Jeremy Cherfas
As my interest in the micro-wildlife on our terrace has grown I have found myself wanting to know more exactly what I am looking at. I don’t have any way to catch things, but I do have a macro lens on my camera. Problem is, the focal length is quite short, which means that in macro mode the subject can be about 1cm from the front of the lens. In addition to sometimes blocking the light, it alarms…
A good month, much of it away from home where, happy to relate, most of the plants survived the endless heat; heat that has been the worst of the time at home. Highlights of the month: The Umbrian week continued into July Real lamb for one dinner, not too-young abbacchio Kinda sorta got into attempted macro photography Bad computer trouble with overheated SSDs, but recovered Grape harvest; a…
Listening to James G talking to Rachel on the Wonders of Web Weaving podcast, one thing in particular caught my attention, and that was when she was telling James about her studio. It’s a 20–30 minute walk from home and she goes there in the evening after work to do creative things; woodworking, writing, other stuff too I imagine. I’ve long wanted a place like that myself. In fact, The Squeeze and…
The CMS engine that drives this site — Grav — has now been updated to version 2.0.18. Kudos to the Grav team for a very smooth process, very well explained. Of course I have a couple of niggles. It warns that there could be a problem with Twig content in a page, and handily flags up pages that might be problematic. But the warning does not take account for stuff that is enclosed in backticks,…
In a flash, I was 16 or 17, at my friend’s house round the back of King’s Cross, and trying to work out what in the world to do next. A link from Gwern had sent me to The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds , in which David Hill took his chances at a Diplomacy tournament. Those days, we didn’t know we were nerds, let alone alpha nerds. But we did play Diplomacy whenever someone could persuade their…
Having been away from home for a bit, and with nobody here to keep the crows coming by, it took a few days to reestablish our relationship. Truth be told, I'm still not that good at identifying individual birds to be able to say with any certainty that they are the same birds. Nevertheless, they're crows alright. And they like peanuts in the shell. And while some are quite timid, others are bold…
Last summer, I noticed an insect bringing a bit of leaf to plug the hole in a bit of bamboo that is part of one of those folding director’s chairs. Huh? A leafcutter bee , how interesting, and thought no more about it. I particularly failed to notice when, or indeed whether, any adults emerged earlier this year. They must have done; I think that’s some debris just visible in the hole on the left.…
A podcast I just listened to raised again the thorny issue of blogger’s guilt, and tried to make it seem like nothing, that you are answerable only to yourself, that you can blog at any cadence that suits you. Almost all bloggers, however, know that’s not true. That’s why there are so many blog posts that consist of little more than an apology for not blogging. As I woke from my nap, I thought I…
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:…
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.