Montage of screenshot of thewebpages linked to in the article. Own Your Web – Issue 18: Curators • Buttondown Own Your Web • Buttondown About - Link Punk: A Linkblog i.webthings hub Commonplace Puter

I’ve not posted a set of links for a while, keep saving them, but retired life is busier than I thought it would be. I am prompted by this newletter post:

Own Your Web – Issue 18: Curators

So every time you share a link on your blog, every time you write a few sentences about why someone else’s work matters to you, every time you add a new entry to a blogroll or a links page – you are a curator. You are doing what no algorithm can do. You’re saying: I am a person. I read this. I think you should read it too.

There is a good selection of links to link curators.

I am not sure when I subscribed to Own Your Web

Own Your Web is a newsletter by Matthias Ott about designing, building, creating, and publishing for and on the Web.

But it is great. There is an RSS feed too.


The TACO Tracker: Every Time Trump Chickens Out

Trump won’t stop chickening out. We won’t stop tracking it

One of the more amusing uses of AI

Via brad who has the Indieseek.xyz Indie Web Directory

Indieseek.xyz is a small human curated, searchable, directory of web links to both websites and to individual web pages. We try and list pages that are informative, fun, classic and useful

And

Link Punk: A Linkblog

Just a linkblog, mainly for articles and individual blog posts that I find and want to share. I think of this as me being a DJ only playing articles rather than songs.

Brad also post funny political thoughts most days on mastodon.


Another great source of links is Joe Jennet
i.webthings hub

Welcome to the hub of i.webthings, an independent, noncommercial web initiative

Joe credits where he finds his links which can lead to some other interesting directories.


Commonplace

Commonplace is a self-hosted, federated link-collection manager. You can create curated collections of links and share them with followers across both the Fediverse (Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.) and Bluesky — without creating new accounts on either network

Created by Doug Belshaw. And changing quickly. I am logged on via indieAuth, which is nice. I’ve created a few collections, the largest so far is AI Reading. It is always interesting to try out new pieces of software.

Commonplace allows sharing collections, suggestions and replies.

Commonplace now has a bookmarklet, which is for me essential. It grabs an image and description via open graph (I’d guess) to give a description. You can edit this and add curators notes.

I’ve used a bunch of link collectors over the year, delicious, pinboard, locally in the drafts app, on my site and a few more. I’ve not used pinboard much in the last few years. I feel a bit guilty about not updating my lifetime sub when pinboard changed to annual fees. Life-timers like myself could upgrade to a yearly fee. I didn’t. I mostly use drafts in a fairly disorganised way. At the very least commonplace is giving me the chance to think a bit about my link collection & sharing. It is also interesting to watch the development, as Doug is AI coding the site.


Here is an ‘real’ teaching and learning link. I’ve been doing the odd bit of supply and wonder if I should give this a go.

micro:bit CreateAI

micro:bit CreateAI is a free, web-based tool that makes it easy for students to explore AI through movement and machine learning (ML).

You can use micro:bit CreateAI to train an ML model and then run it on your BBC micro:bit V2.

  • Collect movement data from the micro:bit accelerometer
  • Train an ML model to recognise patterns in the data
  • Code the micro:bit to run ML models and take your creation anywhere.

And a last weird one.

Code seems like a computer on the web. You get a desktop. Also can create web apps and get access to AI. The UI has me baffled. I might not be the audience.

A montage of screenshots of plages linked in the post.

From Glastonbury to Gaza: no direction home

From Glastonbury to Gaza: no direction home | Chris Smaje a rabbit hole of links, to climate & farming, ht Jeremy Cherfas


Dougie Strang

Dougie Strang | writer, storyteller, performer I read a essay by him in Antlers of Water: Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland and more recently this poem: Poem That Avoids Arrest – Bella Caledonia

Much of my work, whether written or performed, is inspired by the natural and cultural ecology of the Scottish landscape.


Sensei LMS

Learning Management System Plugin for WordPress – Sensei LMS

Sensei Review: Transforming WordPress into a Dynamic Learning Platform

The Sensei LMS plugin allows WordPress users to create and sell online courses without relying on a separate platform. Free and Pro versions are available, so users can get a feel for Sensei before committing. While Sensei Pro isn’t quite as feature-rich as the leading standalone learning management systems, keeping everything within WordPress offers major benefits.


Wainwright Prize

Shortlist 2025 – Wainwright Prize

The Wainwright Prize, a celebration of nature and conservation writing, announces its 2025 shortlists. This year marks a bold new chapter, with three new categories reflecting the evolving landscape of environmental storytelling – particularly in how it reaches and inspires younger audiences.

Looks like a good list to check the library with.

A montage of 4 webpage screenshots.

Bookmarked for future reading. AI in education is becoming increasingly confusing.

Education Scotland are running a week #ScotAI25: Scottish AI in Schools 2025 with live lessons for pupils & some cpd for staff. I might try to make some of those.

  • This week I’ve used:
    ChatGPT to make some questions up about a passage of text for an individual in my class; Write an example text about levers; create a formula for a number spreadsheet and create a regular expression.
  • Claude to make a fractions matching game and a trivia quiz.
  • I am occasionally using lovable.dev to play around making an alternative way of posting to WordPress.

I might have used ChatGPT a couple more times in school. Although it is accessible the login options didn’t seem to be so I’ve no history to check.

Quite a few teachers I know use it in some of these ways in a, like me, fairly causal way. This is a lot easier than thinking about any ethical and moral implication.

Montage of 4 webpages linked in post:

Things that cheered me up today.

bradenslen pointed me to this:

England, like most countries, is more of an imagined place than anything objectively real. Its ordinanced borders are merely state stories. We who live here know its true thresholds are the salted shore, ends of lanes where magic lives. We all make it up as walk its ways. – #CLNolan

[image or embed]

— hookland.bsky.social (@hookland.bsky.social) January 23, 2025 at 5:02 PM

It’s a win for butterflies! Government refuses emergency use of banned butterfly-killing pesticide on sugar beet | Butterfly Conservation

But Environment Minister Emma Hardy decided not to grant the authorisation for emergency use of Cruiser SB, which contains the butterfly-killing neonicotinoid thiamethoxam prohibited since 2018 – the first time in five years the application has been turned down.


Post by @climagic@mastodon.social
View on Mastodon

via @nitinkhanna:

A new study found that half of the world’s carbon emissions come from the richest 10% of people.

Billionaires Are the One Case Where Personal Choices Can Affect Climate Change

Which points to Carbon Inequality Kills: Why curbing the excessive emissions of an elite few can create a sustainable planet for all – Oxfam Policy & Practice

We share new evidence of how the yachts, jets and polluting investments of the 50 richest billionaires are accelerating the climate crisis. Oxfam’s research shows that the emissions of the world’s super-rich 1% are causing economic losses of trillions of dollars; contributing to huge crop losses; and leading to millions of excess deaths.

A montage of screenshots: OSXPhotos - osxphotos 0.68.6 documentation Forever ✱ Notes - A free framework for Apple Notes About | bcattools WordPress Block Themes Simplified: A Must-Watch Guide for Beginners! - YouTube Tax Facts – free resources for teachers and parents - GOV.UK The secret power of a blog – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden Bonus Content - Danny Nics Science Fix Digital Citizenship UK_Year 1-13 Progression 2023 - Google Docs

Tech

OSXPhotos

What is OSXPhotos?
OSXPhotos provides both the ability to interact with and query Apple’s Photos.app library on macOS directly from your python code as well as a very flexible command line interface (CLI) app for exporting photos. You can query the Photos library database – for example, file name, file path, and metadata such as keywords/tags, persons/faces, albums, etc. You can also easily export both the original and edited photos. OSXPhotos – osxphotos 0.68.6 documentation

This command will search for photos that are missing location data and look for the nearest neighbor photo within a given window of time that contains location information. If a photo is found within the window of time, the location of the nearest neighbor will be used to update the location of the photo. OSXPhotos Command Line Interface (CLI) – osxphotos 0.68.6 documentation

Forever

Forever ✱ Notes is not an app, but a simple framework and scalable digital note-taking method for Apple Notes. It’s free and created to last—forever. Forever ✱ Notes – A free framework for Apple Notes

Bellingcat Geolocation

This is your place to discover tools! Our toolkit includes satellite and mapping services, tools for verifying photos and videos, websites to archive web pages, and much more. Most of the tools that we include can be used for free. Geolocation | bcattools

Master Block Themes in 3 Steps!

WordPress Basics for Beginners: Master Block Themes in 3 Steps!
Food for Glow Blog’s Help. WordPress Block Themes Simplified: A Must-Watch Guide for Beginners! – YouTube

Between

The blog’s form is practically made for active learning, for sharing thoughts and updates over a span of time. The secret power of a blog – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden

Teaching & Learning

Pause & Think Online (UK)

Digital Citizenship UK_Year 1-13 Progression 2023 – Google Docs

This document outlines a mapping of Common Sense Education’s Digital Citizenship Lessons by topic, year and term.

Bonus Content Science Fix

My book Science Fix: Science Made Easy for Primary Teachers was released Oct 2024. There was a lot of content that I included in the early drafts that has had to be cut to make the book more manageable. from: Bonus Content – Danny Nics Science Fix

Tax Facts free resources for teachers and parents 

Tax Facts is HM Revenue and Customs’ free tax education programme for primary and secondary school students. It has resources to help children and young people learn about the UK tax system, from lesson plans to videos. from: Tax Facts – free resources for teachers and parents – GOV.UK