Yesterday I came across an article in the Canadian Cycling magazine on how to set your saddle height correctly. Alas, I can’t tell you if that article was any good or not, as I could not get past the AI generated illustrations — I can only assume that this publication no longer employs any humans, it’s how bad it was. The cover image was hinting at an orgy about to get on the way in a particularly niche corner of the Internet, and it went downhill from there. You can judge for yourself, I took some screenshots.

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I keep coming across the expression ‘rewilding nation’ being used with respect to Scotland. Forgive me for being blunt, but that’s a load of crap, not just as a reality, but as a very concept. Rewilding in Scotland boils down to very wealthy individuals, corporations and NGOs buying up large swathes of the Highlands (mainly) to keep the land depopulated. This got bugger all to do with ‘the nation’, it’s just the lairdship of old reinventing itself for a different age.

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It seems to me that the single most dominant characteristic of the human race is we never learn from our mistakes, no matter how stupid and no matter how self-destructive. This might be the only human trait that could possibly convince me humans are not ‘just’ animals, though if that was the case, it doesn’t do much for the concept of imago dei. The recent EU commissioned report on geo engineering sums up why it’s such a bad idea, see this piece by The Verge. It should not be that hard to grasp, should it?

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I have been griping about the need to move the Internet over to a pay-for-content model for years, in order to get away from the moral cesspool that is stolen-data-driven advertising. Well, The Verge is going down that route, and it’s pretty reasonably priced as well. Time to put the wallet where my mouth is, we need more content that is not arse kissing the data miners. And, yeah, the RSS is appreciated.

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There is lot to be said for self-hosting various online services, and I have run a couple of servers to that end for quite a long time. Over the years they hosted websites, forums, jabber (if you are old enough to know what that was), irc, git, and of course email. But over time the list got shorter and shorter.

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I have migrated the blog to a new static setup using Jekyll. It was really pretty simple to do, should have done it long time ago. The main fallout is for anyone using the feed, you might have to re-subscribe.

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I am offering a set of four small silver gelatine prints of Scottish coastline scenes in exchange for a donation to Médecins Sans Frontières. If you are interested, the details are here.

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Greenwashing is the act of overstating the environmental gains and benefits of one’s actions. And one of my real gripes with the various greening projects is the (deliberately) misleading language that is being used to describe what is being done and what is being achieved.

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I am making most of the mild spell this weekend and spending some time in the darkroom again (in recent years electricity has become the single biggest cost of my darkroom time, so I tend to leave the printing to late spring and early autumn). Also, I have not done much photography since our June holiday, really produced just one worth-while photograph since, so have not been spending much time in the darkroom either. But I have been meaning to make some very small prints to use as cards for a while.

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I have just deleted my Flickr account, my last link to the corporate social media. It’s a sad moment in a way, as I have been using Flickr for a very, very long time, and so I have dithered much over doing this. But it’s been very long time since Flickr was worth while, the Yahoo takeover in 2008 pretty much killed it, from then on it was just hoping against hope, and since SmugMug took over in 2018 my departure was inevitable, as a previous customer of theirs I don’t have a great opinion of their business, and really just hang on by sheer momentum. For a long time it has been nothing more than a place to dump photos to share somewhere else, and there are better solutions for that nowadays. My more serious work can be found on tf.photography, while the sort of stuff I might have once posted to Flickr will be landing on aye.photos, though I don’t have much of that these days.

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The stainless steel thermos, that loyal companion of the winter hillwalker, suffers from a wee problem: whether it’s tea or coffee that is your poison, a dark coating will build up in the thermos over time. This stain stubbornly resists scrubbing with a brush, not helped by the limited access. Does that mean we are for ever doomed to the taste of stale tea and coffee with whatever we put in there? As it happens there is a simple solution (and, no, it’s not a new thermos).

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I have been doing a bit of mushroom microscopy in recent months, and this generally requires the use a 100x magnification oil immersion lens (the spores and related bits have sizes in the order of single micro meters, so 1000x overall magnification is needed to see them well enough and measure them). And getting most of the oil immersion lens requires keeping it clean, which I imagine is taught somewhere in the Microscopy 101 course, so nobody really talks about, and it took me a while to find a way that works reliably well. So in case this saves some other budding microscopist time …

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I have, over the years, become quite well attuned to the distress calls of birds in our garden, and in particular to the ‘watch out for the cat call’, which demands an immediate action on my behalf: for I do not tolerate cats in the garden. But the other day the ruckus had nothing to do with a cat.

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Given the forecast I could not just sit at home today. So I took the day off and headed into the Ochils. Over the years I have spent huge amounts of time walking, running, cycling and skiing in these rolling hills at the back of Stirling, but it’s been a while since my last visit.

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The State has no moral claim on a person’s life. Our lives are our own, no one else’s. The State has no right to decide who lives and who dies, and that cuts both ways. A law that criminalises suicide, as we have in the UK, is a feudal overreach, the ultimate codification of serfdom. That is the bottom line. The current ‘debate’ around assisted dying is little more than FUD, driven by religious self-righteousness that is neither capable of genuine compassion nor of the critical self-reflection necessary to understand the depth of its own immorality. Death, and hence suicide, is never a good thing, but no one can answer the question whether it is the worst thing on behalf of an another.

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I won’t be buying an EV anytime soon. I care deeply about the current state of the environment, and I am greatly frustrated by the way things are going, but I have come to the conclusion that most things that are happening in the name of Climate Change on any sort of an industrial scale are mostly greenwashing, and EVs are no exception.

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