A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.
1 min read
* On bicycle
* 41.884605, 12.475028
* 10 November 2024
* 423.74 ppm CO2
* OpenStreetMap
I went out for a long bicycle ride this morning, having vaguely noted that there was a Rabbit to be bagged not too far from the route. On the way back I dismounted, got as close as I could and took the picture. It was a great ride.
Very cool. A new website dedicated to taking your bicycle on a train (in Europe). Sort of The Person with a Saddle in Seat 61. There's mention of it being crowd-sourced, which would be interesting. Instant follow.
https://cycling-on-rails.com/blog/2024/11/05/train-bicycle-guide-started.html
Eat This Newsletter today ranges from big stories in India and Europe to little gems about candy floss (aka cotton candy) and asparagus.
Oh, and a titan of industrial food calls for mandatory nutrition labels.
Read it at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-255-gamut/ and while you are there, consider subscribing.
Almost identical to my own journey, although I haven't scoured ALL the places I might have left a bookmark. I should watch the tagging video, because I know I am too lax about tags, and have too many tags with only a single item. AI could fix that, right?
I've often dreamed of handing headphones to people playing their shitty phone-based noises out loud, but never taken it beyond a dream. Terence Eden could be living the dream with his two quid shitty earphones.
Current me thanks past me for due diligence.
[Unable to login to Monocle](https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/unable-to-login-to-monocle)
New episode: How the Spanish learned to love anchovies
For hundreds of years, the people of Spain wanted nothing to do with anchovies, except perhaps as fertiliser for their fields. Today, they eat more anchovies than anyone else. How did that happen?
https://eatthispodcast.com/anchovies-spain
After a week away seeing family and mostly ignoring the online, it is very good to be back home and online.
I don't know why they call it a potato. Tuber would be just as alliterative, and instructive to boot. Still, an interesting read.
Last week was National School Lunch Week in the US. The latest Eat This Newsletter wonders why there is still no such thing as a universal free school lunch.
Read it at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-254-deja-vu/ and think about subscribing there.
Truly baffled by someone who has a kind of About page that links to their various online presences, and the one labelled “blog” takes me to a Substack signup. Whatever else you may think it is, a newsletter is not, on its own, a weblog. At least, not for me.
#IndieWeb
For some reason, we both woke at our normal time and then slept on for another 90 minutes. TGIS
Fun and instructive.
Latest episode: the divisive anchovy.
Love them? Get practical advice that can make them even better.
Hate them? the failing probably is not yours.
Listen at https://www.eatthispodcast.com/anchovies/ and subscribe wherever et cetera.
I knew most of this history, as a relatively long-time user of Known, and I contribute to the project via Open Collective. A new version of Known would be even better than a functional exporter, but I would settle for that if I have to.
In the latest Eat This Newsletter
- Nutrition experts who feed off big food
- The tomato in India
- Tainted turmeric
- Cloves, with a hitch
- 陈麻婆豆腐: is the story true?
Read it at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-253-conflict/ and please consider subscribing.
Yet another plea for proper micropayments that don't gouge payer or payee. Even Patreon has been going down the tubes in this regard. I still fondly remember the original flattr. Couldn't someone, somewhere, please reinvent that.
1 min read
#rabbit_quest #geohashing 20241004-W-AY6808
* On foot
* 41.886121, 12.444012
* 4 October 2024
* 420.9 ppm CO2
* OpenStreetMap
After recent storms there were a few trees blocking my way, and I couldn't get that close anyway.
Eat This Podcast latest episode: Crunch Time — Insects Are Not Going to Save Us
Dustin Crummett, executive director of The Insect Institute, tells me why he thinks the puffery about eating insects to save the planet is largely hot air inflating a bubble.
https://eatthispodcast.com/no-insects
I find it odd that anyone who found the Gutenberg editor in WordPress “deeply frustrating “ would not switch to ClassicPress. Maybe they looked and decided it wasn’t for them; if so, I would love to know why.
I've long known that the sky is polarised, but today I discovered while waking along the beach that rainbows are too. I happened to tilt my head to one side and a rainbow that had been faint and short became much brighter and extended across more of the sky. Strange.
I wish there were some kind of tool that would do a diff between two audio files so I could string together all the ums and ers and I means I've cut out and send them to the person that others praise for being so eloquent and fluent.
1 min read
* On foot
* 55.169166, -6.777712
* Tuesday 24 September 2024
* 420.25 ppm CO2
* [OpenStreetMap](https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=55.169166&mlon=-6.777712#map=14/55.16843/-6.78612)
I’ve been looking for baggable rabbits, but this graticulette is mostly sea, and even this one was out of reach except at low tide, which wasn’t for about another 6 hours.
Ayjay and lots of other good people wish Word would die in a fire. Me too.
Eat This Newsletter points the finger at
* alt-protein energetics: the sums don't add up
* breastfeeding: formula looks "less like brain damage and more like a really bad kindergarten teacher", and
* food allergies and intolerance: the immune system loses its mind.
https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/eat-this-newsletter-251-relevant/
"There are also tools to show me where my online images have been used so I can invoice people who use them without permission. But it’s a pain and I wish Flickr could do that with a click of a button. It might happen."
That would be a game changer, and maybe even profitable for Flickr on a small percentage.
Is it possible, in my wildest dreams, that the latest XKCD from Randall was inspired by a recent episode of Eat This Podcast?
https://xkcd.com/2982/
https://www.eatthispodcast.com/water/
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.
1 min read
* 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.
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.
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.
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/
[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.
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?
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/
