BadBlog

February 2023
  February 22
    Here we are again
January 2023
  January 2
    HNY
July 2022
  July 8
    A tiny thought on the current uk news. It worries me they way politicians use Twitter to post letters of resignation & the like. Trusting Twitter with something so important seems like a mistake. Surly they should post somewhere they control & forward to Twitter #indieweb
    Microcasts
      Adam Procter (Fragmentum)
      BoffoSocko Microcast
      CleverCast
      Colin Devroe
      Colin Walker
      Convocasts
      Eddie Hinkle (Author's Note)
      Henrik Carlsson
      John Johnston
      Micro Monday
      Percolator (Aaron Parecki)
      Thought Shrapnel (Doug Belshaw microcast)
May 2022
  May 27
    Some links
    How to Move a Live WordPress Website to a Local Environment
    How to Use CSS Grid Layout – Grid Properties Explained with Examples
    DownloadYoutubeSubtitles.com - Online Youtube Subtitle Downloader Tool
    Command Line Interface — wordcloud 1.8.1 documentation
    Choosing Colormaps in Matplotlib — Matplotlib 3.5.0 documentation
    Enjoyed reading Among the Salmon People
December 2021
  December 24
  December 18
    A year in flickr
  December 17
    A good few years ago I bought an iRig Mic for making short podcasts at conferences and the like. It worked well for me. I’ve not got much of an ear or wallet for mikes. Last week I dug it out for my class to use in their podcast. It still works well enough for our needs.
  December 15
    Interesting the increase in covid 19 during cop 26 was in primary aged children, not cop attendees.
  December 11
    Daytona Screenshot
    Just bumping the outline to try Daytona
  December 3
    Michael Timmons - 10 Days Before You Died (Video) - YouTube
November 2021
  November 22
    Below with br tags added
    And The Days Are Not Full Enough by Ezra Pound

      >And the days are not full enough
      And the nights are not full enough
      And life slips by like a field mouse
      Not shaking the grass

  November 21
    🛋 SOFA
      Start Often Finish rArely h/t Doug Belshaw
    >And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass
    Struggling to figure out. Multi line quote.
    MD quote
      >And the days are not full enough
      >And the nights are not full enough:
      > And life slips by like a field mouse
      >Not shaking the grass
    COVID reading.

      Read: Snow by John Banville ★★★☆☆ 📚
      A nice trip to Ireland & crime fiction’s past. Country houses, local colour and character. Somewhat disrupted by the gory details.

      Read: Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie ★★★☆☆ 📚

      Read: The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner ����★���★★ 📚
      Super book, full of small incidents, ageing, illness, deaths & disappointment in a 14th century nunnery. The Black Death, a phoney priest, riot, rape & murder. A really sense of time passing, & quite a few laughs.

      Read: Dark Matter by Blake Crouch ★★★☆☆ 📚
      Pretty good 🦠 recovery material. Light on character, mad plot, very fast moving.

      Read: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler ★★★★★ 📚
      A re-read, from 9 years ago. I love the narrator’s voice, funny & smart. A tricksy telling that worked even though I knew the twist.

      Read: Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead ★★★★★📚
      Lighter than The Nickel Boys.I was expecting something akin to Chester Himes but this was gentler, more thoughtful & a more absorbing read. Politics handled lightly. I hope Ray, keeps out of trouble, if not I want to read about it.

      Read Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal ★★★★☆ 📚
      An introduction, for me, to a strange artistic world painting trompe-l’œil. Lovely long sentences. The heroine has a ‘lazy’ eye looking two ways at once. The eye recalls Dory Previn – The Holy Man on Malibu Bus Number 3

  November 19
    Other Drummers
  November 18
    Read: The Corner That Held Them
      Read: The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner ★★★★★ 📚
      Super book, full of small incidents, ageing, illness, deaths & disappointment in a 14th century nunnery. The Black Death, a phoney priest, riot, rape & murder. A really sense of time passing, & quite a few laughs.
    >Squeezed uncomfortably into a corner the chaplain looked at him with a malevolence so habitual that it was almost indifference
    Sylvia Townsend Warner, **The Corner That Held Them**, really enjoying this book.
  November 16
    An update to the Drummer to WordPress script - Digging the Digital
  November 11
    Change notes: GitHub scripting is deployed
  November 10
    Insomnia
  November 7
    Read: Miss Ranskill Comes Home by Barbara Euphan Todd ★★★★☆ 📚 This 1946 novel is a lot of fun. Miss Ranskill Returns from a desert island to war time Britain. Confusion and poking fun ensue.
    Trying out the new drummer static pages, Park Birds
  November 6
    Silly Games
    Watching cop 26 play out in my home town. The most positive thing, as a Glaswegian teacher is seeing how confident and articulate some of the local young activists are.
    The new http.client verb in drummer looks interesting. The mention of strut in the docs reminds me of using the xml-rpc, metaweblogAPI in AppleScript to post to WordPress.
    Another busy week and not beating on the drum.
October 2021
  October 31
    Back to GMT
  October 30
    Well this is clever
      How to view mostly love on Twitter - Matt Maldre
  October 29
    I do not generally post about music but this is lovely. Empty Room by Michael Timmons. Sound fills your head and a west of Scotland voice.
  October 28
    3 years ago I was posting occasional lists of interesting posts on microblog, this one, 🗓️ ♥︎<280 Turned up on my on this day page today. A lot of broken links.
  October 27
    Busy week so far. I've been reading some of the drummer issues, but not much more.
    I noticed in today's change notes Dave explaining how Drummer linking works. This for folk who had been asking for markdown to make linking easier. This made me think about about how folk write text with links. I suspect the markdown folk do not like leaving their keyboard for a mouse. Although I occasionally write markdown I am not click adverse. A middle way might be to have a keyboard shortcut for the link button. WordPress uses ⌘-K to open the link. ⌘-K seems fairly standard for this. it certainly works in Apple Notes where I use it most.
  October 24
    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
  October 23
    Just changed my Glossary, having WordPress turn into a link was messy when it ended up in a title or a url. Set it to have a semicolon first ;WordPress.
    Drummer to WordPress!
      Frank's technique works. This is my second test.
      The possibilities for using Drummer just opened up for me. The script looks as if it is going to open my eyes a bit. I've only really scripted posting to WordPress via XML-RPC using AppleScript. I am guess tags and categories could be handles in the same way Frank get the image and inlineImage attributes from items?
      This could be delightful.
    Excited: Give the drummer some: Publish to WordPress with Drummer
  October 22
    I think I'd like to be able to set a favicon for my drummer blog. I wonder how you do that?
    Quite lot of folk seem to use linkedin for blogging. I am alway surprised.
    Enjoyed listening to Andy's Episode 008 – Interview with Ton Zijlstra - Thinking About Tools For Thought. Although most of the guests and Andy himself approach using software in a much more though out way that I do I am enjoying every episode.
    Thinking about Drummer, comments and the like. Drummer seems a very opinionated bit of software, which I like. Dave is a very famous blogger, I imagine that will colour his view on the usefulness of comments on his blog. The likelihood of him getting unpleasant/unwanted comments will be vastly greater than mine. 🤞I've not seem much of that in my years of blogging. Apart from spam which is well dealt with by Akismet at the moment.
  October 21
    The Moon This morning
    Through the Trees
  October 20
    For a while now my mac (macbook pro 13 2016, 10.14.6 ) is crashing with a message System Sleep Wake experienced a problem. This seems to happen when I am away from it. experienced a problem. It aways happens when I am away from my desk.
  October 18
    Back to school after the October week, I expect my posting anywhere to drop a lot. Over the last week I used Drummer a fair bit, on my computer and iPad. Drummer is great on a laptop/desktop, ok on iPad but tricky on a phone. I suspect I'll not be here as much this week.
  October 17
    Gif of adding an image from flickr, only mistake was the missing capital in the attribute. Should have been inlineImage. post below.
    berries
    Drummer Notes, Blogging Thoughts and other rabbit holes
      I’ve been messing about with Drummer for a while now. I alway enjoy when a new thing opens up a few rabbit holes. Drummer certainly does that.
      Blogging in an outline is different. I’ve done a little before with Fargo. Then I mostly thought about using the outliners reorganisation affordances as the main idea. This time I am seeing more possibilities with the micro, one line posts narrating a day’s work. As I am on holiday this week and not busy I’ve managed a bit of this, not so much work as narrating my play. Back to school on Monday, so I’ll be doing less of that.
      One rabbit hole than digging out how some things work in Drummer. Mostly by trying failing and trying again after changing one this. Obviously reading the docs would be better.
      It is truly fascinating seeing a little of how Drummer is put together. Reading other users experiences and getting a glimpse into Dave’s mind.
      The GitHub site, Issues · scripting/drummerSupport has some great questions and answers. The later provided not only by Dave but other folk. This is also a useful place to help in exploring drummer. The requests and problems found give a bit of insight in how other bloggers think and blog.
      Amit Gawande produced a great summary post: Getting Started Blogging with Drummer. This clears a lot up and points to some other good information. I’ve tried to write these sorts of notes when on a new path. I often get dragged down by an error and into a confusing maze to fix that. The notes get skipped or bits missed out. Amit’s are exceptionally clear.
      Jack Batty has some drummer notes, a lot of the questions have resonated with me.
      Thursday’s rabbit hole was getting my drummer blog to appear on my own domain.
      And that tunnel lead to some more raspberry pi thoughts. I though I might get river5 running again. This time on a separate pi, using my, slight, new found reverse proxy knowledge to get it going on river.johnj.info. And I did. Unfortunately, it is really slow. I guess because of the old pi. I also failed to install forever, which might make running things with any consistency. I might dig out a newer pi and try again. Hopefully slightly quicker than yesterday & today effort.
      I���ve also been reading Testing HTTPS · Issue #78 · scripting/drummerSupport so made some progression that. I’ve added a cert to river.johnj.info, but I’ve not changed the templates in Old School yet.
      Meanwhile I’ve been blogging a bit both to my ‘real’ blog and through Drummer. I cankt imagine at the moment giving up WordPress. I like the archives, search(sic), categorisation & tagging too much. I wonder if these features will come to Drummer is some way. One solution for me would be a way to post from Drummer to WordPress in the same way as you can tweet.
      Currently I spend more time reading my blog as opposed to writing it. Nearly all via the On This Day page. I find this endlessly fascinating. Partly seeing old thoughts and how they have repeated and morphed. I also love seeming the seasonal changes reflected through my photos and observations.
      Apart from being a new place to play and learn I and still seeing, for me, drummer as a possible place to build, pulling and gathering material that could end up here.
      This post turned out to a set of rambles rather than coming to a coherent conclusion.
  October 16
    Realised that being able to mount my PI on my mac means I can quite quickly add images to Drummer.
    I've been hard reloading with ⌘-shift-r for years. After Dave's note I realise I've been doing in wrong. Safari, ⌘-⎇-E (empty cache) then ⌘-R!
    River 5 of Raspberry Pi Again
      After yesterday's success in getting http://drum.johnj.info running I though I'd try to add river5 on another pi and use the same sort of reverse proxy to get it running on river.johnj.info. It sort of works. Even locally it runs very slowly. The Pi i a Model B Rev 2 so quite old now. Certainly node was tricky to install, I had to get older version. Also seems to use >90% of cpu when river5 is running. Once I set up the reverse proxy I can load the page at river.johnj.info but I get tons of errors about websockets. Currently googling, losing hope. I can use River5 locally albeit slowly. I've probably spent enough of Saturday morning on this now.
      A wee bit later, I just used my router to point the port for the websockets directly at the second pi. This seems to have worked. I see no errors in the console and some success messages.
  October 15
    Loch Ardinning
      We had a short walk and a picnic today. First bright day this week. Ardinning was autumnal. Saw what was probably the last dragonflies of the year.
  October 14
    Drummer Custom Host
      I've managed to get my own domain from my Drummer Blog working. It took me all afternoon. Using a reverse proxy.
      My drummer blog sits at: http://oldschool.scripting.com/johnjohnston/
      There are a few methods of getting Drummer on your own domain, but they all seemed to involve cost. There is Dave Winer's own Page Park, and some folk had used reverse proxies on Caddyserver and nginx. Jack Baty has details of the nginx way on his wiki. I though I could probably get Apache to do the same sort of thing, but was not sure how.
      I started by setting up a subdomain on my pi. It already holds https://pi.johnj.info
      I did a deal of guessing, searching and testing on the VirtualHost settings on the pi. I eventually got to the 404 page for Scripting. Eventually I got this:
        ServerName drum.johnj.info
        ProxyPass / http://oldschool.scripting.com/johnjohnston/
        ProxyPassReverse / http://oldschool.scripting.com/johnjohnston/
      Which worked.
      I also had to set a header in the blog opml in drummer: urlBlogWebsite pointing to http://drum.johnj.info
    Got a custom domain working http://drum.johnj.info
    Pinboard, mostly art/walking links
      The LRM - The Loiterers Resistance Movement
      Home - Walking Publics / Walking Arts
      Slow Ways - help create a network of walking routes connecting Great Britain - Home page
      Halloween Ideas — Darrell Wakelam
  October 13
    I am writing new posts/paragraphs today by the plus button. This means the latest end up on the top. Alternatively I could hit return, then the day���s post would be in chronological order.
    The Rowan seem to be redder than usual this year. Certainly more of them.
    Title in the old school reader seems fixed.
    One of the best things I ever did on my blog was to add the on this day page. I read it just about every day.
    I am still a bit discombobulated when pasting into Drummer, especially on iOS.
    Old School Drummers Reading List is becoming more interesting as Andy adds more feeds. I notice the feed from this blog is titled “undefined”. The way some of my posts are formatted seems strange. I wonder if River5 updates posts?
  October 11
    Drummer
      Scripting News: Sunday, October 10, 2021
        Today is the 27th anniversary of this blog. To celebrate, I’m opening up Drummer to the world. I hope you love it as much as I do. ❤️
      Drummer is, as you would imagine a really interesting project. A quite different approach to blogging.
      I've been lightly beta testing Drummer since 4th September. This is my Drummer blog: John’s tambourine.
      I would not like to presume I can understand Drummer well enough to give anything like a complete description. These are some of the features that have interested me so far.
        Drummer is an outliner, like Dave's LO2 and the Fargo system. You could use it for outlining in all sorts of ways.
        Drummer can created a blog from an outline at post at the push of a button.

        Drummer is a scripting system in an outliner
        .

      Each of these elements give you a lot to think about. It has made me think about how I blog, and how I'd like to blog. It is an opinionated system. Coming from one of the internet elder you would expect no less.
      If you are interested in blogging, microblogging and the like I'd recommend you have a look at Drummer. Certainly read: About Drummer
  October 9
    Watched: HARAKIRI (1962 Film) : SHOCHIKU
      Great movie. Full of quiet and stillness. According to Wikipedia it lost the Palme d’Or to the Leopard, another film I love.
    pinboard
      the last few pinboard links. Fixed the script in drummer to get these. Typing javascript on an iPad in drummer is tricky. But insomniac blogging is all about the iPad for me.
      LEGO Stop Motion for Beginners - brickstudiozee.com
      Captain Bodgit
      Overview - AmplitudeJS Documentation
      joshbuchea/HEAD: A simple guide to HTML elements
      robvanbakel/gotiny-api: A lightweight link shortener API
  October 3
    I just paid my annual Flickr pro fee. Very happy to do it. I like taking pictures although I don't think of myself as a photographer. I am not really interested in the technical aspects. I use photos in the same way as blogging. To think about something, or note it, remember it, share it, or collect it for later. A diary or commonplace if you like.
    Busy week. I’ve not posted anything to Drummer for a while although I open it a couple of times most days, follow the issues and check the Old School Drummers Reading List. One more week till the October break where I’ve got a week off.
    interesting conversation on Twitter.
September 2021
  September 24
    I've got the Changed Notes for Drummer open in a tab in Drummer. A wee while ago I saw the icon go green as Dave Winer edited the outline.
    Drummer Thoughts
      I am still wondering about using Drummer as a place to pull and edit. Although Dave has pulled the twitter opml feature from the current version, the script to pull tweets works fine.
      I've written simple scripts to get bookmark posts from my blog, my flickr photos and pinboard links. These could hen be edited, copied into my blog tab and published.
      I'd like to be able to add twitter favourites into the mix or bookmarks (I might start using them). I had a look at inoreader, the RSS reader I use but my account, supporter, no longer has rss or json feeds available. I can't really justify paying for a pro subscription.
      I'd also like to have the publish to WordPress feature from Fargo in drummer.
    Flickr
      I've now got a simple script that pulls my last 5 flick images into a item in Drummer. Here is an example. ( just choose the number 5 at random).
  September 19
    Seems that using a straightforward image tag works better in drummer than the flickr embed
  September 16
    So I've got a script in drummer that pulls down my last 5 (could be more) links in pinboard makes links, I could ten add more annotation. I could also get more out of the feed from pinboard. But this was a stretch for me in one day. So I am still thinking of the affordances of drummer as somewhere to pull things in and organise.
    recent pinboard links
      robvanbakel/gotiny-api: A lightweight link shortener API
        This seems useful as it supports CORs and dosn't need an api key. found from:
      public-apis/public-apis: A collective list of free APIs
      SWEIC – Blog for the South West Educational Improvement Collaborative
      This Teacher's Outdoor Classroom During Covid Inspired 'a Wave' of Others: 'We Saw a Change in Students' | PEOPLE.com
      Create a Random Generator - Perchance.org
  September 15
    tweet to remember
  September 12
    Sunday Linkdump
      A Poetry Podcast! — Speculative Books
      Lingdong Huang
      The Psalms
      Hummingcrow & Co. — Write.as
      create a random generator
      FLAUBERT’S DICTIONARY OF RECEIVED IDEAS
  September 11
    Another interesting way to blog, sheet-posting, where you blog in a Google Spread sheet. I had a quick try. I've messed about with using Google Sheets as a store before. Guess you alway need to remember Google could pull the sheet from under your feet. I also remember when you could stick a webpage in google docs (or dropbox) and it would be served. The Sheets-Posting site is made with glitch.
    Read: The Case of the General's Thumb by Andrey Kurkov ★★★★☆ 📚 Ukrainian police and Russian KGB race around in a confusing and occasionally daft plot. The characters as lost as the reader. If you see a backward shooting gun in the first act...
  September 10
    Drummer Blogging thoughts
      I am thinking about how drummer could fit into my blogging. I blog at MyBlog, I also hook up to micro.blog and Twitter to expand my conversation. But my blog is mostly read by me. I read my On This Day page most days, reviewing old thoughts and tidying links and breakages. I search it a fair bit and am interested in other ways to extend that.
      What drummer would bring to the mix would include organising and improving my longer posts by outlining and scripting the web. Both these areas I've only dipped my toe into but both are intriguing.
      Pulling information into an outline, for consideration, longer thinking and writing would be interesting. Leaving an item to sit might be good too. I've already cribbed a script to grab my blogs bookmark posts and put them in an outline. These could sit awaiting expansion.
      So far a missing piece would be posting from Drummer to my blog. Fargo did that so I expect it might work. The post to Twitter feature gives me hope. I guess a script could pop a window and populate a Post This window from a item & sub-items. It could even add tags & categories. Perhaps IndieWeb kinds too. I might manage that myself. But a proper XML-RPC post could be better.
      Lots to study.
    Item attributes
      A couple of things, for urltweet I found that I needed to strip off theparams from a ‘ copied’ link.
      urlvideo. Needs to be “proper” youtube not shareable YouTu.be link I think.
  September 9
    inlineImage
    added urltweet attribute
    Finding Old School Drummers Reading List interesting. Tempting me to set up river5 again on my Pi
  September 5
    the item below was brought in with the script menu from MyBlog's bookmarks, the indieWeb kind bookmarks. from the json feed.

    Bookmarked

    lofi.cafe – lofi music 🎧, last session I played a bit of this type of music, from YouTube in class. Went down quite well. Think this may be useful. Via @joejenett‘s pointers

    Should have recalled this
      “Tab does the same thing as Cmd-R and Shift-tab is the same as Cmd-L”
    I am wondering about titles now
      I have an amazing ability to spend far more time than I have on a piece of software. Most of the morning spent kicking Drummer Tyres, checking docs and messing abound.
      I need to get to my Yearly & Term plans.
    Got my Tabs on. Not got the glossary working for the About tab.
    OPML header urlHeaderImage changes the header url
    Break It…: drummerCMS on localhost Looks really interesting. I am guessing it might be worth trying to host on a pi. Checking my pi it currently has git installed but not node. It has had node running on it before and River 5: Raspberry River. That post might be useful too.
    Glossary test MyBlog
    Added a cloud
    Switched to mac and keyboard. Immediately much more fun. Building blog gave popup blocked in the url bar (safari). I guess that is why blog didn't open in iPad .
    On the iPad, which is what I’ve used from drummer so far, I keep trying to dNd items.
    Even before I have more than one outline I am wondering how to move a item from one outline to another.
    NTS comments, Reorg menu, don’t get published to blog.
    Wondering about the modern distaste for progressive taxation. It is clear, to me, that the richest amount us have benefited from government spending on health and education. They depend on the education and health of others.
  September 4
    <="" a="" >
      Just pasted embed code from Flickr.
    Set up the blog on iPad. Build my blog did not open a new tab? But checking the url shows the blog.
    Hello World