
Stonechats having a chat at Barassie Beach yesterday evening. Plenty of butterflies about too.

Stonechats having a chat at Barassie Beach yesterday evening. Plenty of butterflies about too.
#SilentSunday #Flora #Bloomstrolling #Bloomscrolling
A group of harebell, one of my favourite flowers, out this evening in Ardinning. First I’ve seen this year.
A young looking fox, all long legs & ears, runs out of a garden across the road, doubles back from the traffic. It runs between a couple of gardens so I cross the road & keek, the fox is sitting in the border looking straight back. A quick blurry phone pic & I leave quietly.
#silentsunday
Saw this lovely comma today, according to butterfly conservation the unusual wing shape allows them to hibernate among dead leaves.
Kilpatrick Braes. Warm & cloudy. Dozens of ringlets. Other species: photos of dark green fritillaries, small tortoiseshells & meadow browns. A few painted ladies & whites escaped me. Met a fox up the steep field. A sparrow hawk flew through the woods near the big fallen beech.
#SilentSunday #Birds
Blustery and bright. Along the Kelvin, Dalsholm to the Vet School. River high & brown. Butterflies: a few ringlets & whites, a tortoiseshell. A few dippers & finally a kingfisher circled the ‘dog pool’ near Dalsholm. Bright agains the river. Lots of Flowers.
Greenside track this afternoon. The weather ranged from almost dry through smirr, drizzle, to quite heavy rain. Quite dull and dark, brightened by lots of wild flowers. Including 3 species of orchid. #blookstrolling #bloomscrolling
#SilentSunday #birds
Warm and wet today, in the afternoon the sun came out as did a few Red Admiral and Ringlet butterflies round Gartnavel.
Barassie, lots of small whites (on wild radish) & small tortoiseshells( sea rocket) along the shore. The Tortoiseshells zooming along. Some heading quite directly out over the beach. Watch a couple of common blues circling around never settling. Hot day veering to muggy.
My blog got its name from an idea I tried to popularise: a Class Blog could be a wall display for everyone to see.
My own classroom displays tend to the messy. As I tidy up for the last time, 🎻, I took a few photos of today for my memory box.
I thought it might be worth noting this use of claide.ai. I’ve seen a wide variety of views on AI and its promise & pitfalls. When it comes to writing a wee bit of code I feel a lot of sympathy with Alan’s approach. But I have dabbled a bit and do so again this week.
I use gifsicle a bit for creating and editing gifs, it is a really powerful tool. I think I’ve a reasonable but limited understanding of how to use it. In the past I’ve used it for removing every second frame of the gif and adjusting the delay.
#!/bin/bash gifsicle -U -d 28 --colors 64 "$1" `seq -f "#%g" 0 2 20` -O3 -o "$2"
This is pretty crude and you need to manually edit the number of frames and guesstimate the new delay which will be applied to every frame1.
I know gifsicle can list the delays of each frame with the –info switch, but I do not know enough enough bash to use that information to create a new gif. I had a good idea of the pseudo code needed but I reckoned that the time it would take to read the man page and google my way to the bash syntax needed was too much for me.
This week I was trying to reduce a gif I’d made from a screen recording. It turned out a bit bigger than I had hoped. I tried a couple of application but didn’t make much of a dent. I decided to ask Claude:
I am using gifsicle/ I want to input a gif, and create a new one. Explode the gif, delete ever second frame and put an animated gif back together doubling the delay for each frame. So a gif with 20 frames will end up with 10 frames but take the same length of time. I’d like to deal with gifs that have different delays on different frames. So for example frame 1 and 2 the delays for these frames added together and applied to frame one of the new gif.
The original query had a few typos and spelling mistakes but Claude didn’t mind. After one wrong move, when Claude expected the gifsicle file name to be slightly different I got a working script and took my 957KB gif down to 352KB, that was the image at the top of the pos2t.
I had asked for the script to use gifsicle explode facility to export all of the frames. Which the script did, neatly in a temporary folder. As I typed up this post, looking at my original attempt, I realised I should not have asked for the script to explode the gif, but just grab every second frame from the original. This seemed more logical and perhaps economical, so I asked Claude to take that approach. The final script has been quickly tested and uploaded a gist: gif frame reduction in case anyone would find this useful.
Of course this has added to the pile of not quite formed reflections on AI and should we have anything to do with it. I don’t feel too guilty as I needed at least a little gifsicle knowhow to get started.
I met this snail this morning. I am wondering why its trail is ‘dotted’? Was it hopping;-)
It looked like it was going to rain this afternoon, so we had a quick walk up to Jaw Reservoir. Plenty of small heath butterflies about. Lots of foxgloves and plenty of bird song. A whinchat in a dead larch near the water.
#SilentSunday
#SilentSunday #BloomScrolling #BloomStrolling
Walked up to Greenside reservoir this afternoon. Still bright, but light grey coverage and a bit of a cool breeze, felt like rain on its way. First fritillary I’ve photographed this year. there were a few feeding on Fox & Cubs, colour match meant I nearly missed them.
Outdoor learning with my class today. Lines, angles & bearings in maths, some poetry writing & drawing. We also saw some lovely creatures. Green Veined White, Large Red Damselfly & Speckled Wood butterfly.
walkmap map, photos & note
Pretty & pretty exciting walk out to Duncolm this morning. Plenty of flora & fauna. First small heath, painted lady & small copper butterflies of this year. Watch an osprey fishing over Loch Humphrey for a about half an hour (that was the exciting bit).
#SilentSunday
Barassie Beach yesterday, A Sedge Warbler singing loud and clear, IDed by Merlin, got a photo. Super song.
I am finding Merlin a lot of fun, hearing and sometimes seeing birds I would have missed or dismissed.
#SilentSunday
Green Hairstreak. Walking from Braeval car park. Lovely sunny day. Dozens and Dozens of orange tips and Green Veined Whites, but I had my eye out for these wee guys. Eventually saw 3 and this one cooperated for a few seconds.
#silentsunday #waterfall #scotland
Walk to Greenside: cuckoos calling & cuckoo flowers. Lots of green, lots of singing birds hiding in the green. The Sun came out and so did green veined whites & orange tip butterflies. plenty of Goldfinches.
#silentsunday
A damp drizzly day, took a #bloomstroll around Gartnavel hospital grounds. #bloomscrolling. A lot of bird song, everything ‘misty wet with rain’.