Category Archives: posse

These are sent to microblog which posts them to mastodon.

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3x3 grid of images, photos with a map in the centre. From topleft: The moon setting behind some trees, a sun lit orad, a sunling path trough bracken, a winter tree with the rising sun behind, the map, a raven wings outspread agaist a blue sky, an oak tree, a ranve perched on a rock, a buzzard in a hawthorn tree.

I arrived at the Kilpatrick hills car park at dawn this morning. It was already pretty full. Frosty with a clear sky. The full moon going down. More folk than usual on the tracks and paths. Saw a few redwing feeding on hawthorn along with blackies & thrushes.
Beautiful warm light to start, long shadows.
The frozen ground was much nicer than the usual bog between Loch Humphrey and Duncolm.
On Duncolm a raven circled diving & twisting with quiet croaks. Seemed unfazed by me and came quite close, shining in the sun. Saw a few more on the way back. A little egret in the horse field. I wonder if they come to the field when the tide is high. I saw this one at 12:30 and high tide at Old Kilpatrick was at 12:40 today. I’ll try and keep a note.
Nice view of a buzzard in a hawthorn near the road and a flock of fieldfares on the field and hawthorn.

Photos on flickr & on the

walkmap

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montage of 665 photos from flickr

As usual I’ve made a pummelvision style video:

The featured image is a montage of the same photos and here is an average:

An abstract gradient of green and blue tones with vertical bands.

Because I’ve now got a local database of my flickr photos it was easy to get all my tags of the year and make a wordcloud.

A word cloud with words like "fauna," "butterfly," and "kilpatrickbraes" in green on a black background.

And a slitscan (or a sort, given these are separate still images):

Abstract vertical striped pattern in green, brown, blue, and other colors

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I’ve read over 50 books this year, the most since I started noting on this site. Retirement from full-time work is beginning to reap benefits. Looking through the whole list I find my scoring system does exactly relate to the ones that stick in my memory most. Here are the 5 stars anyway.

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I am pretty pleased with On this Flickr Day and already find it fascinating to see photos from the same day across the years.

I left this with a few todos and have made progress.

  1. Create a way to produce JSON rather than a web page with PHP. I could then bring the thumbnails into this site using JavaScript.
    • Was fairly simple when I found json_encode($data,JSON_PRETTY_PRINT); for php. That could be fetched with JavaScript from my new index page.
  2. Add some sort of lightbox to see the images larger.
  3. Change the layout & appearance.
    • Worked a little on this especially for mobile. Using a css grid on desktop. I want to keep it as simple as possible.Still need a bit of a tidy. While I was searching I found out about Masonry which look like a nice way to go eventually. Introducing CSS Grid Lanes | WebKit is a good read.
  4. Figure out a simple way to update the database without completely rebuilding it.
    • Just checking the last 100 photos on flickr once a day with a cron job. I just truncated the original script that built the database. I’ve uploaded a photo or two most days recently and it seems to be working. I could probably cut the numbers checked to 50, as I don’t upload many photos.
  5. Decide on any extra fields and recreate the database.
    • Not done, but I think I want to add in a smaller image size so I can pull the json into WordPress and add tiny thumbs to my on this day page.
  6. Figure out why I can’t get location information from the database with PHP I can with bash.
    • This sorted itself out once I check there was some location data for the image in the json when it is received.

I’ve continued to talk to claude.ai a bit in the process. But I’ve been careful to ask for it to discuss approaches & not give me code. I’ve tried to describe my ideas and situation and finish with Can you run through some options & idea, without code? or similar. This has been really helpful. I continue to search for answers to problems with DuckDuckGo too as in the pre ai days.

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For the last 3 years I’ve tried to note one natural thing I saw each day. Here are 2025’s notes

I keep a yearly note in the drafts app and update the text file on my pi occasionally.

I’ve struggled to mange every day this year, perhaps because a lot of notes came from my commute?

I did write more in each note, which I decided on at the start of the year.

YearNumber of NotesAverage words per note
202336510.81
202430713.42
202522827.82

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Read: The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine ★★★★ 📚

She has read that in Belfast during the conflict there were séances because so many were taken unexpectedly, leaving behind unanswered questions and husbands, wives, children who didn't get to hear or say a last I love you. Who couldn't understand why they wanted an ectoplasmic gush of revelation or reassurance? All bullshit of course, but a dark table in a house, a woman in a mantilla, Miriam would go there, if she knew of such a place.

A girl is sexually assaulted by 3 of her "friends". The novel explores the families involved, individual's histories, personalities & class. Their stories are mixed in with other connected or disconnected fragments. No easy answers.