🔗 Tree Talk
Map of London trees
Most Recent Bookmarks
🔗 Braggoscope - Explore the In Our Time archive
In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 since 1998. Here’s the official site.
There are almost a thousand episodes (974 listed here), on all kinds of topics, and they are all available to listen to on the BBC website.
This unofficial site is about finding what to listen to next.
🔗 Geo
🔗 Amazon Kindle EPUB Fix
Amazon's Send to Kindle service has support for EPUB files, however, for historical reasons, it still assumes ISO-8859-1 encoding if no encoding is specified. This creates malformed formatting errors for special characters. It is also pretty strict when it comes to EPUB format validation.
This tool will try to fix your EPUB to be able to use with Send to Kindle. It currently tries to fix these problems:
Fix UTF-8 encoding problem by adding UTF-8 declaration if no encoding is specified
Fix hyperlink problem (result in Amazon rejecting the EPUB) when NCX table of content link to <body> with ID hash.
Detect invalid and/or missing language tag in metadata, and prompt user to select new language.
Remove stray <img> tags with no source field.
🔗 Pandoc Beamer How To
This is a short guide about how I make PDF slides using beamer format output from the pandoc.
🔗 Password requirements: myths and madness
Password requirements are weird. It seems impossible to set a new password in many websites. Why?
🔗 Building a website like it's 1999... in 2022
I'm on a bit of a mission this year to bring back the spirit of the old web. The creativity and flair of the late 90s and early 2000s. Back then, there were no rules – you put whatever you wanted on a webpage, because it was your space to do as you please.
And for a whole generation of internet users, having a website was the cool thing to do. It's just what you did back then. We're talking pre-social media, pre-web 2.0 – the good old fashioned static personal home page.
Sites like Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and Expage offered free static hosting for all, and the number of personal websites boomed. Some hosts offered drag-and-drop website builders so you didn't even have to learn HTML.
We might …
🔗 Vintage Egypt
Vintage Egyptians ads and photos
🔗 Speech-to-text with Whisper: How I Use It & Why
Whisper, from OpenAI, is a new open source tool that "approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition"; "Moreover, it enables transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages into English."
This is a really useful (and free!) tool. I have started using it regularly to make transcripts and captions (subtitles), and am writing to share how, and why, and my reflections on the ethics of using it. You can try Whisper using this website where you can upload audio files to transcribe; to run it on your own computer, skip down to "Logistics".
🔗 Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
"And we will. I’m sure. Somehow. We will find or make another place, eventually. It won’t be exactly the same. It never really is. But we’ll gather again, and they’ll burn it down again, and we’ll start over again. Some of us will lose everything in the cracks between safe spaces. Some of us won’t. It’s impossible to predict who will be who. We just keep trying. Keep trying not to let each other fall. I’m exhausted but that doesn’t mean I get to stop."
🔗 nota
Coverage on GV
🔗 Bicycles vs Cars
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🔗 The World's Fastest-Growing Cause of Death Is Pollution from Car Exhaust
🔗 Despite losing one of his legs, a student goes from Cairo to Ain Sokhna on his bicycle
“Bicycles don’t demand much and don’t need much, yet they give too much. The beauty of the city can’t be seen while someone’s riding a car or a bus, but it definitely can be felt while riding bicycles,” Yassin said.
🔗 Cycling in Cairo: Just use your head
On the smaller streets riding a bike is a breeze, since you avoid the kind of traffic that bogs down cars. On the bigger streets it is more challenging but general rules apply; take the right side of the road (but leave some space), deal with the other traffic as if you are a slower, smaller car and above all be mindful of your surroundings.
🔗 Nadia El-Awady: Cycling Across Europe
I cycled a total of 5630 km to get from Lisbon to Tallinn.
🔗 Breaking the Cycle of Automobile Dependency
🔗 How Paris became a cycling success story—and built a roadmap for other cities
🔗 Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom
![img[https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320486621l/9227270.jpg]]
Take a lively look at women's history from aboard a bicycle, which granted females the freedom of mobility and helped empower women's liberation. Through vintage photographs, advertisements, cartoons, and songs, Wheels of Change transports young readers to bygone eras to see how women used the bicycle to improve their lives. Witty in tone and scrapbook-like in presentation, the book deftly covers early (and comical) objections, influence on fashion, and impact on social change inspired by the bicycle, which, according to Susan B. Anthony, "has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world."
🔗 Flickr: Egyptian Cycling History
![img[https://live.staticflickr.com/4190/34767094104_8262814c60.jpg]]
32 photos collected by Mikael Colville-Andersen
🔗 Egypt: "But We Never Used to Cycle Here" - Yeah, right
...cycling has become something unusual. Something subcultural, something done by poor messengers to transport goods, something for kids to do or a tool for advertising luxury, gated communities
🔗 "Bicycle face": a 19th-century health problem made up to scare women away from biking
In 1890s Europe and America, bicycles were seen by many as an instrument of feminism: they gave women a measure of increased mobility, began to redefine Victorian ideas about femininity, and were eagerly taken up by many women active in the suffrage movement. Bikes helped stoke dress reform movements, which aimed to reduce Victorian restrictions on clothes and undergarments so women could wear clothes that allowed them to engage in physical activities.
As Munsey’s Magazine put it 1896: "To men, the bicycle in the beginning was merely a new toy, another machine added to the long list of devices they knew in their work and play. To women, it was a steed upon which they rode into a new world."
All this triggered a backlash from many …
🔗 Iconic bicycle designs through the ages – in pictures
🔗 How the bicycle became a symbol of women's emancipation
The American civil rights leader, Susan B Anthony, wrote in 1896:
"I think [the bicycle] has done more to emancipate women than any one thing in the world. I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a bike. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammelled womanhood."
🔗 a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally as important to one in a $30,000 car
Since 1998, Bogotá, Colombia has built more than 300 kilometers of protected bikeways. Streetfilms recently had the chance to explore the city's bike network with the man responsible for building it, former mayor Enrique Peñalosa.
"When we build very high quality bicycle infrastructure, besides protecting cyclists, it shows that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally as important to one in a $30,000 car," said Peñalosa. And as mayor, he walked the walk, extending the network of protected bikeways to every community.
"He spent all of the money that he had developing public space for pedestrians and bicycles," said Carlos Felipe Pardo from SlowResearch.org. "If you go to other places, you have people in the mud walking but the cars on a perfect road and …