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Category Archives: posse
Read: Buckeye by Patrick Ryan ★★★★ 📚
Say, forever. What is it about time that confounds us? We spend it. We save it. We while it away. We waste it. We kill it. We complain about not having enough of it, or about having too much of it on our hands. We regret what we've done with it. We give it away. We want it back. We say "time and again" when something is bothering us and "it's time" when something is supposed to end. Felix saw it so clearly: all we should ever want of time is more of it. Life was so simple when it was reduced to the barest of necessities: more time; more air; more Duke Ellington.
I raced through the 440 pages absorbed in the characters & situations. American small town story over two wars, two or three generations. The cast all damaged by birth, those wars & circumstances.
rss chat
I’ve been following the development of rss.chat on Dave Winer’s Scripting.com for a while. Dave set up a limited example at chat.rss and now an open one at https://demo.rss.chat which I joined. There dosen’t seem to be a promise that this particular server will stay up, but it offers the chance to try and explore.
rss.chat is a social network:
- Every user has an RSS feed with all their posts.
- The whole community has an RSS feed.
- There is an OPML file that lists all the users.
You can subscribe to those feeds if you want.
Introducing rss.chat – daveverse
from the same page:
I envision a world of small communities, running on small servers. We haven’t released the code for this yet, but will, under an MIT license.
Which is interesting. I remember, when I started using micro.blog, one of my thoughts was that it was the perfect model for a small community with particular interests. At the time I was thinking of education. I love everything about micro.blog but I do not see many there with my interests in education. As I understand it, Dave has no intention in supporting all of micro.blog’s features. In fact I think he hopes that other people will used the spec and concept to create different things:
Don’t think of this as a product Rob. Think about features you want in other people’s products. Think of this as a source of feeds, not a destination for them.
https://demo.rss.chat/?id=108
This is a very interesting way to think about a new piece of software. There are also some interesting ideas on the github issues including mentions of webmentions and WordPress.
Given the good weather there are quite a lot of butterflies around this week. This one looks like an old one that has been in the wars, black faded and very ragged. I wonder what tales it could tell. My butterfly by month page is building nicely.
Butterfly Morning at Greenside
Short walk to Greenside reservoir this morning. Warm, mostly sunny. Lots of butterflies around.
I’d guess I saw over 200 ringlets; a lot of painted ladies & meadow browns. A few common blues & red admirals ,one small tortoiseshell & a white of some sort. A few fritillaries bright orange and zooming around, never posing. I saw one I’d never seen before. It look to me, after consulting my book & the web, like a small skipper. According to the same research this doesn’t seem to be where they are expected? Unfortunately my camera threw an error while I was trying to get a different angle.
#Flora #BloomStrolling #BloomScrolling
Guided Tours in WordPress
I’d also love to know what you think of the broader idea. A WordPress Playground that doesn’t just show people a site, but actively teaches them how to use it.
Turn Any WordPress Playground Into a Guided Education Experience | Pootlepress
This looks like something with amazing potential, a way to build in guided tours in the WordPress editor. It works in the WordPress playground via pootleplayground.com. Pootle Playground helps you create blueprints for the WordPress Playground1.
There are technologies I know little about only have dipped my toe into. The featured image is a gif of a simple tour I created in a few minutes. It does look like there could be great potential for WordPress environments like Glow Blogs2. Teachers are busy multi-skilled people. Making a WordPress site might not be in their skillset but might be in their remit.
I could see something like these guided tours working not in the playground but in a site itself. A teacher or pupil could choose a tour to work through, say a class blog, e-portfolio or school site, the tour would take them through the steps to get started.
Today’s daily create #tdc5280 #ds106 #dailycreate #ShowYourStripes point toward the #ShowYourStripes webpage that very neatly shows
visual representations of the change in temperature as measured in each country, region or city over the past 100+ years
The site also links to #BiodiversityStripes
The ‘biodiversity stripes’ provide a visual representation of the change in biodiversity over time, often since 1970. The highest level of biodiversity is coloured bright green. Lower levels move through yellow to grey, depending upon the level of decline. Darker greys appear with greater declines.
This one shows the decline of UK moths from 1970 to 2018
86% decline in only part of my lifetime. Horrific. I was 12 in 1970, I remember when cleaning insects from a windshield was a thing.
In 2025, the now-annual survey conducted by Buglife in Kent found a decline of 66% in flying insects since 2021.
Kent bug splat survey shows ‘troubling’ fall in flying insects – BBC News
I am currently reading Aurochs and Auks by John Burnside, a wonderful book, which in part deals with the feelings around this terrible state of affairs.
Life in Links 67
A varied collection of links some of which have been sitting in my notes for a while.
Frank Cottrell-Boyce: ‘We’ve treated a generation of chil…
They miss school? “School is where our kids feel secure. It’s where they’re fed. It’s their happy place. They don’t like the summer.”
Many times in different schools I’ve head about children that are troubled by the approach of summer. This is a great article. I’ve been disappointed by the Observer since it changed hands but this was well worth a read. A podcast episode SNC Extra: Frank Cottrell Boyce on modern childhood – The Slow Newscast was great too. That link is to Castro, I could not find a url for the source episode, even in the acast rss feed!
Philip K. Dick’s Most Disturbing Writing Isn’t His Novels
He came to believe that an unchanging reality–the Ancient Roman time of 50 A.D.–existed permanently underneath our perceived reality that occasionally bleeds through into ours. And people could only notice it if they were sensitive (or perhaps unstable) enough.
LLMs aren’t the traditional Terminator androids that science fiction warned us about. The problem with these glorified chatbots is more subtle, and one Dick actually identified: they are extraordinarily sophisticated generators of pseudo-reality. Fluent, confident, plausible text (plus images and video) delivered directly into the heads of millions of people who have increasingly limited tools for distinguishing it from reality. Deep fakes. AI psychosis. Misinformation. These are the pseudo-realities Dick was worried about when they were created by institutions.
I’ve not read any PKD for quite a few years, might be time to revisit or read some different ones?
Back to books – Sweden’s schools cutting back on digital learning
Sweden’s government is championing a renewed focus on physical books, paper and pens in classrooms, designed to reverse falling literacy levels.
But doubling down on analogue tools has drawn criticism from tech companies, educators and computer scientists, who argue it could impact pupils’ employment prospects, and even damage the Nordic nation’s economy.
The pendulum swings…
I Accidentally Built a Completely New Type of Website | Pootlepress
https://scrappy.world/ is a wee bit like the mac freeform app. Another interesting “store in browser” app.
Print your own images using turmeric and sunlight | Popular Science
Sometime I wish I was back in school.
Breaking the Spell of Vibe Coding – fast.ai
Similarly, AI can produce grammatically correct, plausible sounding text. However, it does not directly sharpen your ideas. It does not generate the most precise formulations or identify the heart of the matter.
Bubbles I’ve actually been getting some traffic from this site! Feed of posts from independent sites, as they happen or in a voted list. I’ve not tried the my feeds which let you create your own list. Sign in via mastodon.
Cursor Camp noted this a while back. Some fun.
Read: Solace House by Will Maclean ★★★★ 📚
After sudden scalding exposure to the late twentieth century, and the garish monomania of the supermarket, it was joyous to return to the hospital, to the house. I found that I wanted to immerse myself in Solace House and its environs, gather it around me, cloak myself in it. I didn’t doubt, in that moment, that this was what Flayne had felt, sequestered here in his self-imposed exile.
Fun Gothic horror with magic mushrooms. A narrator who becomes more & more unreliable as the book gets weirder. I am not sure I really know what went on. Plenty of nineties details.