- Permian Designs mixed media & photos.
- Amanda Thomson
My creative practice is ideas and research-led and fuses creative non-fiction; traditional and digital printmaking techniques, photography, bookmaking, video and sound and 3-dimensional work. I’m interested in how we are located (and locate ourselves) in the world, notions of space and place and ideas of belonging. A lot of my work – in art and writing – is about nature, flora and fauna, and rooted in the highlands of Scotland, where I’m at my happiest.
- out of books
Inspired by Boswell & Johnson’s 1773 journey to the Hebrides, Out of Books is an illustrated guide to Ken Cockburn & Alec Finlay’s modern-day interpretation. Read- ing the text in landscapes their predecessors described, they will invite people to join them at readings & guided walks. Visiting libraries, they will select books that update the themes Boswell & Johnson mused upon.
- The Road North (2010–11) Podcast
The Road North (2010–11) is a word-map of Scotland, composed by Alec Finlay & Ken Cockburn as they traveled through their homeland, guided by the Japanese poet Basho, whose Oku-no-Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North) is one of the masterpieces of travel literature. Ken and Alec departed Edinburgh on May 16, 2010 – the very same date that Basho and his companion Sora departed Edo in 1689. The result of their journey is a collaborative audio & visual wordmap realised as a blog, book, and audio recording, describing the landscapes they have seen and people they met. This audio accompanies a book-length poem published by Shearsman in October 2014. This recording is an abridged version of the poem, performed by Alec Finlay, Ken Cockburn, and Lila Matsumoto, with sound design by Geoff Sample
- Poetry By Heart | KS2 Timeline
- Jenny Mackness – Jenny Connected
With the realisation that my years ‘are numbered’, I am keen not to waste time on things I am not interested in and to remain open to new learning opportunities; these currently lie in philosophical subjects such as epistemology, ethics and philosophical literature. I closely follow the work of Iain McGilchrist and Stephen Downes, both of whom have influenced my thinking. I have realized that at this stage of my life, art, music, the natural world and interpersonal relationships are all becoming increasingly important. This, I think, relates to what Iain McGilchrist refers to as the need for an embodied life.
- Openverse
Openverse is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone.
Openverse searches across more than 300 million images from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset. It goes beyond simple search to aggregate results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog, and facilitates reuse through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution. - Kinopio
Spatial Thinking for New Ideas and Hard Problems
looks like a fun interface
Tag: lifeinlinks
Life in Links 44

Mostly School and TiddlyWiki things.
- The Subsume Plugin — Turn links into sliders! TW plugin for using the html details tag. Sliders seems a little misleading, I’ve added this to the maths TW I am making which pulls together E&Os, Benchmarks and resources.
- Font Awesome — using Font Awesome with TiddlyWiki 5 could be used to prettify a wiki.
- Mini Mangonel – Alom Shaha blog with some pretty simple making stuff for the classroom.
- Outdoor Learning ideas Outdoor Learning Resources
- Digital Downloads | Dust-to-Digital We increase access to hard-to-find recordings via preservation, research, and production
Life in Links 43

- Download your artist activity pack | Stay inspired at home | Firstsite
Firstsite’s mission is to improve the well-being and life-chances of all residents of East Anglia through innovation, ingenuity and creativity. We empower people, no matter their background, to be creative together and lead happier and healthier lives.
This page has several pdf downloads of art activities that looks as it they could be useful in school. I’ve been trying to avoid school related things over the holidays but there are a lot of interesting links out there.
- A Year Of Posts to Notes Conversion – Interdependent Thoughts Reading your own old blogs posts every day. I do this, not every day but most of them using my On This Day page. I mostly fix typos, links and the like.
- Oh Hello Ana – Blogging and me I really enjoyed this post it is from a web developers perspective but it applicable to most bloggers I think. I particularly liked the bonuses of blogging:
Searchable; Memories that you own and are in control of;
- Talking of blogging, Multiverse is a new thing, for the personal site that is different. Easy to set up, I did that in June and sort of forgot. style is Macpaint & HyperCard with gaudy colours, could be fun.
- Talking of blogging 2, Joe Jenntt’s ‘dailywebthing daily pointers posts to a really wide variety of mostly personal sites, this leads to many rabit holes. Joe’s the dailywebthing linkport is wonderful for web development links.
- Access Guide
is a friendly introduction to digital accessibility – specifically to help understand WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), the official resource for legal compliance.
One of many I found via Joe’s site. This looks like a very easy entry to thinking about accessibility. I di a bit of cleaning up on the glow Blogs site early this year and could have done with this then.
- For one tide only: modernist sandcastles – in pictures | Art and design | The Guardian
Featured image, spider and young, my own.
Life in Links 42

The Spring Holidays, like others will increase my blogging. It has been a busy term both home learning and back in school. Looking forward to a holiday of wee walks (still stuck in Glasgow) and some random browsing.
- Johnny•Decimal a system for organising. Been a bit of discussion on micro.blog. Sounds good, I made a start with the mess that ins my OneDrive folder, but need to re-read the instructions and start again I think.
- Himalayan Balsam | Scottish Invasive Species Initiative
The Scottish Invasive Species Initiative (SISI) is a 4-year partnership project which aims to work with local organisations and volunteers to control invasive non-native species along riversides in Northern Scotland, for the benefit of our native wildlife and communities.
I see quite a bit of Himalayan Balsam around, quite pretty but a nasty smell.
- Contemplation. Dramatically Improving Your Photography With Reading via #tds2104 Contemplative Image Reading | The Daily Stillness This looks like an interesting practise.
via @wonderofscience- OpenSeadragon An open-source, web-based viewer for high-resolution zoomable images, implemented in pure JavaScript, for desktop and mobile.
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"At startup, an Android device sends Google about 1MB of data, compared with iOS sending Apple around 42KB. When idle, Android sends roughly 1MB of data to Google every 12 hours, compared with iOS sending Apple about 52KB over the same period." https://t.co/nPXiM8Tqi6
— Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) March 31, 2021
- George Oates Returns to Revitalize the Flickr Commons | Flickr Blog
- Cuba is a vaccine powerhouse and Capitalism and greed gave Britain its vaccine success, PM Johnson says | Reuters via Micro.blog – @rom
The Featured image is Maxwell dynamic machine, 1961 | Science Museum Group Collection © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence found via the Never Been Seen | Science Museum Group Collection page, which I learnt about from Ian Guest
Life in Links 41

- Primary Maths – Starting Points Maths interesting set of exercises and discussions.
- Raspberry Pi dog detector (and dopamine booster) uses a raspberry pi to notify when a dog ones past the window using YOLO: Real-Time Object Detection to detect the dogs from a video stream. I almost started replicating this but stopped myself just in time.
- Scratch
Here you can find a number of Scratch projects to teach primary pupils, and in particular to scaffold learning for students with special educational needs. We recommend teaching pupils about the concepts in order: Sequence > Input > Repetition > Selection > Variables > Other. In each section there are a number of projects you can use to explore code, modify or extend existing projects or to fix a program, by debugging or ordering code.
Looks as if it might be a good way to cover scratch. I used a few ideas during lockdown.
- INTERFACE CRITIQUE — Olia Lialina: FROM MY TO ME
Webmasters of the 1990s built homes, worlds and universes. But also, outside of intergalactic ambitions, they strongly pushed the concept of something being mine. The first-person possessive determiner “my” took on a very strong meaning – “my” because I build it, I control this presentation; my interests, my competences, my obsessions: in the trajectory from my to me, I suggest following its decline.
really interesting history of individuals on the web. found in Known Issues with the Web Garden | bavatuesdays
that’s the story of how I temporarily fended off some link rot in my small corner of the web.
Featured image my own dithered to grey with imagemagick, from an idea by Doug Belshaw who was trying to save energy. I just like the idea of these images for link list posts.
Life in Links – 40

Every so often I come back to this idea of posting sets of rather random links. I love seeing them pop up on my on this day page. For organisation and discoverability it might be better to post links separately. Mostly in pinboard too.
I checked how many posts I had tagged lifeinlinks and that makes this one number 40.
- james brunt artist (@RFJamesUK) / Twitter excellent Twitter stream of land art, should inspire my class the artists working code will be good for class discussion too
- Day 14 of 30 Days of Creativity – YouTube looks like a interesting set of ongoing videos for iPads in the class. Via Steve Bunce
- Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) Search via Alan of course OER is mostly higher Ed at the mo, but a search for fractions found me a knowledge organiser from 1890 Fractions | Library of Congress
- Digital Detox #4: Habits, Data, and Things That Go Bump in the Night: Microsoft for Education – TRU Digital Detox
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Ultimately, it seems to me that at least part of the problem wth Microsoft for Education, and particularly Teams and the integrated Office 365 suite, is that it wasn’t designed for education; education is a useful revenue stream for an enterprise communications solution. So as we’re learning about the value of a multimodal learning environment for students that blends synchronous and asynchronous learning experiences, we’re looking to a video conferencing software with deeply embedded surveillance functionality as a solution. This isn’t to say that individual instructors aren’t doing incredible things with Teams — I know they are, I see it everyday. But I worry about a tool that has been designed first and foremost as a corporate solution by a company with a poor track record on data privacy, leaping into the learning management game in the middle of a crisis.
Having spent a lot of time in the last couple of months in Teams this was interesting. Most of my problems with Teams stem from the UI, I keep expecting the native app to behave like a native app.
- There’s a hidden message in the parachute of NASA’s Mars rover – The Verge you can make your own message Encode Mighty Things might be fun in school.
- No to catch up! Yes to recovery, reconnection and PLAY! catch up vs play post COVID.
- The Kilobyte’s Gambit ♟️💾 1k chess game I’ve no idea how good a chess player this is, but it seems pretty amazing. Like the Queen’s Gambit design, and how good is the https://vole.wtf/ home page.
Featured image, some branches against a blue sky today. convert branches.jpg -scale 900x -colorspace Gray -ordered-dither h4x4a branches.png
Wallace Stephens or Bot
I’ve read a few AI things recently. I can’t say I’ve got my head round it. A few bookmarks:
Donald Clark Plan B: GPT-3 is like looking into the future What a time to be living.
I couldn’t tell the difference between Wallace Stephens and a bot. Interestingly my wife could, she pointed out that reading out loud made the human poet easier to pick.
Not just words: Let’s talk about that GPT-3 AI tweet that shook designers to the core
Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.
You can have fun with the previous GPT-2:
Write With Transformer
Life in Links 19 Jul 2020
A bit of a tab dump:
Miso Dengaku (Tofu, Eggplant, Daikon & Konnyaku) 味噌田楽 • Just One Cookbook I’ve dipped my spoon into this site a few times, horrible number of popups, but tasty.
Panelle al Forno (Baked chick pea flour gnocchi) Recipe I’ve eaten a lot of chickpea flour over lockdown, Panelle, pancakes, rissoles
Rathad an Isein. A Lewis moorland glossary by Anne Campbell. – peat cultures
Rathad an Isein The Bird’s Road. A Lewis Moorland Glossary.
Sexy Peat / Tìr mo Rùin | Artists’ diaries from the Lewis Peatlands
Artists’ diaries from the Lewis Peatlands
See how a modern neural network auto-completes your text 🤗
This site, built by the Hugging Face team, lets you write a whole document directly from your browser, and you can trigger the Transformer anywhere using the Tab key. It’s like having a smart machine that completes your thoughts 😀
The Big Butterfly Count is a UK-wide survey aimed at helping us assess the health of our environment simply by counting the amount and type of butterflies (and some day-flying moths) we see.
‘Scotland small?’ by Hugh MacDiarmid | Scottish Poetry Library
Japanese White Eye – Limited Edition Fine Art Print | Richard Spare
Drypoint and watercolour
Somerset JPP Textured White 300gsm cotton paper
Image Size: 150 x 125mm
Paper Size: 285 x 255mm
enviro:bit micro:bit Kit – Pimoroni Store
Make a friendly weather station to sit on your windowsill, that keeps track of temperature, pressure, humidity, light and colour, and sound. A perfect way to introduce kids to sensors and science.
🗓️ ♥︎
- @bradenslen This is the web
- @JohnPhilpin Are we wrong about time management huffduffed for commute
- @amit QA joke
- @numericcitizen alas Apple
- @frankm continues to wiki tickle
- @coldbrain The Marber Grid
- @jemostrom & others Teacher suffering
- 📷❤️













