not flying today

1 min read

Meetup location:
* 41.802416°, 12.617251° or
* N41°48.145', E12°37.035' or
* N41°48'8.7", E12°37'2.1"
DJIA adjusted for location east
of the 30W longitude

For the first time since I started checking, today's geohash location is actually somewhere I could easily have reached.

Jeremy Cherfas

Feeling good about the changes at Flickr

1 min read

So interesting to see some of the changes that are happening at Flickr. I'd more or less given up on it as a place to share some of my images, and now I'm beginning to think it is becoming more attractive again. I've been a paying user for a long, long time, without really thinking about it. I'm not too bothered about the "silo" aspects of the site, as I have copies of the images themselves. I suppose I ought to look into grabbing comments, likes and so on, but not with all that much urgency. It's the images that count.

The thing I find most interesting about this most recent blog post is this:

Lastly, we looked at our members and found a clear line between Free and Pro accounts: the overwhelming majority of Pros have more than 1,000 photos on Flickr, and the vast majority of Free members have fewer than 1,000. We believe we’ve landed on a fair and generous place to draw the line.

I'd love to see the raw histogram of number of images and videos per user.

Jeremy Cherfas

2018-11-01

1 min read

So, that's what an Overton window is. Thanks to Alice Bartlett for prompting me to find out.

Jeremy Cherfas

2018-09-13

1 min read

Having a diagram doesn't make it clearer, making it clearer makes it clearer.

Words to live by from a how-to-do-slides post that didn't contain a lot new for me. Except for the bit about showing websites.

Jeremy Cherfas

2018-08-31

1 min read

In the latest Daskeyboard metahacks, there's a certain irony to the juxtaposition of item 5 -- “The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal.” – Mark Twain -- and item 2 -- "Giant container ships are just as responsible for pollution as cars". How hard would it have been to check? For example, BBC Radio 4's More or Less.

Jeremy Cherfas

A little problem with Known's Micropub endpoint

3 min read

One of the developers of Sunlit, a photo-sharing app that is part of the Micro.blog ecosystem, contacted me to say that “the images on your site have a MIME type of application/data”. I’d like to say I understood immediately what the problem was and what it meant, but I had to do some learning first. It wasn’t as simple as the extension, the bit after the filename that indicates whether it is a JPEG or PNG kind of image. Rather, it was about what my server tells your browser about the image.

To backtrack, Known stores all files as blobs that contain the actual file data, the 1s and 0s. Your browser, when it receives a post from my server, can often sniff out what kind of thing (image, audio, text etc) that blob of data represents and do a good job of showing it to you. Normally, you wouldn’t even notice. One clue is that if you right-click on an image, and ask to open it in a new tab, it actually gets downloaded instead, I suppose because the new tab doesn’t know what else to do with it.

Anyway, I confirmed that the source file for most images did not have an extension (which would have told the browser directly how to deal with it). Most, but not all. Files I had uploaded to my site directly did have an extension and the correct MIME type. The “bad” files had come from OwnYourGram or Quill, both of which are part of the joyful . They use a standard called Micropub to send things to a suitably equipped website.

It seemed unlikely that both Quill and OYG would fail to send the requisite information to identify a photo, so I went digging into the code that Known uses to decide what to do with a post sent by Micropub. I made a bit of progress but although I could see more or less what was happening, I couldn’t see how to make it right.

Fortunately Aaron Parecki, who built Quill and OwnYourGram (and so much else), was around and gave me the clue I needed to investigate: curl -I example.com/file.

One beautiful feature of Quill is that if it is sending a photo and if the receiving site has a media endpoint for receiving files (which Known does) it uploads the file, shows you a preview and tells you the location of the file. With that, the curl command shows that the temporary file has the correct description of Content-Type: image/jpeg. Once Known has processed the whole post from Quill, though, the file that contains the image shows as Content-Type: application/data.

Somewhere between receiving the temporary file from Quill and storing it permanently, Known fails to give it the proper MIME type.

I wish I knew enough to discover where the problem lies. Most likely Marcus Povey – who keeps the wheels spinning at Known – will be able to do the needful, now that I have submitted an issue. And Sunlit will be able to share my photos far and wide.

Jeremy Cherfas

2018-06-11

1 min read

It's all about power. Where the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium leads, the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking and the Agricultural History Society follow.

Jeremy Cherfas

2018-05-27

1 min read

@phoneboy kindly shared a screenshot of the "webmention" spam he said he had received.

As I suspected, it looks to me like common or garden spam, hence the scare quotes. Of course, I can't be absolutely certain without digging further into the actual URLs, which I'm not about to do, but everything about these comments screams pingbacks or trackbacks. And the solution is obviously Akismet which, to be honest, I am suprised Phoneboy has not already installed and activated.

The day may come when webmention spam is a thing, and people have been thinking about a protocol called Vouch for that eventuality.

Jeremy Cherfas

2018-05-21

1 min read

A couple of days ago, @phoneboy mentioned the fun he had deleting the spam webmentions he had received on WordPress.

I asked him to document them.

Now Phoneboy replies:

Once I figure out the right settings, I’ll let you know.

And I’m not sure what that means. What right settings? Doesn’t WordPress keep a copy of all comments it receives? It would be really useful to see the contents of those “spam webmentions,” where they came from, what they contained, who sent them, simply because, as I said before, so few of these imagined evils have so far been spotted in the open. Not sure what settings that requires.

Also, the irony of this question has not escaped me:

Also, where did you post this comment? Didn’t see it in micro.blog.

I posted it here. Where else would I post it?

Jeremy Cherfas

2018-05-17-02

1 min read

If you're looking for a really good introduction to the and insights into how it all works, you could do a lot worse than listen to Jeena's podcast with Martijn. They do a tip-top job of explaining for people less knowledgeable than they are, and the audio quality is very acceptable.

Jeremy Cherfas

2018-05-17

1 min read

Strangely, perhaps, given my love of tinkering with shiny, I've never been tempted by Ghost. But reading the latest birthday review surfaced this bit of wisdom.

Decentralised platforms fundamentally cannot compete on ease of setup. Nothing beats the UX of signing up for a centralised application.

But

Centralised platforms fundamentally cannot compete on power and flexibility. In the long run, nothing beats owning your technology and controlling your destiny.

Jeremy Cherfas

2018-05-07

1 min read

I think I just need to remind myself and others of the natural progresion of things.

  1. Everything not forbidden is permitted.
  2. Everything not permitted is forbidden.
  3. Everything not forbidden is compulsory

That is all.