montage of 6 webpage screenshots: https://ecohustler.com/technology/blue-empire-the-norwegian-salmon-industry-consumes-25percent-of-all-wild-fish-caught-globally https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/curation-is-the-last-best-hope-of-intelligent-discourse https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/wmg/about/outreach/resources/turtlestitch/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3jrgYnljYI https://projects.kwon.nyc/internet-is-fun/ https://lessons.wesfryer.com/courses/coding/scratch-coding

School

Lessons by Dr. Wesley Fryer @wfryer – Scratch Coding We use Scratch a bit in class so adding this to a pile of links.

A variation on Turtle/Scratch stuff, there is some CPD coming up

Turtlestitch is freely available software that enables the generation and stitching of patterns using a digital embroidery machine. It gives programmatic control of the machine, enabling a wide range of patterns to be designed and stitched onto fabric. It was developed by Andrea Mayr-Stalder, and runs in a browser window.

Mac

TipBITS: Always Show Window Proxy Icons – TidBITS Bless TidBITS for this. I’ve been quiety grumbling for a while. As someone with poor window management I’ve alway loved proxy icons.

Internet

The role of human curators is not just to select and present content but to imbue the digital landscape with a sense of reliability and authenticity that only human insight can provide.

Curation is the last best hope of intelligent discourse. — Joan Westenberg

I’ve been meaning to write some kind of Important Thinkpiece™ on the glory days of the early internet, but every time I sit down to do it, I find another, better piece that someone else has already written. So for now, here’s a collection of articles that to some degree answer the question “Why have a personal website?” with “Because it’s fun, and the internet used to be fun.”

The internet used to be fun

Nature

Blue Empire: the Norwegian salmon industry consumes 2.5% of all wild fish caught globally | Ecohustler I avoid Salmon due to the sea lice and the effect on wild stocks here.

Music

Jumping right into the middle:

Since the castro problems I’ve been using Pocket Casts as my podcatcher. I don’t love it or hate it. I kept my Castro Pro sub going Now there is perhaps some hope.

We are excited to announce Castro has been purchased by Bluck Apps.

both Aurelian and Castro are designed to give a delightful experience to people who really love podcasts and listen to many of them. This is a niche, and we intend to serve that niche. If you have over 100 podcast subscriptions and listen to them all semi-regularly, you are probably one of our people.

Castro is Back

I’ve mentioned the app Aiko a couple of time. Until now I’d used it to transcribe podcasts to quote. Today noticed that it could export transcriptions as subtitle .srt files and I gave it a couple of wee videos that I had to remove1 from the Glow Blogs2 help site to comply with accessibility guidelines. Suffice to say I was very impressed with the results. Aiko is free and available for mac and iOS. Cute icon too.

Aiko app icon

  1. The plan was to add subtitles, but I ran out of time. ↩︎
  2. I am please to say I am back working on Glow Blogs on a part time basis. ↩︎

ipod classic screen with Radio Sandaig podcast episodes listed.

I found my old iPod last night, took a while to get it to boot, but I recorded a microcast just for nostalgia. I use this quite a lot around 2005-9 to record podcasts with my primary classes. There seem to be some interesting crackles added this time.

Suprisingly it mounted on my mac, I could drag the wav file to the desktop and convert to mp3, no other editing.
Continue reading

A montage of 9 webpages mention in the article.

Aide or Answer – Learning with Artificial Intelligence – Read Write Respond

With this in mind, for me I feel that AI tools are useful as an aide, but I am circumspect about using them as the answer. I guess time will tell.

Walk to Auld Wives Lifts I need to have a wee walk to the Auld Wives Lifts

Tom Coates on how Threads will integrate with the Fediverse

Who knows? Maybe we’ll get the interoperable shared, open social web that many of us have wanted for the last twenty plus years? Wilder things have happened. Fingers crossed?

A less positive view of Meta:

Meet ‘Link History,’ Facebook’s New Way to Track the Websites You Visit

As lawmakers introduce tech regulations and Apple and Google beef up privacy restrictions, Meta is doubling down and searching for new ways to preserve its data harvesting empire.

The company pitches Link History as a useful tool for consumers “with your browsing activity saved in one place,” rather than another way to keep tabs on your behavior.

Scripting News: Friday, January 12, 2024

That’s the thing we really need to escape from, being monetized. The only respectful way to be monetized is to pay for something worth paying for, roughly what it costs, plus a reasonable margin of profit.

RemovePaywall | Free online paywall remover

Remove Paywall works by finding archived versions of a website. These archived pages do not have a paywall
and allow readers to get the article without having to pay or being forced to log in.

Marlon James on Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, Authenticity as Pose, and Not Reading His Book Reviews ‹ Literary Hub

I think the thing about Led Zeppelin and the Stones is that they dig music–particularly black music–after the fact. The difference between them and Dylan is that Dylan digs culture as it’s happening. And I think that’s a big difference. It’s why Talking Heads sound like Talking Heads, you know?

Top 100 Tunes from Scotland 2023 (25–1): Young Fathers to Jesus & Mary Chain | The Herald

11 Michael Timmons & Yoker Moon – Practice

Recorded mostly live and apparently musically improvised with Glasgow electronic musician Yoker Moon, the East Kilbride songwriter Michael Timmons has placed an evocative and fragile lyrical hook within a tense computer generated soundscape.

My son-in-law at number 11