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Packaging for the "World’s Sharpest Knife," showing a serrated blade cutting a red tomato and marketing text.

I think it must have been about 20 years ago. I was in the supermarket and they had a guy demonstrating these kitchen knives. He sliced a lot of things up quickly, thinly and efficiently.

The knives, from China had lifetime guarantee.
I noticed he had a lot of plasters on his fingers.
There was a deal where you could buy 3 of the larger sized ones very cheaply. I bought 3, a very small paring knife and a fish filleting knife.

Later as I left the store I saw the salesman being handed over by the security guards to some policemen. I think he had been shoplifting.

I’ve still got the knives. Most of them are still quite sharp. I now prefer my heavier cook’s knife for chopping most things. They are good bread knives.

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Speckeld wood butterfly, wings outstretches resting on a stone

Flickr By Month

A while ago I thought it might be interesting to be able to search Flickr and organise the results by the month that the photos were taken. Over the last couple of days I’ve made the system a little better. The page searches my Flickr photos and displays them in the months they were taken.

I’ve changed the default search to butterfly as I am taking quite a lot of photos of them at the moment. It is potentially useful to be able to see what to expect at different times of the year. The page takes a parameter of t to display a different search:

https://johnjohnston.info/flickrcal/?t=bird

The main change I made was to add some caching, getting the results of a Flickr search can be slow, so this speeds up repeated searches. I also made the sorting a bit more logical. The display of thumbnails is basic and they just link back to Flickr. I might think of making them look a little better maybe opening a lightbox? I also hope to deal with results of > 500 where I would need more than one call to the Flickr api.

This fits very well with my approach to photography. I think of my photos like a diary rather than great photos. I am still shooting auto 99% of the time. I enjoy looking back at pictures in the same way as I like reading old blog posts. I also think it could become more useful over the yeas in letting me know what to look out for.

I also wonder if I could use the same idea for a search of everyone’s photos using a bounding box to limit the area.

The featured image is of a specked wood, my current favourite butterfly.

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A goldfinch feeding a oungster, in hawthorn bush covered with bright red berries, sky very blue behind.

On Monday I was planning a walk but it felt a bit hot to go to the hills. I got the train to Milngavie and walked back down the Kelvin walkway to Glasgow.

A dirt path through a dense green forest with sunlight filtering through the leaves.

Saw the first kingfisher on the Allander water which kept my eyes on every overhanging branch for a while.

Both the Allander and the Kelvin are lined with the pink stink of Himalayan Balsam. The path quite overgrown in places with nettles, thistles & brambles making shorts a poor choice.

Despite the warm weather the rivers are quite full. Less butterflies than I expected, green-veined whites all long the way.

Everything seems to have come to autumn early, brambles, acorns and already red hawthorn berries.

Once back in Glasgow I was looking across the river and saw a reflecting, the colour and shape of a foxes ear. Lying in the balsam above was a young looking fox. It didn’t look quite right, spread and very still. Zooming in I couldn’t see breathing and it was still when I made a loud clap. My second kingfisher of the day arrowed past.

Once I got to the science park I saw a couple of specked woods. Birds along the way: a kestrel, mobbed by wee birds; warblers, and goldfinches. I watched one goldfinch feeding a youngster in those incongruous hawthorn berries.