Returning blue tits

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While we await the return of the Loch Arkaig Ospreys (due any day now) it is good to see the blue tits have returned to the hole in the wall for their nest this year. They abandoned it while the roof was being replaced in 2023:

Roof striped of old tiles with new tiles awaiting laying.

but are now making use of it again:

Database slop

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Who needs AI when we can generate our own slop?

My home address seems to have found itself on the National Database for gas suppliers and I am now receiving a bill for the supply of gas. This is despite the fact that I do not have a gas supply. Just how my address is randomly associated with an account without any kind of verification remains a mystery to be resolved once I navigate the Kafkaesque “customer services” of British Gas and disentangle my address from their database. Should you also find yourself drowning in the inefficacy of British Gas “customer services” I found this form actually reached people who may be able to do something to help.

The UK government has a General Register cataloguing our births marriages and deaths since 1837 (with some gaps). This is very useful when documenting a family history except so much of it is wrong. The errors are mostly from the transcribing of the original hand written records but it does mean everything needs to be questioned and double checked before being accepted.

Just because it is in the database does not mean it is correct. Bring on our AI future. What could possibly go wrong?

The Outsider web is alive and well.

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The web designer and developer Jim Nielsen commented on a quote from the Security/Devops engineer Mat Duggan about the Fediverse… apparently a “social network that half the internet has never heard of”.

No source for this claim is cited so allow me make up my own statistic in response: Half the Internet has heard of the Fediverse but decided it is not for them as they are not techy people and do not wish to join one of the gated communities they are building for themselves so they can keep reassuring each other what a great job they are doing… even if some of them struggle to resize a window.

To quote from an earlier piece by Mat Duggan regarding a browser extension he had created:

“Interestingly one of my most common requests is “I would like less technical content” which as it turns out is tricky to provide because it’s pretty hard to find.”

The clues are all there. Let’s see if they can figure it out.

Éliane Radigue at the Co-op.

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It was just a few days after the Guardian had an article about the delightful drone of the refrigeration cabinets at a Sheffield Co-op store:

…that we learned of the death of Éliane Radigue at the age of 94. Some of the comments to the article describe the musical sounds of some European trains which loops nicely back to Radigue’s apprenticeship with Pierre Schaeffer in the 1950s as he used recordings of trains in his own works.

But this is Éliane Radigue’s Islas resonantes created on her ARP 2500.

At least Apple’s Music app has figured out how to spell her name with the erroneous Radique variant now redirecting to the correct form.