There’s a nice place in Kent, close to a castle and a palace, that’s very good for afternoon Tea. We go there a few times per year.
We went yesterday, and took the dog.
I started August with great plans to post every day / every week / at least once. It wasn’t that I did nothing to write about, it’s just that I’m a lazy sod.
I’ve walked in the company of The Gentle Author, I’ve walked the mail rail loop, I’ve walked the financial district of London guided by a very newly qualified tour guide. I took lots of photos, but as I don’t seem to be updating Flickr these days either, you’ll probably never see these.
I have done some work on the back-end of this site, and the others I host on this server. In theory this will make it easier to keep things update and mean I can finally ditch PHP and WordPress. This will go live one of these days, the biggest noticeable effect should be my sidebar returning to the sidebar, and not a random tangle at the bottom of the page; a relic of last time I did any work on this site.
September starts with this post. Tomorrow I plan to travel to Kent for Tea and Cake. I might write that up?
I’m a scientist, I like data. If I can collect and analyse data from the environment around me, I’m a happy scientist. I’ve been using BirdNet on my phone to identify birds by their sounds; it works pretty well, but sometimes gets confused by lots of birds together, I’ve taught myself a lot of bird sounds comparing what the app says and what I hear.
I’ve wanted to get an idea for what bird species visit my garden, leaving a phone running 24/7 isn’t really ideal, and anyway the BirdNet doesn’t work with streaming audio, you need to select and submit a period of sound containing the bird you’re interested in identifying. While ponding ways to make it work, I discovered BirdNET-Pi which runs a bird identifier on a Raspberry Pi computer.
I’ve had this running in my garden for two days, it hasn’t really tuned up any major surprises (anything surprising is 99.999% likely to be a misidentification). What it has done is show up the active times of the local birds, the sparrows are a bit over represented as they sit close to the microphone and swamp out fainter birds.
The software claims to have detected 71 species in two days, I’m sure many of these are incorrect, I did have the detection threshold set a bit too low at the start. There are also many identifications of Owls and Bittens that I’ve identified as distant dog barks and wind noise.
At present, the system is a lash up of a bare Pi circuit board and a cheap USB microphone. If I was to leave this running longer I would need to get a proper outdoor, weather proof microphone and a proper case for the Pi. Something I might consider in a few months. It would be very interesting see how the detected species changes though the year.
Since the first lockdown, when we were all taking our allotted ‘one exercise session per day’ seriously, I’ve been walking around my home town a lot more then I have in years. Initially it was interesting to walk down side streets I’ve not been along before, or to let the dog choose a direction at each intersection and end up somewhere unvisited before. Over time, this became a bit of a game with myself, can I walk places I’ve never walked before, then it because even more specific, can I set foot on a piece of ground I had never stood on before.
While choosing new roads, this was easy; every step was a new one, but as my walking patterns got more settled; to the shop and back, to the park and back, the game became harder.
The rules I set myself:
It’s an easier game to play and explain away when I’m walking the dog. If I’m sure I haven’t ever set foot on the manhole cover in the middle of the road, it’s a lot easier to explain away should anyone ask, if I can say the dog pulled me that way.
Drains, bits of curbstone and the like are all good for a first step. I’m 99% sure I’ve never stepped on most of the ones I choose. A new pothole in the road is a good find, while I may well have stepped on the original surface, the newly revealed subsurface is ripe for another step.
I’ve had some first steps that I’m sure are the very very first step anyone has ever had, a tree being cut down while on my outward journey left me a nice low stump to step on on my return. A fence removed at the park got me several steps on a bit of land inaccessible for decades, a fallen tree at another park opened up a space between it and a fence – another tiny scrap of land that cannot have had any human footfall for at least 80 years.
There’s absolutely no reason for me to carry on wit this game with myself, but I shall. Many of the easy steps on my usual routes are now stepped on, so there’s still a challenge to find something new.
