Category Archives: posse

These are sent to microblog which posts them to mastodon.

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Over the last few years, my blogging has slowly became less social. I thought I might reboot that by responding to Knowember, get to know your blogger – Robert Birming. I’ve been enjoying visiting the sites of other blogs listed on Robert’s page. It is good to move outside your ‘local’ area and get some serendipity. Some great rabbit holes.

A photo

Autumn colours, cloudy hills and a valley reflected in the still water of Finlas Water reservoir.
Finlas Water Reflection

I take a lot of photos, but am no photographer. I think of them as notes of nice looking or interesting things, ways of telling a story, a memory. Recently I’ve been posting sightings of flora & fauna to iNaturalist where a not very good photo can still be useful. I also enjoy the #SilentSunday hashtag on Mastodon. I mostly post via this site: Silent Sunday.

Name or nickname

My name is John Johnston, mostly online as johnjohnston. Occasionally, when that is taken, I use troutcolor, but no one has ever called me that. I started on Flickr. I like trout; I used to love fishing. I usually spell colour colour.

Where in the world I blog from

I’ve lived in Glasgow for almost 50 years, apart from occasional posts from wee holidays or alway days, I post from home. One of the best things about Glasgow is how quickly you can get to some sort of quiet countryside.

The blog is WordPress and I like to type in TextMate & drafts.

What my blog is mostly about

It started off about my use of, what was then called, Web 2 technology in the primary school classroom. It developed to include some technologies I am interested in; walks, mostly short; photos, mostly butterflies in the summer; links I like and books I’ve read. Now I am mostly retired the classroom has dropped off. I still read some education sites. The bigger tags in my cloud are classroom, blogging & WordPress. I don’t write about family, feelings or politics very much at all.

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A collage of nine website screenshots, including a film-trailer selector, globe game, bird-identification page, literacy article, citizen-science site, salmon campaign, Guardian article, art exhibition page, and an older education blog.

Links I’ve collected at Links and Notes recently.

Fun

Trailer Time Machine Watch random film trailers from a year of your choice! I have clicke through a few from the year I was born (1958) and the year I went to university 1976, 58 seems a better year so far. Great fun.

I never got the wordle habit but I am finding these interesting:

MapTap.gg – Daily Geography Game I have been playing this for a week or two every day.

Birdle UK | Guess the Daily Bird

a fun way to encourage more people to learn about birds and bird conservation, no matter their experience level.

Facinating

The Right Words in the Right Order I posted about this earlier. LLMs, education, humanities & screens.

Chronolog 

Timelapses of Earth powered by community science. Used by organizations worldwide to monitor the environment and inspire stewardship.

Via @dogtrax. There is a map: Map | Chronolog. This looks great. Crowd sourced timelapses. There are none in Scotland.

Nicola Turner | 1 October – 7 November 2026 – Overview | Annely Juda Fine Art

A site-responsive installation made mainly from dark wool and horsehair will fill the ground-floor galleries at 16 Hanover Square, extending in a procession-like manner that continues 12 metres up the façade of the Georgian townhouse. Inline with Turner’s practice, the installation will reference the fascinating history of the building, whilst touching on myriad issues such as shame associated with the female experience, secret-keeping and the inherent ‘memory’ of materials.

Frightening

End Salmon Farming – Project Slingshot

All Scottish salmon sold in supermarkets comes from overcrowded, filthy, underwater factory farms, where parasites and flesh-eating sea lice are endemic. Investigators have filmed fish with damaged and missing eyes and whole chunks of their flesh eaten away.

Years ago I had a wee picture of the colour chat fish farms used to choose the colour of the salmon flesh on my sidebar linking to attempts to clean up salmon farming. Looks like it i still a problem.

Why Arturo Béjar left Meta – and blew the whistle: ‘I don’t recall Mark ever being empathetic’ | Social media | The Guardian

24.4% of 13-15-year-olds on Instagram said they had received unwanted advances, and 21.8% said they had been the target of bullying on the platform in the past seven days. Furthermore, 51% of Instagram users said they had had a bad or harmful experience in the past seven days. Only 1% of them reported it, and of those, 2% had the content taken down – so just 0.02%. This was a far greater degree of harm than the company’s existing measurements suggested. Zuckerberg never replied.

Finally

John @ Sandaig Primary John’s Feeds Some nostalgia from the internet archive, sites I followed via RSS in 2007. Not many still active.

These are the sites I read in my feedreader, I just exported them all and converted the export to html.
The only feeds that are missing are the useful to me but no one else ones, comments on my flickr stream, del.icio.us links for me etc.