Category Archives: enviable stuff

Links/bookmarks/likes

Talking about it isn’t good enough / But quoting from it at least demonstrates / The virtue of an art that knows its mind. // Seamus Heaney : Squarings

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Likes Exploring WordPress, Textcasting, and Open Web Standards.

In this episode of the Fediverse Flows series, host Matthias Pfefferle sits down with pioneer technologist Dave Winer. The inventor of blogging, podcasting, RSS, and text casting. Together, they unpack the evolution of the open web, discussing why true interoperability and openness matter more than ever in an age of restrictive social media platforms.

The shownotes and transcript on this podcast are wonderful. The Takeaways, provide a great summary and worth reading after you listen.

I’ve been reading Dave Winer’s blog since I discovered rss. I’ve tried many of his more recent tools, including WordLand & FeedLand which he discusses here1.

Matthias Pfefferle is an IndieWeb & WordPress developer. I use his sempress theme & several of his plug-ins2 on this site. Recently he has been developing the ActivityPub – WordPress plugin . This allow your WordPress site to function as a federated profile. I’ve not tried that as I currently posse posts from here to mastodon via micro.blog.

Anyway, I’m a big fan of both participants.

A few interesting things

of the many in the podcast.

I don’t believe in comment sections on blogs, though. I think we could live without that, actually

Dave Winer

Like Alan I do like comments. I’ve read about bloggers who do not and mostly they are the ones with huge audiences. Apart from valuing the conversation, comments & even likes, which I fetch back via brid.gy, it does let me know that sometimes I am not writing into the void. I’d still blog for the void but it is nice to get some contact.
I’d guess bloggers like Dave dislike comments because of the way they can go on big sites.

But over time, what I hope happens is that people find that Wordland’s editor isn’t what they want. They want a different editor because you know what? There’s no one kind of editor that would please everybody.

Dave Winer

I’ve found this one of the most compelling reasons for exploring WordLand. WordLand is quite an opinionated editor. It has led me to think about all the different ways I’ve posted in the past and try out a few other options.

I think most of the younger generations are not aware of what a link is, what a URL is. They simply use one social network, and if they search for other users, they have that little search box and they search for the username. They do not understand that in a decentralized world that they may have to copy and paste URLs to find a new.

Matthias Pfefferle

This really spoke to me as a teacher. I am saddened by the way that even browsers hide paths after domains, and pupils just grab whatever google tells them. I have been surprised twice in the last few years by young kids, 9-11, doing something smart with urls or parameters.

I really enjoyed listening to this episode, lots of food for though. The ideas discussed become complicated quite quickly. A bit like the IndieWeb in general. Dave has of course been aware of WordPress but only recently started using it in earnest. Matthias comes from a different direction, the IndieWeb and Activity pub.

I’ve also now listened to another WordPress podcast with Dave: #186 – Dave Winer on Decentralisation, WordPress and Open Publishing – WP Tavern.

In this one Dave’s optimism and enthusiasm really shines through. I don’t know who it was told me, or maybe I read it somewhere: if you wait long enough Dave Winer is always right, Not sure that is true of anyone, but Dave Winer is always interesting & though provoking to read or listen to.

  1. Other products of Dave Winer I’ve used recently include:
    BingeWorthy 3
    Drummer
    1999.io ❤️
    ↩︎
  2. indieweb/wordpress-indieweb
    wordpress-indieweb-press-this
    WebActions for WordPress
    A Webmention plugin for WordPress
    ↩︎
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Likes I Do Not Remember My Life and It’s Fine by Marco Giancotti.

Intriguing
via Steven Splinter

This is a fascinating read! I had a shallow understanding of what aphantasia is before reading this account of trying to remember without access to mental imagery.

Where the comments are interesting too.

I feel I’ve more than a touch of this, I don’t really visualise, have a less than perfect memory, and my facial recognition is poor. I am quite good with knowing where I am and navigation.

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montage of six webpages listed in article

Craig Mod on The Talk Show

Interesting take on the morality of using AI

But I have a hard time parsing out what is moral or amoral about how this stuff is being used, or how the information’s been gleaned, or whatever it’s been sucked up from.

-✂️ snip-

00:03:25 ◼ ► I don’t use any of the photo generation crap or whatever.

00:03:28 ◼ ► What I do think is profound, and I feel like it’s way more morally defensible, is the code generation stuff, just because of all the open source stuff, yada, yada

The Talk Show ✪: Ep. 421, With Craig Mod

The Sea

▶︎ The Sea | Francisco del Pino/Charlotte Mundy | Notice Recordings

wilding.radio

From the famous Knapp estate via Joe

we have installed a solar-powered, quadrophonic live audio feed just north of the dam: A pair of hydrophones brings us closer to the sounds of the water itself and reveals the tiny sounds of fresh-water organisms. A pair of microphones in a fallen willow tree let us get to know the birds and mammals that live near and visit the water and hear the play of weather in the trees.

wilding.radio

Organic Maps

I’ve installed this on my phone with the intention of giving it a shot for recording walks.

Organic Maps is a privacy-focused offline maps & GPS app for hiking, cycling, biking, and driving. Absolutely free. No ads. No tracking. Developed with love by the open-source community. Powered by OpenStreetMap data.

Organic Maps is one of the few applications nowadays that supports 100% of features without an active Internet connection. Install Organic Maps, download maps, throw away your SIM card, and go for a weeklong trip on a single battery charge without any byte sent to the network.

Organic Maps: Offline Hike, Bike, Trails and Navigation

Poetry on the line

Quite delightful raspberry pi project.

 a vintage phone brought to life with Raspberry Pi

Poetry on the line: a vintage phone brought to life with Raspberry Pi – Raspberry Pi

My ‘secret strings’ game to unlock ‘texts’ 

Looks like a good classroom activity.I’ve done similar occasionally but the prompt is much better than mine.

 You tell the children/students that they are going to be poem or story ‘detectives’ and their job is find the ‘secret strings’ in a poem or story – or play or any ‘text’.

Secret strings run within texts linking words, phrases, sentences and pictures or ‘images’. The students’ job is to find them. 

Sometimes the link is to do with sound – eg alliteration, assonance, rhythm, rhyme, repetition, long phrases, short phrases. 

Michael Rosen: My ‘secret strings’ game to unlock ‘texts’ (stories, poems, plays, non-fiction etc)
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Likes “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI by Molly White.

Irresponsible AI companies are already imposing huge loads on Wikimedia infrastructure, which is costly both from a pure bandwidth perspective, but also because it requires dedicated engineers to maintain and improve systems to handle the massive automated traffic. And AI companies that do not attribute their responses or otherwise provide any pointers back to Wikipedia prevent users from knowing where that material came from, and do not encourage those users to go visit Wikipedia, where they might then sign up as an editor, or donate after seeing a request for support. (This is most AI companies, by the way. Many AI “visionaries” seem perfectly content to promise that artificial superintelligence is just around the corner, but claim that attribution is somehow a permanently unsolvable problem.)

A good post to read or listen to at the beginning of  Scottish AI in Schools week . The article does not want the stable door closed.

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A montage of 4 webpage screenshots.

Bookmarked for future reading. AI in education is becoming increasingly confusing.

Education Scotland are running a week #ScotAI25: Scottish AI in Schools 2025 with live lessons for pupils & some cpd for staff. I might try to make some of those.

  • This week I’ve used:
    ChatGPT to make some questions up about a passage of text for an individual in my class; Write an example text about levers; create a formula for a number spreadsheet and create a regular expression.
  • Claude to make a fractions matching game and a trivia quiz.
  • I am occasionally using lovable.dev to play around making an alternative way of posting to WordPress.

I might have used ChatGPT a couple more times in school. Although it is accessible the login options didn’t seem to be so I’ve no history to check.

Quite a few teachers I know use it in some of these ways in a, like me, fairly causal way. This is a lot easier than thinking about any ethical and moral implication.

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I am still posting using WordLand from time to time. Dave Winer opened the service to everyone, on Friday. I’m reading round it as much as I can:

Aziz Poonawalla wrote a review to which Dave responded.

Andy Sylvester gave it a try, posting a video of his first use. Andy is thinking aloud, a process I always enjoy watching others do.

Manton noted:

its own RSS feeds outside of WordPress. The feeds have both HTML and Markdown. So you could build platforms (like Micro.blog!) that aggregate user feeds.

Manton Reece

Which points to the idea your blog could be, without the WordPress bit, an RSS feed that can be piped everywhere. For example: It could go to micro.blog and then be pushed on to lots of other places.

It has surprised me that WordPress does not have a bigger range of ways to post. I hope WordLand will start a trend. Personally I do not use one particular editor, depending on the type of post I am making.

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Screenshot of webpafges linked to in the article.

Here are few really interesting posts I’ve found on Mastodon.

The Really Dark Truth About Bots – YouTube via rg4w (@FourthWorld@mastodon.online) – Mastodon is a tangled web indeed. Worth a listen unless you are overwhelmed by recent news.

Apple is removing iCloud end-to-encryption features from the UK after government compelled it to add backdoors – 9to5Mac from Ian Betteridge (@ianb@well.com) – Mastodon who wrote on his own blog:

And it’s worth saying again: what Apple is offering is still as good as Google, Microsoft, etc, none of which offer zero-access encryption for file storage. There are remarkably few companies that do: the only one I’ve come across is Proton, whose Proton Drive is hosted in Switzerland, subject to Swiss privacy laws, and zero-access encrypted by default. If you’re currently using Advanced Data Protection for file storage, they are worth a look.

from: Apple’s Advanced Data Protection: what’s going on in the UK?

I am not a user of Apple Advanced Data Protection myself. But this is interesting from the tech/politics pov. And we don’t know when we might need a bit more encryption & privacy.

FastScripts 3.3.5: Live Script Progress and Other Fixes – from the horses mouth: Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass@mastodon.social) – Mastodon. FastScript is one of my very favourite mac application. It allows me to do lots of things fast. Limited only by my own lack of skills with AppleScript & shell.

Talk about the thing itself – annie’s blog via bradenslen (@bradenslen@indieweb.social) – Indieweb.Social

Lots of very smart stuff about introducing technology to people.

When I introduce you to my friend, I don’t say: “This is Angela. She’s made of bones that connect to each other with cool joints so she can bend her skeleton. On top of the bones, she’s got muscles! And then there’s skin, which is the part_ _you see now! The skin is important because it holds everything together and lets you interact with Angela without being all grossed out.”

I say something like: “This is Angela. I know her from college. She’s into geology, like you.”

I’ve spent a fair bit of life introducing technology to pupils & teachers. Especially with the latter I’ve made the mistake of wanting folk to understand and love something the way I do. (RSS for example).

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Montage of 4 webpages linked in post:

Things that cheered me up today.

bradenslen pointed me to this:

England, like most countries, is more of an imagined place than anything objectively real. Its ordinanced borders are merely state stories. We who live here know its true thresholds are the salted shore, ends of lanes where magic lives. We all make it up as walk its ways. – #CLNolan

[image or embed]

— hookland.bsky.social (@hookland.bsky.social) January 23, 2025 at 5:02 PM

It’s a win for butterflies! Government refuses emergency use of banned butterfly-killing pesticide on sugar beet | Butterfly Conservation

But Environment Minister Emma Hardy decided not to grant the authorisation for emergency use of Cruiser SB, which contains the butterfly-killing neonicotinoid thiamethoxam prohibited since 2018 – the first time in five years the application has been turned down.

Post by @climagic@mastodon.social
View on Mastodon
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Likes why post, what to post, and how to post by Tantek Çelik.

Here are a few specific reasons why you should post:

* Search everything you write. Do you post long comments or issues on GitHub? Do you post on public mailing lists? Post such things to your own site, so you can more easily search everything you’ve written on a topic. Then post a copy to those external destinations.

Lots of other ideas. Including Use a local text editor, I do sometimes. I used to use TextMate pretty exclusively, but drifted away because of post kinds, then blocks. Thinking about it a good bit more since testing WordLand, which I am enjoying.