Category Archives: posse

These are sent to microblog which posts them to mastodon.

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Witch's Butter Fungi growing on a gorse branch

I continued to try and note one ‘natural” thing every day. Fell short, especially towards the end of the year. Leaving for work and getting home in the dark does not help. Here is the 2024 list. I don’t keep the online list up to date, just every month or two.

I also tried to record/podcast each month, but stopped after August. I do enjoy the process. But I suspect I had an audience of none.

I am going to continue in 2025, perhaps making each note a little longer, 2 or 3 sentences. So far:

2025-01-01 Rainy morning. Dumping the rubbish. A very black and shiny crow was making a lot of noise on a neighbour’s washing line. Round the front the traffic is sparse. Across the street, in a pollard, a blue tit is calling.

2025-01-02 Clear blue skies and frost. High tide, at the end of a small rocky outcrop a heron hunches away from the sea and cold. A starling perched high by drain hole under the eaves making experimental sounds.

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According to my Books page I’ve read 49 books so far this year.

There are the ones that I gave ★★★★★, in my rather careless system.

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Read: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel ★★★★★📚
A subtle & grownup take on the post apocalypse novel. I think I enjoyed everything about this. Flits between characters & time before & after the Georgian Flu which kills 99% of the population.

None of the older Symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended.

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A timely idea arrives from several directions. Podcasts I listen to.

I listen to podcast pretty exclusively when commuting. I am in the car nearly a couple of hours a day. I seldom listen elsewhere. If I am on foot I prefer to listen to what is around me. At home I listen to music when cooking.

Here are some regulars.

The BBC

I wish the BBC and everyone else made it simpler to find RSS feeds.

Tech

  • I listen to Core Init, by Manton and Daniel it is aimed at Mac developers, but often strays onto blogging, AI and other interesting topics.
  • More Mac: ATP & The Talk Show, I don’t listen to all of the episodes but catch up with one occasionally.
  • WordPress briefing. Seems to have dried up as the host moved out of a role at WordPress.

Other

Recent additions

Huffduffer

I like to listen to odd episodes of podcasts without subscribing. Huffduffer created a RSS feed from audio on webpages. I mourn the passing of Huffduffer-video which let you add YouTube and other media to your huffduff feed as audio. Using the huffduffer bookmarklet is interesting. Increasingly some podcast hide links to audio files. This leads to some tedious workarounds. (Find the rss link, open that in Firefox and copy the episode audio url).

John Johnston on Huffduffer is what I’ve huffduffed.

Castro Sideloads

The app I use to listen to podcasts has a few nice features. You can just drop an mp3 into an iCloud folder and it appears in the app. Better still you can use an app extension to get audio from a webpage or rip a YouTube to audio. I hope that it will replace huffduff-video for me for video.

For what it is worth here in my Castro opml export and some of them as html. The html has links to the site and RSS1.

Many of the feeds in my opml are no longer being updated. Some I subscribed to long after they existed. Castros’s triage system, allowing you to build a play order from feeds is very handy for this.

  1. My horrible combination of google sheets and bash didn’t manage to convert them all. Castro’s opml export didn’t have links to the sites, just the RSS. ↩︎