Category Archives: Micro

Posts that go to to micro.blogs/johnjohnston

Posted on
by

Read: The Heartbeat of Trees: Embracing Our Ancient Bond with Forests and Nature
by Peter Wohlleben, Jane Billinghurst(Translator)

★★★★☆ 📚

New science about trees back up with references mixed with personal rumination and experiences. The good trees do for us and the planet and the bad we do to them.

Some really fascinating snippets about tree biology too:

The trick to living another couple of decades or even centuries is to compost yourself. Fungi that enter via a wound in the tree convert the wood into a sort of humus as they eat their way through the tree, creating debris that is soft, crumbly, and moist. Now the tree can grow inner roots into this “soil” and reabsorb nutrients it stored in earlier years in its growth rings.

Posted on
by

Read: Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan ★★★☆☆ 📚
A novel Maddox up of short stories over 100 years linked by a Edinburgh tenement. Gothic, ghosts, queer, beat, crime and more. Some seemed to flow for me better than others. Probably best read in fewer sessions than I did.

Posted on
by
Listened David Winer from guykawasaki.com
I’m Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. This episode’s remarkable guest is David Winer. Dave is a programmer, entrepreneur, writer, and to some, a gadfly. The word ‘gadfly,’ by the way, means “An annoying person, especially one who provokes others into action by criticism.” That’s Dave, all right.

Listened: David Winer – Guy Kawasaki

Really good chat. Covering the birth of blogs, rss, podcasting and outliners.

Talking about the idea that apple networking, if better, could have made the web unnecessary:

David Winer: We had to give up the GUI. We went from having all this great user interface standards to the web, which had no user interface standards.

When I started using computers, a mac 475 and system 7 point something I really found the standardised UI a huge benefit.

Guy Kawasaki: …. but it seems like Apple and Spotify and Amazon, they’re now trying to gate-keep podcasting.

I’ve been podcasting since 2005 and really worry that the medium is being commercialised. Dave Winer was more pragmatic.

Interesting too to compare Dave’s podcasting routine with Guy Kawasaki’s extensive editing:

David Winer: I open up my iPhone, I turn on the Voice Memo app, talk for a while, I email that to myself, I upload it to a server, I put it on my blog. Goodbye.

The wee bit of audio was grabbed by Castro.

Posted on
by
Read Harrods Salmon at £245 a kilo
Wild salmon was on sale last week at the Harrods luxury  store in London for £245 a kilo, making the cost of the average salmon to be over £700, or around £60 for a single portion. Chips would prob…

The conditions that make this so are really depressing. I remember family holidays as a child in the 60s. We would buy a wild salmon for the freezer on the way home. This from netters on Galloway estuaries because the price was so good. I also recall seeing the nets in operation at the mouth of the Spey huge numbers of fish being caught.

Posted on
by

Barassie Beech yesterday. Bright & Breezy. Butterflies, common blue, grayling, ringlets, meadow browns & small heath.

Marvellous bright flora, harebells galore. Ringed Plover and chicks, it is amazing that these can hatch given the number of dogs, crows & gulls around.

Posted on
by
Liked Cory Doctorow: Tech Monopolies and the Insufficient Necessity of Interoperability (Locus Online)
It’s been 150 years since a lack of coordination among new Australian states created the “middle-gauge muddle”: a nation whose railroad tracks are laid at different widths depending on which part of the country you’re in. In 150 years, no one has figured out how to make a rail car that can change its wheelbase midway through its journey and after hundreds of attempts, Australia is giving up on interoperable rolling stock. Instead, they’re tear­ing up thousands of kilometers’ worth of rail and putting down new ones.

Enjoyable read. One of the things I love about blogging is rss which provides all sorts of interoperability. Micro.blog is a marvellous example.