It depicts two people in nomadic garb leading a demon, or Persian div, in chains between them. The female figure holding the chain to her face is painted to look nearly as ferocious as the captured div. The concept of divs as evil supernatural creatures of mysterious origin dates to pre-Islamic Persia, but they are also described in the text of the Qur'an. Divs in Persian literature and folktales are sometimes captured and forced to use their magic to serve a king or hero.

Featured Image: Demon in chains | Cleveland Museum of Art CC0

Winding Chain - Triple Square Link with Wooden Spacers, 5½-inch Pitch, Wrought Iron, 1850s-1870s

I’ve not posted links for a while, these are some of the things I’ve found interesting in the last couple of weeks.

Technology

Education

Sounds

Nature

Featured image found with Openverse, attribution copied from the caption. Winding Chain – Triple Square Link with Wooden Spacers, 5½-inch Pitch, Wrought Iron, 1850s-1870s by Photographer: David Thompson is licensed under CC-BY 4.0

Robin at dawn. Dither image. It was poor anyhow due to light.

The above is a short selection of a few moments of the stream I broadcast this morning, 10 minutes in total. The segments are each separated by 1 seconds of generated silence. The Whole thing is on the Stream Page.  There is a fox barking near the start and a pigeon claps its wings over head near the end.

Continue reading

After bookmarking the Locus Sonus Stream Project the other day I saw a link to Soundcamp 2023 on Caught by the River. This lead to:

REVEIL 10 – Call | Announce

Saturday 6 to Sunday 7 May 2023

On Dawn Chorus Day, Reveil will make its tenth annual day-long loop of earth, travelling west on live audio feeds sent in by streamers around sunrise.

from: REVEIL 24+1 hour daybreak broadcast — Call | Announce

There seems to be several ways to join in, Raspberry Pis, computers and mobiles. Looks like icecast technology.

I would be quite interested in joining in. Dawn is around 5:30am in Glasgow on the 6th April.

Some of the locations on the  Locus Sonus Stream Project  make nice background noise, birds and burns from around the world.

 

Bookmarked Locus Sonus Stream Project (locusonus.org)
Locus Sonus Stream Project offers a worldwide network of "open mikes" that permanently stream local soundscapes to a dedicated server. The resulting live audio is used in a large variety of artistic projects. The microphones are installed and maintained by volunteer participants.

Looks really interesting.

The idea

I’ll share people’s sites I follow and enjoy. I’ll also suggest some feed readers to try out along with other related resources. I’ll use the tag/hashtag #FeedReaderFriday to encourage the website to website conversation. If you’re interested in the experiment, do come and join me and help to spread the word.

#FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns | Chris Aldrich

Feed Readers

Feed readers allow you to ‘follow’ websites something of the same way as you follow accounts on Twitter, mastodon and the like. Feed readers are different in that the feeds they read are, mostly, on the open web. Feed Readers use RSS to pull content from other sites for you to read. If you listen to podcasts in an app you are using a Feed Reader, the app. Podcasts like blog posts are distributed via RSS.

Chris suggests What is a feed? (a.k.a. RSS) | About Feeds to get started.

My main feed reader is Inoreader. It has been the one I’ve used most since the demise of Google Reader. It allows me to quickly read or skim a lot of blogs and organise that reading in a variety of ways.

More recently I’ve been using FeedLand. FeedLand is a development by Dave Winer who has an amazing pedigree in software development, RSS in particular.

FeedLand is a really interesting product, still under development but ready for use. FeedLand allows you to collate RSS feeds either by adding them yourself or by seeing what feeds other users have added. FeedLand then let’s you to organise, categorise these feeds. FeedLand is a feed reader, so you can read the feeds you follow. FeedLand allow you to publish readers for other folk to read in a few different ways. Here is one hosted on FeedLand and one on my raspberry pi. Both are experiments at the moment. Finally FeedLand allows you to produce a simple feed. Of your own. Here is mine viewed on FeedLand.

Folk to follow

So a couple of people I find it interesting to follow via RSS

  • the dailywebthing linkport one of Joe Jennet’s suite of sharing sites, three links a day. A huge variety of interesting sites. Not so much a gold mine as a gold, silver, bronze, and rock mine. RSS FEED
  • CogDogBlog RSS FEED Alan blogs about education, open, WordPress & Flickr amongs other things. Great detail with a personal touch. I think I’ve been reading him for as long as I’ve been blogging. A wonderful blog.

I am going to try and post for the next couple of Fridays with a wee bit about readers I use and a couple of suggestions for follows.

Of all the digital tools I’ve used the one that has stuck with me longest is RSS. I’ve been excited & delighted to get a peek at Feedland. Feedland is Dave Winer’s latest foray into the technologies he has spent many years working on, RSS, opml & news.

As part of my peeking I’ve had the chance to produce a personal news reader. Any messiness is down to me rather than Feedland.

Over the years I’ve made a few similar things. This has been one of the easiest ways. The linked page is running on an old Raspberry Pi 2. Most of the work is done on Dave’s servers but the end result was easily produced on my own.

Dave hints this is a partial sneak peek. I am looking forward to exploring and finding out more.

I like Flickr’s style:

we want to get photos and video into and out of the system in as many ways as we can: from the web, from mobile devices, from the users’ home computers and from whatever software they are using to manage their content. And we want to be able to push them out in as many ways as possible: on the Flickr website, in RSS feeds, by email, by posting to outside blogs or ways we haven’t thought of yet. What else are we going to use those smart refrigerators for?

About Flickr

I’ve just made a wee ‘blog’ from my flickr photos with the tag fblog: fBlog. It is only one webpage, not really a blog, but it didn’t take long. Sitting on my Raspberry Pi.

I do wonder if someone could make a clever flickr app that would mimic the best parts of instagram…

Bookmarked Raspberry (steve-best.github.io)
I'm pleased to report that our iMac is now better than ever, thanks to Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC and Mac (also known as Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop). What exactly is this operating system with an incredibly long name? It is a Linux distro based on Debian with the Raspberry Pi's desktop environment. (This is not actually the operating system that is typically installed on the Raspberry Pi devices (Raspberry Pi OS), but Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop and Raspberry Pi OS are incredibly similar.)

Looking at mum’s old intel iMac in the back room…