As much as I enjoy using Mastodon, it feels better posting my travel updates/photos here.

Day #5 in Gran Canaria and I’m finally up a mountain. Found a strange metal basket that seems to provide a pretty nice frame.

Instead of just posting a bunch of stories while I’ve been away in Gran Canaria, I’ve been using the Clips app to put together daily summary videos where it’s just short 0.5 to 2 second clips of what I’m up to throughout the day. It’s more fun, and I think the results are a lot better.

So far I’ve still been posting the final video to my Instagram, but at the end of the week I think I’ll either post each video on my blog, or maybe even combine them together into a single video.

Not a bad place to sit…

My main blog now supports micro posts!

Took a bit of tinkering, but I’ve now got them appearing on the website correctly, excluded from the main RSS feed, and also being syndicated here on Micro.blog.

One day I need to go through the 1500 posts on my blog, and delete all the rubbish that has built up from various migrations and periods of cross-posting. But it doesn’t seem very easy from Ghost. If only I could interact directly with the db 🤔.

Working from home really messes with my brain. At various points of today I’ve thought it was a different day of the week. Then I remember it’s actually friday, and I don’t need to think about work for a few days.

I didn’t realise Rings of Power was out alreeady! I wonder if I can manage to watch both episodes tonight. 🤔

I must say, I’m very much enjoying House of the Dragon. It reminds me of how it felt watching the first series of Game of Thrones. 📺

Countle looks like it may become one of my daily mini games. Even though I still haven’t worked out todays sum.

My mini blog refresh is complete. A tad more minimal, with a plain colour background again, and no more serif font. However, I added some different visual layers with the content, with featured images also getting a bit of love.

chrishannah.me

God damn it. I’ve now got it in my head that I need to (partially) redesign my blog.

I wonder what I can get done before the football starts in 50 minutes.

On a bit of a wild book hunt at the moment. My Bookshop.org wishlist is growing quite a bit. 📚

Currently reading: Natives by Akala 📚

After playing with DALL-E recently, I wondered if I could use it to create wallpapers. I still haven’t totally succeeded yet, but I did think of an interesting image pipeline.

1. Start with an image description.
2. Pass that into DALL-E and choose an image.
3. Run it through Pixelmator Pro’s ML Super Resolution.
4. Treat it like a photo and do any usual edits/crops.
5. Voila.

Here’s what each step looks like on one of my recent generations. (Note: all images have been scaled down to a maximum size of 1024px x 1024px).

The image description:

“a photo of a large tree with handing branches in the center of a dense jungle with a small tropical river nearby during golden hour”

(Yep, handing should be hanging, I’ll blame autocorrect for that).

Here is the outputted image:

This is it after running it through the ML Super Resolution a few times. (And then resampling down to 1024px):

After some edits:

Finally, cropped to a vertical 3:4 ratio:

I think I’ll play around with the process a bit. But I do find it very interesting, and fun, to see how far you can take DALL-E images. The next thing I want to figure out is to make the images look like real photos, not like weird pieces of art.

The Music app being the default application to open mp3 files on a Mac seems pretty stupid to me.

I don’t know where it came from, or how long it will last, but I have a sudden weird desire to own a Mac desktop.

🗺 I was in Devon this past weekend, and I took a few cameras with me, so I’ve shared a few of my favourite photos on my blog.

📸 chrishannah.me/photos-fr…

Last night I discovered that Beyblade has an official YouTube channel, and the entire first series (51 episodes) is there. So I guess I know what I’m doing for the next few weeks.

It’s just started to rain where I live (England), so I’ve decided to go sit outside. Because it’s finally a temperature that my body can live with.

Apparently even a minor design change such as this simple tiling background can make a website look much better.

I’ve finally finished my first roll of film with my Dubblefilm SHOW camera. Nothing special, just a 36 exposure roll of Kodak UltraMax 400. But I’m very interested to see what comes from this camera, as I’ve taken photos in all kinds of locations and lighting conditions. 📸

Quick update on my search to find a web archive tool: I’ve found ArchiveBox, which is self-hosted solution that allows you to build your own web archive. For now I have it archiving locally on my Mac, but I think I’ll eventually look at running it elsewhere, or adding syncing.

I’m away this weekend, in Wells-next-the-sea, and although I have my MacBook with me, my only source of internet is a temperamental 4G connection via my phone. It’s made me realise (or maybe remember) the pieces of software that I use which absolutely require an internet connection.

So I think I will be going through them, and making a couple changes. Since, although in most cases you can rely on having a connection. It still feels weird to me that my task manager (Todoist), doesn’t want to work unless I have internet access.

One more problem that I’d like to solve is saving websites to read later. Not via RSS feeds, I have Reeder for that, but I would ideally like a way to save a link from my browser, and then have that page archived locally to my device. I think Feedbin (the RSS service I use) and Reeder both have mechanisms of saving one-off pages for reading later. However, one thing I don’t like about RSS feeds is that by it’s nature, it’s only the raw article contents. Whereas I like to enjoy writing within the context of the website where it was published.

Maybe that’s weird, but I think sometimes extracting the article contents from a website can cause it to lose a bit of personality.

Anyway, that’s enough complaining. I’ve now got to work out how possible this actually is.

I watched a great episode of the Rich Roll podcast with neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman. There was a lot that fascinated me, so I decided to write about the three I found most interesting.

chrishannah.me/neuroscie…