Starting off, as usual, with a couple of links:
- PhyloPic - Massive collection of silhouette images of plants, animals and other life forms. If you can think of it, it's probably here. I'm not sure what you would use the silhouettes for but they are free for reuse under the Creative Commons licenses.
- Going Medieval - On Side Hustles - Interesting blog post on how people were side-hustling in medieval times.
One of my passions is collecting old web graphic sites. There was so much wonderful creativity involved with the early web graphics makers and so much of it is lost. Sometimes the Internet Archive has a pretty complete capture of what a site was, sometimes it seems it's just a bunch of broken graphic links. Since I've started collecting websites for my Linkware Websets, several of them have gone "dark" and had to be be replaced with a Wayback Machine link. Wanting to save these graphics, I posed the question on the 32-Bit Cafe Discourse about the possibility of downloading entire sites. I got great responses and a few different methods/programs to try out. I ended up downloading HTTrack Website Copier and so far I've grabbed 2 sites and am working on a third. Not sure exactly what I'm going to be doing with them but at least I'll have them in case the site disappears.
We've had a crazy amount of 100F+ (37C) days in the Phoenix area this year. We've had a little break this weekend - we had rain and temperatures cool enough to turn off the A/C and actually get a little chilly. It's been glorious! Unfortunately, it looks like temps are going up again this week but the weather app currently claims it won't go any higher than the mid 90s (35C).
I was hankering for something sweet last night but didn't want to go out and get anything so I searched for chocolate cookie recipes and DuckDuckGo provided me with this banger of a cookie recipe, Soft and Chewy Chocolate Cookies. These ended up being dangerously good! I halved the recipe because I live alone and however many cookies are made are how many I will eventually eat. Mine came out a little different from the original recipe - they spread quite a lot and were thin but I feel this was a feature and not a bug. The cookies ended up being crispy on the edges but still brownie-like in the middle.
Listening
I try to check out Bandcamp's New and Notable section pretty regularly. Usually it's a lot of misses but look what I found this week:
I listened to this whole album the other day and put it on my wishlist. Next Bandcamp Friday it will be mine!
I've also been listening to a new podcast, True Tales from Old Houses. I found out about it from a YouTube channel I watch (Shannon Makes, who is renovating a 100+ year old house in Nova Scotia). Now I'm not particularly interested in old house renovation but this has been a really nice podcast to have on if you just want something in the background while you're doing stuff. Also, the subject matter - like hardwood flooring and window replacement issues - has ended up being unexpectedly interesting.
Reading
Finally finished the library book I was working on, Spells for Forgetting. Now I'm not sure what I'm going to read next. I have a whole slew of Terry Pratchett books from a bundle I bought a while ago, or a few other books I've bought that are just sitting on the Kobo. I'm not really excited about anything that I have, though. The last book in Tad Williams' Last King of Osten Ard series is coming out next month. I had been reading that series last year and then thought I'd better stop until that last book came out. I'm not sure where I stopped in that series, though! If I can figure it out, maybe that will be my next read.
Watching
My son showed me The Gamers on YouTube when he came over this weekend. I think I've seen snippets of one of the other Gamers movies but not the original. We only watched a few minutes together but then I finished it up last night and quite enjoyed it. Was it "good"? No. Was it goofy fun? Yes!
I've been doling out episodes of Slow Horses since after this season I'll be all caught up and even though season 5 is a go, it won't be released til next year. I watched episode 3 this weekend. Only 3 more episodes! Sometimes I wish TV was more like it was in the old days with 20+ episodes in a season.