For a while now I've been concerned about owning my own data, in the spirit of IndieWeb. In June 2015 I started an experiment in the indieweb using a CMS called Known, and bits of that worked well enough. Trouble is, I actually have almost no control over the details of the CMS, which has meant that whenever I come across a little problem that might be within my capacity to solve, I generally can't even try. This frustration has finally reached the point where I'm prepared to do something about it, like host my own copy of Known rather than rely on Indiehosters.

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The slow process of migrating posts from old backends to new continues glacially slowly, prompted sometimes by a desire to link to something, sometimes by nostalgia, sometimes by lack of a greater priority. Today was a bit of all three. The announcement that ADN will be put out of its misery on 14 March made me wonder about updating all posts that mention it. I decided against that, and in doing so came across a post from about three years ago that continues to exercise me.

What podcasters need, I said, was a good way of finding new podcasts. Not coincidentally, that's also what people who listen to podcasts need. And we're still no nearer to either the human recommendation engines I proposed or to any kind of intelligent algorithm.

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What a wonderful book. When it first came out and got lots of praise I stupidly decided that it was not for me, possibly because the praise tended to focus on lyrical nature writing and that is not something I enjoy. However, my friend Nicola Davies was adamant that I give it a shot. I did, and was entranced from the word go.

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The resurrection of the Carolina African Runner peanut has been greeted with joy throughout the land. ¹ That it came to America with enslaved people from West Africa is undisputed; few people, however, seem interested in what peanuts were doing in West Africa in the first place, given that their ancestral home is in South America. I decided to dig a little deeper.

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A while ago, a good friend introduced me to Marcus Didius Falco, the Roman detective who features in a whole slew of whodunnits by Lindsay Davis. Falco is an informer, working mostly for the emperor Vespasian, who roams about the empire solving mysteries and giving readers like me insights into ancient Rome.

Of course, I'm not a classicist or historian, which may be the reason I find the Falco novels such fun. Where else would I have cause to learn the intimate workings of Archimedes' hodometer? I mention that because it plays a key part in the book I have just finished, A Dying Light in Corduba. And because I am not a historian, I take as gospel everything Davis has to tell me about hodometers and everything else in the Roman empire.

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