For us, another good month. Things are slowly becoming easier; making sure I have gloves and a mask in my pockets when I go out is becoming a habit. Washing hands when I get back in has been for a long time. It’s great that the park is open, even if it is overrun most of the time. Children being at home can’t be easy. Everything has really been rather good. I missed the travel I had booked, but the online Dublin Gastronomy Symposium was very enjoyable and not nearly as difficult as I feared it might be.

There’s more ➢

My online chum Lewis Coles has, like everybody and their dog, been baking bread in these troubled times, and he’s not happy.

Lewis is a software engineer. I can’t be sure, but I guess that he thinks that if you follow a set of instructions, you should end up with the same result every time. So he’s understandably peeved.

There’s more ➢

The Wayback Machine, part of The Internet Archive, is an absolutely essential part of the open web and, as it happens, my work. I use it for all sorts of things, most visibly finding archived versions of web pages that have vanished for whatever reasons. I support them with an annual donation, but today I felt compelled to give more, after The Guardian reported that Dominic Cummings falsified the record of what he said when about coronaviruses. The prompt:

First spotted by Jens Wiechers, a data scientist, the edits are verifiable through periodic snapshots of the blog saved by the Internet Archive, which shows the change occurring between 9 April and 3 May this year. A hidden record on Cummings’ own site shows the post was edited at 8:55pm on 14 April, the day he has told the public he had returned from his trip to Durham.

Cummings’ weblog is hosted by WordPress.com, so I’m guessing that the “hidden record“ is one of their secrecy-by-obscurity URLs that shows revisions, but I don’t honestly care. The Wayback Machine’s smoking gun is good enough for me.

The sky was the bluest it has been in a long time. There was a bit of a breeze keeping things cool. We had a cappuccino at the bar, my second since mid-March, me keeping a respectful distance from The Main Squeeze, and then we ran for a bus.

So exciting, my first excursion off the Green Mountain since it all began.

There’s more ➢

It’s so nice when things just happen to come together and move me forward. A teeny thing, but mine, and I hope worth sharing.

A week back I wrote about tending my zettelkasten garden, and trying to become more of a curator and less of a hoarder. Two days later someone mentioned readwise.io, which I had a quick look at. That same day, a cyberchum posted something “from this morning’s Readwise email”. So I was well primed.

There’s more ➢