My intention was to review not only December but the whole of 2019, and like the best of intentions, it went to hell in a handcart down a well-paved road. I have excuses aplenty, most notably that both December and January were short months thanks to a long holiday. This will probably be a bit truncated.

France to ban culling of unwanted male chicks by end of 2021 BBC news told us yesterday, and I could barely contain my disbelief. Unwanted males are the price you pay for specialised breeds, whether dairy cows or layer hens.

After a lot of trial and error, I think I have a system for creating and using routes that I can live with.

One of the things I am trying to be better at is processing the little scraps of information I squirrel away "for when I have time". A note I made on 28 July 2013 said simply "Microryza crowd funding". I had absolutely no recollection of what it might be.

Turns out it is a site for crowdfunding ex...

One of the reasons I love RSS (and other) feeds is that they effortlessly alert me when someone I follow posts something. So it was this morning, when James Morley published Collecting and displaying contextual tweets for cultural heritage records. I've known James a long time, and admired his approach to gathering and visualising data, and this was his first post in almost two years.

It's about automatically harvesting Tweets using a tool called TAGS – Twitter Archiving Google Sheet, and he shows in detail how useful it can be. I might even find a use for it myself. But here's the thing. James recognises some "potential issues," among them this: