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Likes Bop Spotter by Riley Walz.

installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below.

What a great idea. Webpage looks super too. via jwz.

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Likes Fighting for our web by Molly White.

We can build the web that we want to see, and we can return to that place where the web is a place of wonder, where all of us feel that same burning feeling of excitement as we push the web back towards the wonderful, beautiful, joyful place it ought to be.

I enjoyed listening this morning.

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Likes The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted by John Naughton.

How lovely to see Dave Winer’s 30 years blogging in the Observer on Sunday.

I either read or was told by a friend once that Dave Winer was always right if you waited long enough.

I certainly benefited from blogging, podcasting & RSS which Dave was pivotal in
Developing. I’ve also been lucky enough to play with some of Dave’s more recent tools which always makes you think.

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A few years ago1 I tested the WP OSM plugin. I didn’t get it to do exactly what I wanted so left it on the back burner. In the mean time I made a map system of my own. The plugin had been producing some security warnings from Jetpack and I’d deactivated it. Last week I saw some fixes and through I’d try it again. Using the gpx file I recorded last week and the associated flickr album2 I had another go.

I created the kml file with gvellut/flickr2kml, which is a command line app, to convert a flickr album url to a kml file with images. The map above combines the gpx track & kml file.

The result is not, so far, exactly what I hoped. I was thinking the images could be views at a larger size, or link to the bigger versions. I suspect I could use the flickr2kml templates to do that.

I am also wondering if I could overlay and overlap bigger versions of the images with some random transparency maybe something like this, but with some randomness:

Glen-Finlas-Dream-paths
Glen-Finlas-Dream-paths | John Johnston | Flickr

A few things to think about.

  1. 9 years ago, not sure where the time goes! ↩︎
  2. I used this in my own system: 2024-09-27 Finlas Loop ↩︎

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A composite image in a 3x3 grid showing various natural scenes, including hills, a reed bunting in bracken, deer on a hillside, a loop of fence wire hanging on a post, the map where the photos were taken, looking down to Finlas Reservoir, a rowan tree with red berries, woods, trees and moss, and water flow over rocks.

I went back to a familiar walk today. The circuit of small hills round the Finlas Reservoir. The day started very bright with a clear blue sky. Once I was past the farm I started hearing the stags roaring in the distance. I saw and heard a lot of deer today.

walkmap

Going up Creaghan Hill most of the flora had died back, a few sparks of bog and common heather and some scabious for the most part. The bracken dying back. More deer on the hill and on the way to Beinn Ruisg. Colder on the hill and it started to get cloudy from the north. Between Beinn Ruisg and Creag an Leinbh, I saw lot of deer, most gathered in groups with one or more roaring stags. Spent a while watching. A few chases between stags but nothing serious. One 12 pointer was most active, fighting reed beds and following hinds.

By the time I got to the unnamed top between Creag an Leinbh and Balcnock, I could see quite a lot of heave clouds to the north. Ben Lomond got one or two showers, but I stayed dry.

Walking along the fence from Balcnock I put up a couple of snipe. One from my feet. I could see the ‘form’ it had been hiding in, surrounded by splatter of white droppings.
I went further along the fence, or near to it, than normal, finally cutting down past the reservoir. The Rowan are well covered in berries. It is fascinating to see where they manage to grow out of the way of sheep and deer. They were really shining in the sun, the higher ones already leafless with very pale bark were particularly dramatic.

Given I’ve not walked much this year, I was quite pleased with my puff. Even though it took nearly 7 hours for 10 miles I did spend a lot of time sitting watching the deer. Didn’t see another human.

Also noticed, Ravens, Reed Bunting, Stonechat.