Recent content on Michael Ian Lewis
This is a followup to Today I Learned 2024 , Today I Learned 2023 , Today I Learned 2022 and Today I Learned 2021 . 
 
 20 Feb 2025: It is likely that the Battle of Hastings in 1066 had a lunch break
 
 
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 The battle is likely to have begun around 9am, and lasted until around 6pm, which made it an unusually long battle for the era. Given the…

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 This post summarises the things I learned while I was an Airbnb host between Nov 2021 and Dec 2022. I did the short lets for my old flat in Shoreditch as an alternative to leaving the property vacant while I was trying to sell it. 
 It has taken until now to publish the post, because I wanted to complete the sale first (and…
This is a presentation I gave to the 7th International Open Search Symposium in Helsinki on 10 Oct 2025. It was part of their Industry Track on Alternative Search Engines. 
 One of the projects within the Open Search Foundation is Open Web Search which builds the Open Web Index , although they don’t have an end-user facing internet search interface. One of the objectives of this…
This is a presentation I gave at my youngest daughter’s primary school on 23 Sep 2025. 
 They were studying Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions, and I thought I might be able to give some useful input given my dad spent a number of years in Antarctica. Although not facing quite the same level of challenges as Shackleton, the time he was there (1958 to 1965) was closer to…
This is a followup to Today I Learned 2021 , Today I Learned 2022 and Today I Learned 2023 . As a reminder, these are serendipitous discoveries rather than the result of a dedicated search for new knowledge. Looking back, many are from places I’ve visited or major news stories, although the ones which appear a bit random must have been related to something I was doing at the time. 
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 The London LOOP is the London Outer Orbital Path, a 150 mile (242km) walking route which encircles the city, like a hiking equivalent of the M25 (the London Orbital Motorway). There’s more good info on the LOOP on the TFL and Ramblers sites. 
 I split the walk over 9 days between May and September 2024, averaging 15-20…

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 I’ve probably spent way too much time writing about cherry trees already (see Growing a cherry tree on a north-facing balcony 2019-2021 ). That said, I’d like to quickly jot down a few more notes, before hopefully wrapping up the topic once and for all:-) 
 
 2022
 
 
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This is a followup to Today I Learned 2021 and Today I Learned 2022 . 
 
 6 Jan 2023: September (from septem, the Latin for 7) was originally the 7th month
 
 
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 And October (from octo), November (from novem) and December (from decem) were originally the 8th, 9th and 10th months in the ancient Roman calendar which had 10 months. The preceding 6…
This is an overview of vector search and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) in the context of text data, illustrated with worked code examples, and some closing thoughts on their usage in practice. 
 It is primarily to clarify my understanding and for my future reference, and is likely to be updated with further information over time. It may be of interest to others, but those familiar with…

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 This is a kind-of followup to London to Orkney, and most of the NC500, in an electric car from August 2020. 
 I had thought that the main themes would be how much the battery had degraded in 3-4 years, and how much busier the charging points were, but actually neither proved to be especially problematic. 
 
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 The “three peaks” in this context are the three highest peaks in Great Britain 1 : 
 
 Scafell Pike, England, 978m 
 Snowdon (Yr Wyddfa in Welsh), Wales, 1085m 
 Ben Nevis (Bheinn Nibheis in Scottish Gaelic), Scotland, 1345m 
 
 Some people do the “ national three peaks challenge…

 The area
 
 
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 Moving to London in 1998
 
 
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 Moving to such a big city was a fairly big deal, given I had spent my early childhood years in a remote valley on a Scottish island, and later childhood years in a small town on the Scottish mainland. Indeed, when I had been looking for my first job…
This is a followup to Today I Learned 2021 . 
 
 30 Jan 2022: The Portuguese Man-of-war (the venomous siphonophore) is named after a warship
 
 
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 A man-of-war is a 16th to 19th century warship. The ones from Portugal are also known as caravels. Portuguese Man-of-wars are so named because they look a little like caravels at full sail. They…

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 This post contains information on how I’ve prepared my media files, including multichannel audio from DVD and SACD, for playback on my media server. 
 The media server is running on a Raspberry Pi with LibreELEC/Kodi , connected to a Denon received via HDMI (with AC3 and DTS passthrough configured), in turn connected…

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 This post contains two parts: 
 
 A brief history of previous media servers I’ve built, to give requirements and expectations some context. 
 A short review of the two main solutions I looked at this time around, i.e. Jellyfin and LibreELEC/Kodi. 
 
 It can be read in conjunction with Extracting…

 The demijohns
 
 
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 I had the unfortunate task of clearing the family home last year, and one of the things I found was a couple of dusty old demijohns. I had fond memories of the sound they made slowly burbling away under the stairs when I was a child. My parents used to make home-made wine (my favourite being parsnip wine or parsley wine - I…
I’m going to start keeping a list of random facts I learn. I’m primarily recording natural organic discoveries, e.g. from conversations with real people in real life, so most entries will have a personal story behind it, although I’m not recording those stories so it’ll be an exercise for the reader to imagine. There are actually some from before 2021 to make up for the…

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 The origin story
 
 
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 I like cherries, and for many years I’ve cultivated the notion that I’ll have “made it” when I can sit in my own garden underneath my very own cherry tree. Unfortunately, the realities of city-living have meant that I’ve been in flats…

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 Photos are pervasive nowadays. My children have had cameras in their faces from the moment they were born. Literally. And they struggle to understand how their parents could go for a year or more without a single photo having been taken of them. 
 In some ways the profusion of photos is a positive thing. It is always a…
Note: this post is now on blog.searchmysite.net at https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/searchmysite.net-update-seeding-and-scaling/ . 
 
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 It has been just over 2 months since I launched https://searchmysite.net . I’ve had some good feedback from the IndieWeb community in that time, and made some key changes as a result,…

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 A few years back, I was an avid reader of long distance electric vehicle road trip reports. It seemed like the people making them were intrepid pioneers in a new era of transportation. Well here’s my slightly belated contribution to the genre. 
 
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Note: this post is now on blog.searchmysite.net at https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/searchmysite.net-building-a-simple-search-for-non-commercial-websites/ . 
 
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 I’ve written previously about what went wrong with the internet and how to fix it , and one of the ideas I mentioned was a new model for search. Given…

 Then and now
 
 
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 I remember when the internet, or more specifically the web, was new. There was so much hope and optimism. Early adopters talked excitedly of the seemingly endless ways in which it would revolutionise so many aspects of society in positive ways. There was the idea that “information wants to be free”, where free, at…

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 This post is about a project to generate wav files with a neural network. These are files with the audio in the waveform domain, i.e. as sound samples such as that which might be converted to mp3 files. I had hoped to be able to generate some form of music, but both training and generation are proving too processor intensive at…
This is a short summary of some of the terminology used in machine learning, with an emphasis on neural networks. I’ve put it together primarily to help my own understanding, phrasing it largely in non-mathematical terms. As such it may be of use to others who come from more of a programming than a mathematical background. Note that there are some overlapping or even slightly different…

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 The first 2 sections are from Get Docker Engine - Community for Ubuntu , Post-installation steps for Linux , NVIDIA Container Toolkit and validation steps at TensorFlow Docker , so there’s not really anything new in those sections. However, the subsequent 5 sections contain notes about using Tensorflow with GPU support in…

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 I found a manuscript earlier this year (2019), written by my dad about his time in Antarctica between 1958 and 1965. Although he passed away in 1996, I thought it would be nice to publish it, primarily for the benefit of surviving family members. It had been typewritten rather than written longhand, so I didn’t think it…
Welcome to my personal site. I use it to keep notes on various topics I find of interest, mainly for my own future reference. It is more functional than ornamental, so extending the “ digital garden ” analogy, it is more of a digital vegetable patch than floral display. 
 For my professional services site, see https://aeliantech.com/ . 
 
 About me
 
 
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 This site has been built with Hugo and the hugo-coder theme, and is hosted on GitLab Pages . This post has some notes on these tools. 
 
 About Hugo
 
 
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 Hugo is a “static site generator”, which means that it prepares pages in advance of serving them. This is in…