Yesterday brought a tweet with an interesting angle on a scientific development. Accompanied by a herd of stockphoto cows, John Blue of Truffle Media tweeted

"CRISPR-Cas9 used to create genetically Tuberculosis-resistant cows could be 1st #antibiotic free livestock"

Killjoy that I am, I r...

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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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A few weeks ago, a professional broadcaster asked me how I managed to get such good audio quality on an episode of Eat This Podcast. Once I'd got over the shock, I just told her that it was Skype (and a teeny bit of judicious tweaking). Every time Skype gives me any kind of trouble, I take a deep br...

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Although I am not by any stretch of the imagination a developer, there are bits of what developers do that I appreciate. One of those is version control. On texts, at least, I no longer keep interminable backup versions of different states. I've been using Git to keep track of versions for me, and s...

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