So far?
I heard on the radio the announcement of Liz Truss being selected, I was pottering in my shed on a day off work. I was making cider from some windfall apples. Will the cider last longer than the new PM?
The worst prime minister of your life
Tea and Cake
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.
pear and ginger and coffee and walnut.
August
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?
Five un-blogged things I did in July
- Got interested enough in transistors again that I started writing a book shaped object. Said object now has three chapters and is how I’d have wanted to learn about transistors. Work has paused for now, due to items 2 and 3 in this list.
- Went to the delayed winter meeting of the anatomical society, held in Dublin. My first flight since January 2020. At the conference I presented some work I’ve been doing using x-ray micro-ct to image microscope slides containing valuable histological material from now extinct or engendered species.
- SARS?CoV?2 (COVID) finally caught me. I may have got it at the conference, at the very very busy Dublin airport on the way home, or given incubation times, I was probably infected the day before I flew to Dublin. I was feeling slightly rough on the 7th of July, but tested negative; a precautionary test before an in-person meeting on the 8th gave the long dreaded positive result.
Fatigue, loss of smell and taste, fever, sore throat and general aches and pains. It really kicked my arse. I don’t ever want it again. - Used my newly acquired, temporary, immunity to covid to go out and do some things I’ve avoided for two years.
Saw and really enjoyed the new Rise of Gru / Minions film at a real cinema.
Returned to the cinema a few days later to see the National Theatre broadcast of Prima Facie with Jodie Comer. I’m crap at writing reviews, so I won’t. Just go see it.
Final bit of culture this month was a trip to see (hear?) Jay Rayner’s band at Crazy Coqs, Zédel, Soho. Again, excellent. Go to a show. - Made a friend.
This dragonfly landed on my hand as I was walking home. I carried it towards a patch of grass and it flew away.
Birds of Dagenham
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.