You’ve probably come across GeoGuessr already: it’s an online game where you (and friends, if you’ve got them) get dropped into Google Street
View and have two minutes to try to work out where in the world you are and drop a pin on it.
Can you tell where we are, yet?
A great strategy is to “walk around” a little, looking for landmarks, phone numbers, advertisements, linguistic clues, cultural indicators, and so on, narrowing down the region of the
world you think you’re looking at before committing to a country or even a city. You’re eventually scored by how close you are to the actual location.
Cheating at GeoGuessr
I decided to see if ChatGPT can do better than me. Using only the free tier of both GeoGuessr and ChatGPT1, I pasted
screenshots of what I was seeing right into ChatGPT:
ChatGPT confidently assessed the geographic clues, translated some text that it found, and eventually made a guess down to a particular street in St Petersburg.
That’s pretty spooky, right?
The response came back plenty fast enough for me to copy-and-paste the suggested address into Google Maps, get the approximate location, and then drop a pin in the right place in
GeoGuessr. It’s probably one of my most-accurate guesses ever.
This isn’t a one-off fluke. I tried again, this time using only a single photo, rather than one pointing in each direction on the street:
Again, the text recognition and translation capabilities of the AI were highly useful, but it was helped by architectural and cultural clues too.
This time, it wasn’t quite right: the actual location of the photo was Chittagong, not Dhaka, about 200km away.
But that’s still reasonably spectacular from only a single vantage from a single point.
Don’t think I’d have done better, though.
Obviously my approach here was crude, but it’d be relatively easy to, for example, implement a browser wrapper that cheated on-your-behalf: while playing GeoGuessr, you’d just click a
“send to AI” button whenever you fancied and it’d start working in the background, improving precision with each subsequent screenshot (so you could still “walk around” and pass extra
details to it).
And similarly, a little prompt manipulation could have the output include estimated GPS coordinates, allowing the code to place the pin for you while outputting its reasoning
on the side2.
The short of what I’m saying is: if you’re playing GeoGuessr against somebody you don’t trust not to cheat… they might well be cheating. And thanks to the explanatory output, they can
even justify their explanations for the places they dropped pins.
What about other photos?
The other thought that comes to my mind is: could this be used to infer approximate geolocations from photos whose EXIF metadata has been stripped. Because if so, that’s the
kind of thing that’s certain to get exploited by all kind of people who want to know where you are/were at a particular time. For example… law enforcement, stalkers, and
other unsavoury types.
Explanation: The photograph shows a large ship docked at a port with a building that displays the text “WELCOME TO PORT OF SPAIN”. This text is in English,
indicating an English-speaking country. The mention of “Port of Spain” directly specifies the port’s location in the capital city of Trinidad and Tobago. The design and style of
the port facilities, as well as the presence of a ship named “Logos Hope”, which is known to visit many ports globally, further suggests a Caribbean port, aligning with Port of
Spain’s known characteristics.
Location: The Rollright Stones, England, United Kingdom
Explanation: The photograph depicts an area with several ancient standing stones arranged in a circle in a rural setting, characteristic of a stone circle.
These are typically found in certain parts of the UK. The terrain is typical of the British countryside, with a grassy field and surrounding trees. The specific arrangement
and size of the stones, along with the style of fencing and walking paths, are reminiscent of the Rollright Stones, one of Britain’s historic sites known for a circle of
Neolithic or Bronze Age standing stones located in Oxfordshire, England.
Coordinates: 51.9743, -1.5731
✅ Again, spot on. If you’d never been to the Rollright Stones, you probably wouldn’t get that one, because while it’s a distinctive-looking stone circle… it’s not that
distinctive-looking, right? Let’s be honest: it’s some rocks in a field.
Explanation: The photograph prominently features the Galata Tower in the background, a well-known landmark in Istanbul, Turkey. Moreover, the presence of a ferry
or similar boat and the architectural style of the surrounding buildings are indicative of Istanbul’s famous skyline. The signage in Turkish, as suggested by the word partially
visible on the left, also supports this location as Turkey is a predominantly Turkish-speaking country. These elements combined make it highly likely that the photograph was taken
in Istanbul.
Coordinates: 41.0082, 28.9784
✅ The coordinates aren’t exactly right – it’s placed us in the city rather than on a boat, which we clearly are – but it’s not done badly. Spotting the Galata Tower3 was a nice move.
Location: Cardiff Bay, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
Explanation: The photograph features a marina with modern residential buildings, which is characteristic of the Cardiff Bay area in Cardiff, Wales. The
architecture, clear blue skies, and marina setting are reminiscent of Cardiff’s waterfront development. Additionally, the presence of English signage on the boat (“FINBAR”)
supports a location in an English-speaking country. Cardiff Bay is known for its redeveloped waterfront area with modern apartments and leisure facilities surrounding the marina.
The style and design of the building are consistent with developments in Cardiff’s revitalized docklands.
Coordinates: 51.4626, -3.1678
❌ Oops! Nope. I can see the thinking of what it’s claiming, there, but this was actually the Ipswich marina. I went for a walk to take a break from the code I’d been writing
and took this somewhere in the vicinity of the blue plaque for Edward Ardizzone that I’d just spotted (I was
recording a video for my kids, who’ve enjoyed several of his Tim… books).
So I don’t think this is necessarily a game-changer for Internet creeps yet. So long as you’re careful not to post photos in which you’re in front of any national monuments and
strip your EXIF metadata as normal, you’re probably not going to give away where you are quite yet.
Footnotes
1 And in a single-player game only: I didn’t actually want to cheat anybody out
of a legitimate victory!
2 I’m not going to implement GeoCheatr, as I’d probably name it. Unless somebody
feels like paying me to do so: I’m open for freelance work right now, so if you want to try to guarantee the win at the GeoGuessr World Championships (which will involve the much-riskier act of cheating in
person, so you’ll want a secret UI – I’m thinking a keyboard shortcut to send data to the AI, and an in-ear headphone so it can “talk” back to you?), look me up? (I’m mostly
kidding, of course: just because something’s technically-possible doesn’t mean it’s something I want to do, even for your money!)
4 3Camp is Three Rings‘ annual volunteer
get-together, hackathon, and meetup. People come together for an intensive week of making-things-better for charities the world over.
Gorgeous view of Slievenamon towering over Kilsheelan, Co. Tipperary, Ireland, as seen from Gurteen Wood, where my mother and I are just on our way back from our successful expedition
to the 2024-11-24 52 -7 geohashpoint.
Some younger/hipper friends tell me that there was a thing going around on Instagram this week where people post photos of themselves aged 21.
I might not have any photos of myself aged 21! I certainly can’t find any digital ones…
The closest I can manage is this photo from 23 April 2003, when I was 22 years old.
It must sound weird to young folks nowadays, but prior to digital photography going mainstream in the 2000s (thanks in big part to the explosion of popularity of mobile phones), taking
a photo took effort:
Most folks didn’t carry their cameras everywhere with them, ready-to-go, so photography was much more-intentional.
The capacity of a film only allowed you to take around 24 photos before you’d need to buy a new one and swap it out (which took much longer than swapping a memory card).
You couldn’t even look at the photos you’d taken until they were developed, which you couldn’t do until you finished the roll of film and which took at least hours –
more-realistically days – and incurred an additional cost.
I didn’t routinely take digital photos until after Claire and I got together in 2002 (she had a digital camera, with which the photo above was taken). My first cameraphone – I was a
relatively early-adopter – was a Nokia 7650, bought late that same
year.
It occurs to me that I take more photos in a typical week nowadays, than I took in a typical year circa 2000.
This got me thinking: what’s the oldest digital photo that exists, of me. So I went digging.
I might not have owned a digital camera in the 1990s, but my dad’s company owned one with which to
collect pictures when working on-site. It was a Sony MVC-FD7,
a camera most-famous for its quirky use of 3½” floppy disks as media (this was cheap and effective, but meant the camera was about the size and weight of a brick and took about 10
seconds to write each photo from RAM to the disk, during which it couldn’t do anything else).
In Spring 1998, almost 26 years ago, I borrowed it and took, among others, this photo:
I’m aged 17 in what’s probably the oldest surviving digital photo of me, looking like a refugee from Legoland in 640×480 glorious pixels.
I’m confident a picture of me was taken by a Connectix QuickCam (an early
webcam) in around 1996, but I can’t imagine it still exists.
So unless you’re about to comment to tell me know you differently and have an older picture of me: that snap of me taking my own photo with a bathroom mirror is the oldest digital
photo of me that exists.
Beginning to prepare/test my costume for an upcoming murder mystery party, I glanced into the mirror and briefly didn’t recognise myself. Glasses can do so much to change your face
shape!
Taking a photo of our kids isn’t too hard: their fascination with screens means you just have to switch to “selfie mode” and they lock-on to the camera like some kind of narcissist
homing pigeon. Failing that, it’s easy enough to distract them with something that gets them to stay still for a few seconds and not just come out as a blur.
“On the school run” probably isn’t a typical excuse for a selfie, but the light was good.
But compared to the generation that came before us, we have it really easy. When I was younger than our youngest is , I was obsessed with pressing buttons. So pronounced was my
fascination that we had countless photos, as a child, of my face pressed so close to the lens that it’s impossible for the camera to focus, because I’d rushed over at the last second to
try to be the one to push the shutter release button. I guess I just wanted to “help”?
Oh wait… is there something on that camera I can press?
In theory, exploiting this enthusiasm should have worked out well: my parents figured that if they just put me behind the camera, I could be persuaded to take a good picture
of others. Unfortunately, I’d already fixated on another aspect of the photography experience: the photographer’s stance.
When people were taking picture of me, I’d clearly noticed that, in order to bring themselves down to my height (which was especially important given that I’d imminently try to
be as close to the photographer as possible!) I’d usually see people crouching to take photos. And I must have internalised this, because I started doing it too.
Another fantastic photo by young Dan: this one shows around 80% of my mum’s face and around 100% of my dad’s manspreading.
Unfortunately, because I was shorter than most of my subjects, this resulted in some terrible framing, for example slicing off the tops of their heads or worse. And because this was a
pre-digital age, there was no way to be sure exactly how badly I’d mucked-up the shot until days or weeks later when the film would be developed.
I imagine that my dad hoped to see more of whatever bus that is, in this photo, but he’s probably just grateful that I didn’t crop off any parts of his body this time.
In an effort to counteract this framing issue, my dad (who was always keen for his young assistant to snap pictures of him alongside whatever article of public transport history he was
most-interested in that day) at some point started crouching himself in photos. Presumably it proved easier to just duck when I did rather than to try to persuade me not to crouch in
the first place.
As you look forward in time through these old family photos, though, you can spot the moment at which I learned to use a viewfinder, because people’s heads start to feature close to the
middle of pictures.
This is a “transitional period” photo, evidenced by the face that my dad is clearly thinking about whether or not he needs to crouch.
Unfortunately, because I was still shorter than my subjects (especially if I was also crouching!), framing photos such that the subject’s face was in the middle of the frame resulted in
a lot of sky in the pictures. Also, as you’ve doubtless seem above, I was completely incapable of levelling the horizon.
This is the oldest photo I can find that was independently taken by our youngest child, then aged 3. I’m the subject, and I’m too close to the lens, blurred because I’m in motion, and
clearly on my way to try to “help” the photographer. Our ages might as well be reversed.
I’d like to think I’ve gotten better since, but based on the photo above… maybe the problem has been me, all along!
We’ve missed out on or delayed a number of trips and holidays over the last year and a half for, you know, pandemic-related reasons. So this summer, in addition to our trip to Lichfield, we arranged a series of back-to-back expeditions.
1. Alton Towers
The first leg of our holiday saw us spend a long weekend at Alton Towers, staying over at one of their themed hotels in between days at the water park and theme park:
The CBeebies Land hotel is… whimsical.
Yes, there’s a puppeteer (somewhere) in that cabinet processing checkins.
Even the elevators play tunes and put on a light show with every journey.
It took me a while to see this rabbit as playing music, rather than, y’know… vomiting.
The whimsy continues in the theming of the restaurant. Yes, that windmill turns.
Technically, this is part of one of the other (similarly whimsical) hotels on the site, but nobody seemed to mind our exploring.
On at least one occasion we ate dinner in “The Library”, which turns out (disappointingly) not to be a library but a room with pictures of books on the wall.
The hotel puts on a series of show somewhat reminiscent of an “upscale” Pontins.
Bing the rabbit made me glad that the other end of this hotel room had a bar.
The (Octonauts) theming of our hotel room even extended as far as the phone, TVs, and that notice they put up about towel washing. Neat.
Hole in… seven?
For obvious reasons, we don’t have photos inside the water park. Ignore the sign, we asked permission before taking this one!
Befriending wildfowl is what people with kids come to theme parks for, right?
Yay! Frog fountains!
The In The Night Garden Boat Ride was a particular favourite.
Social distancing was imposed reasonably wall, all things considered, although (as you’d expect) many fairgoers were less-disciplined than we’d have liked.
We spent a lot of our first day in the theme park in CBeebies Land, but we only had the patience to queue for the Octonauts rollercoaster the once.
CBeebies Land itself had a variety of shows with different characters.
Makaton for “friend” is just cute. Thanks, Mr. Tumble.
On these, among the hottest days of the year, we got quite sweaty inside our masks.
I’m not sure we optimised this photo opportunity for height.
An unrepentant nose-picker gets jail time in Mutinty Bay.
The Postman Pat ride designer had the foresight to provide two steering wheels in case the participants weren’t good at sharing… but still provided an odd number of buttons to use
to “deliver parcels” at key points during the ride.
Later in the first day and into the second day we stepped up to more-exciting family rides, like the Congo River Rapids, and even a few thrill rides that interested only a subset of
our party.
The Congo River Rapids had a tediously long queue (not least because no groups, however small, were allowed to share a boat), but at least we all got to take part together as a
family.
The kids had to make a solemn promise to stop their bickering before they were allowed to sit together for this ride.
Not everybody was equally-enthusiastic about haunted house shoot-’em-up ride Duel.
2. Darwin Forest
The second leg of our holiday took us to a log cabin in the Darwin Forest Country Park for a week:
We punctuated our journey from Alton Towers with a trip to Chatsworth House to feed some livestock.
Chatsworth House also has a spectacular adventure playground.
“I found a stick!” “That’s… half a tree!”
Eventually we reached our cabin, unpacked… and jumped into the hot tub!
For the duration of the week we instituted “holiday mornings”, permitting the children to get up by themselves, assemble their own breakfast, and watch broadcast TV… so long as they
did so without disturbing the adults. It worked pretty well.
The forest trails are full of obstacles fun for children… and adults.
This way up.
No, THIS way up!
Further along the trail, there’s a traverse wall.
Off the trails, all kinds of curious sculptures – like these fairy houses – can be found.
We forgot to bring a football, but we played lots of imaginary sports.
The on-site soft play centre operated at minimal capacity, which felt about right.
A soft play centre with a low population means you’re often alone on the racing slides…
…that is, unless you bring your own racers to compete with!
The second mini-golf course of our holiday was deceptively harder than the first thanks to awkwardly-shaped obstacles that reflected the ball out at terrible angles.
Ruth’s old secondary school is now an old folks home and an attached fancy tea room, so – as we were in the vicinity – we had to go visit!
Remarkably, the kids (for once) showed impeccable table manners.
I’m almost embarrassed to say that this, one of the best photos I’ve ever taken, was snapped accidentally when a 4-year-old reached over and touched my camera.
What else does one do in the Derbyshire Dales? That’s right: go down caves!
Staff at the Devil’s Arse were amazing and even took the kids on their own personal tour of a ropemaker’s hut (not part of the routine tour).
We also got to bring home a length of rope that the kids helped make.
It turns out to be hard to take a good photo down a cave. Can’t think why.
Our second spelunking expedition took us into Speedwell Cavern by boat.
The bottomless pit, behind us, turns out to be less-bottomless than advertised.
When it wasn’t raining, it was hot. Either way, we were on holiday, so ice cream was in order.
The kids shared a bedroom for pretty-much the first time since we moved house last year, and routinely sat up late reading stories to one another until they zonked out mid-book.
Naturally, I took one of our “chill out and rest” days as an excuse for a nice long hike and a geocaching expedition to the Sydnope Valley.
We also tried an local escape room and it was spectacularly well-designed (and amazingly family-friendly).
Oh, and there might have been a modicum of drinking, both in and out of the hot tub.
3. Preston
Kicking off the second week of our holiday, we crossed the Pennines to Preston to hang out with my family (with the exception of JTA,
who had work to do back in Oxfordshire that he needed to return to):
Our resident 4-year-old foodie claims that no crumpets are as good as Nanna Doreen’s “giant” ones.
Sometimes you just need an ice lolly and a bean bag to chill on. If you can’t find a bean bag, use Dan.
Now that she doesn’t have any cats, dogs, or chickens, my mother’s old sheds have been converted into playhouses.
Who needs a tickle? You need a tickle.
Fortunately, the felt-tips she found were of the washable variety.
Why yes, this is a picture of me taking a picture of Ruth taking a picture.
I’m not sure what this pose was MEANT to achieve…
…but what it ACTUALLY achieved was my mother getting ink splotches on her face.
Syncing everything up in anticipation of a Pokewalk.
“Which way to the Pokestop?” (I’m guessing. I don’t understand Pokemon Go.)
“How far to the Pokegym?” (I still don’t know anything about Pokemon Go. Don’t flame me.)
I feel like every time I visit my family I acquire a larger number of photos that I can’t begin to explain.
Like this one. Is this some kind of game? What are the rules? Who’s winning? I just don’t know.
Is this the same game? Are the children all on the same team (against Becky) or not? I have so many unanswered questions.
And this one. What are Sarah and I doing? Simultaneously cracking our necks, perhaps?
The kids put food out for the hedgehogs and attracted a big one.
Now THIS kind of GPS-based sport I can get behind. Lead on to the cache!
The kids were less impressed by this geocache than I was. And I wasn’t THAT impressed.
Not content with sprinting around the 400m track wearing her wellies, our 7-year-old then proceeded to dominate on the park gym.
If you pedal one of these things hard enough, does it take off?
Wheeee!
So. Many. Sprinkles.
How do they find so much energy?
We borrowed a dog from a family friend. If our 7-year-old had her way, we wouldn’t have given it back.
It was Jemma’s birthday, apparently, so we marked it at a family barbecue.
Nearby Brockholes nature reserve provided a wonderful outing.
This one’s the less-accident-prone of our children. Otherwise he’d probably already be in the water, somehow.
Our 7-year-old likes to befriend ducks wherever she goes.
Again with the boundless energy as the kids disappear into one of Brockholes’ meadows.
That boy loves a big open space to run in, for sure.
Brockholes’ adventure play area is pretty exciting too.
But crossing a wobbly bridge isn’t the easiest thing when you’re little.
Luckily our children are both pretty fearless and adventurous and will give pretty much anything a go.
It’s hard to tell, but he’s not shouting in distress here, but in joy.
I believe this is an English Longhorn, a traditional draft animal of North-West England in centuries past.
I made several attempts to get my mother, my sister Sarah, and both our kids into a single frame in which they were all looking at the camera and none of them were blinking. I
failed, but this was the closest I managed.
4. Forest of Bowland
Ruth and I then left the kids with my mother and sisters for a few days to take an “anniversary mini-break” of glamping in the gorgeous Forest of Bowland:
This caravan-sized wooden hut became our delightful little home for a few days.
Here, at the edge of the Forest, the Bier Beck snakes lazily towards the River Ribble.
The farm on which our pod was situated kept horses.
I just loved the fact that this horse had a zebra-print jacket.
One morning, we took a scorching hike up Pendle Hill. Didn’t see any witches, but also didn’t receive any mission from God, so I guess all’s well.
We DID get to meet Steve Taylor, though, who’s repeatedly climbing the hill, carrying a bathtub, until he’s ascended to the consecutive height of Mount Everest. He’s raising money
for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, the hero.
That pubs expanded their outdoor seating provision to handle social distancing works wonderfully when you get to sit in a gorgeous but quiet beer garden.
During a self-guided tour of the nearest village we bumped into the vicar who showed us his church’s pipe organ. Ruth tried to explain to me how (and why) this particular pipe organ
was unusual and cool, but I’m not sure I’ll ever “get it” as well as she does.
I found a second wind on a walk around Gisburn Forest and jogged up to the trail’s highest point, leaving Ruth far behind the sweaty mess ahead of her.
I’m not aware of any iron mining operations anywhere near this forest, but there must be iron oxide in the rocks to turn this stream so red.
Each evening we’d record a quick selfie video to say hi to the kids. Sometimes (with some help!) they’d send one back.
A particular treat was stargazing by the fire pit on an evening.
As we checked-out of our accommodation, Ruth suggested we see the sea (we’re a long way from it, normally), so we diverted via the coast.
The children, back in Preston, were apparently having a whale of a time:
Starfish-petting.
(Yes, actual starfish.)
That’ll be Seaworld, of course.
Tube. Tube tube tube.
Do you think the fish think that humans are the exhibit?
Both kids play with VR at home and are way less susceptible to VR-nausea than I am (even with all the practice I’ve had!).
Legoland Manchester. (Did you even know there was a Legoland in Manchester? I didn’t.)
The 4-year-old took “meeting” Lego Batman way more-seriously than the 7-year-old, I think.
That’s one small step for…. OW I STOOD ON A LEGO BRICK!
This brick was her contribution, I guess?
I think this must be Avenham Park in Preston.
Many of his paintings start out as beautiful coloured stripes and end up as brown handprints. I can’t imagine how.
“Do you do contactless?”
I gather the children even got a little gardening done… or at least, grazed on the entirety of my mother’s herb garden.
6. Suddenly, A Ping
The plan from this point was simple: Ruth and I would return to Preston for a few days, hang out with my family some more, and eventually make a leisurely return to Oxfordshire. But it
wasn’t to be…
Well that’s not the kind of message you want to get from your phone.
I got a “ping”. What that means is that my phone was in close proximity to somebody else’s phone on 29 August and that other person subsequently tested positive for COVID-19.
My risk from this contact is exceptionally low. There’s only one place that my phone was in close proximity to the phone of anybody else outside of my immediate family, that
day, and it’s when I left it in a locker at the swimming pool near our cabin in the Darwin Forest. Also, of course, I’d been double-jabbed for a month and a half and I’m more-cautious
than most about contact, distance, mask usage etc. But my family are, for their own (good) reasons, more-cautious still, so self-isolating at Preston didn’t look like a possibility for
us.
Ruth and I went directly to a drive-through PCR testing facility.
As soon as I got the notification we redirected to the nearest testing facility and both got swabs done. 8 days after possible exposure we ought to have a detectable viral
load, if we’ve been infected. But, of course, the tests take a day or so to process, so we still needed to do a socially-distanced pickup of the kids and all their stuff from Preston
and turn tail for Oxfordshire immediately, cutting our trip short.
The results would turn up negative, and subsequent tests would confirm that the “ping” was a false positive. And in an ironic twist, heading straight home actually put us
closer to an actual COVID case as Ruth’s brother Owen turned out to have contracted the bug at almost exactly the same time and had, while we’d been travelling down
the motorway, been working on isolating himself in an annex of the “North wing” of our house for the duration of his quarantine.
I set up a “yellow zone” between Owen’s quarantine area and the rest of the house into which we could throw supplies. And I figured I’d have fun with the signage.
7. Ruth & JTA go to Berwick
Thanks to negative tests and quick action in quarantining Owen, Ruth and JTA were still able to undertake the next part of this three-week holiday period and take
their anniversary break (which technically should be later in the year, but who knows what the situation will be by then?) to Berwick-upon-Tweed. That’s their story to tell, if
they want to, but the kids and I had fun in their absence:
Silly Hat Morning!
Swan boat ride. (I had to do all the pedalling, but the kids were good at shouting orders and threatening to fire upon or board the other boats!)
A trip to Woburn Safari Park isn’t complete without a photo of a monkey on the roof of a car.
That giant tortoise was determined that it could open the (latched) gate if only it pushed hard enough.
Kids love a kid (goat).
Nothing beats a picnic lunch right as everybody else rushes to queue for food in the heat.
Ever the culinary experimenter, our 4-year-old tries pouring a Fruit Shoot onto some candy floss.
And of course, some geocaching might have happened.
“The cache is this way!” “No, it’s THIS way.” “Kids! It’s still 200 metres away, keep walking!”
GC98N1P – whose cache container is this aeroplane and is hidden in a “crash site”! – is one of my favourite local caches.
I gave the 7-year-old a kazoo. #parentingmistakes
We start with nice colourful lines…
…and end up with brown hands! It’s part of his artistic process, I guess.
We enjoyed a socially-distanced visit from Robin one breakfast time.
We also extended our practice in programming with Scratch.
I found an opportunity to retrieve a much-loved but no-longer-sustainable geocache of my own. Look at this monster!
I tapped into my Lancashire heritage and had a go at making “butter pie”, a regional dish distinct to (pretty much) just Preston and Chorley.
This one turned out pretty well, but I’ve still got ideas about how I’ll improve for the next one.
8. Reunited again
Finally, Ruth and JTA returned from their mini-break and we got to do a few things together as a family again before our extended holiday drew to a close:
The children were glad to see mummy and daddy return.
Also, to explain everything that’d they been up to. (Possibly just as a ruse to keep from being sent to bed for a moment longer!)
I specifically said, “Look like you’re NOT completely lost in this maize maze,” I swear.
I feel like I’ve played a lot of crazy golf these last few weeks. This course was perhaps the second-craziest.
There was some kind of puzzle to solve in a maze. Then you had to dig in the sand to find a token of the right colour and put it in a box to show you’d solved it. I don’t know.
I’m not sure this angle of approach is going to end well.
Nice horse.
Den-building? Or poster art for some gritty new Netflix series?
“I’m being a bat.” She hung there for some time, greeting other children as they entered her “cave”.
“Smile!” “Wait… what’s in your mou-?” [click]
Gooseberry-picking.
The gooseberries later made a great reduction to go on our Sunday brunch pancakes. Except for all the ones the kids ate before then.
Choosing exactly the right strawberry requires significant mental effort.
You need to check the fruit from every side before picking it.
This one failed quality control.
We got to go to Liz & Simon’s barbecue party and it was awesome to catch up with everybody.
Plus there are a few new faces in our friend group who I hadn’t had a chance to meet before.
Making (and re-making) friends is so much easier as a child.
For us adults, though, sharing food and alcohol goes a long way.
“It’s smokey over here.” “By the barbecue, yes.” “Why?”
It’s amazing how a toy designed for somebody WAY younger than you is fascinating if it’s just different enough from one you have at home. Novelty wins.
She came here to kick ass at Pokemon and eat your burgers. And you’re all out of burgers.
The fruits we picked earlier in the week made a great addition to a cake.
Of course, we were SUPPOSED to be at Fairport’s Cropredy Convention this weekend, until it was cancelled for the second year in a row. But we still enjoyed Fairport’s livestream
mini-concert.
We adults felt too old and/or self-conscious to dance in our living room, but the kids had no such limitations.
By the end of the virtual concert we were all ready to flump into bed.
We built an enclosure for a new pet we’re expecting in the coming week (the kids’ first pet; let’s see how that goes…).
Robin (and Owen – now recovered but not featured in this picture) – were instrumental in helping us run some ropes over a high bough of one of our garden’s trees…
…to facilitate the installation of a wonderful new ‘nest swing’ Ruth had bought the kids but that they’d not really been able to use until now.
9. Back to work?
Tomorrow I’m back at work, and after 23 days “off” I’m honestly not sure I remember what I do for a living any more. Something to do with the Internet, right? Maybe ecommerce?
I’m sure it’ll all come right back to me, at least by the time I’ve read through all the messages and notifications that doubtless await me (I’ve been especially good at the discipline,
this break, of not looking at work notifications while I’ve been on holiday; I’m pretty proud of myself.)
But looking back, it’s been a hell of a three weeks. After a year and a half of being pretty-well confined to one place, doing a “grand tour” of so many destinations as a family and
getting to do so many new and exciting things has made the break feel even longer than it was. It seems like it must have been months since I last had a Zoom meeting with a
work colleague!
For now, though, it’s time to try to get the old brain back into work mode and get back to making the Web a better place!
This week, some colleagues at Automattic and I are sharing pictures of our workspaces. So I made a 360° panoramic with interactive “info points”
(apologies for work-specific jargon). Would you like to see it?
“Passport Photos” looks at one of the most mundane and unexciting types of photography. Heavily restricted and regulated, the official passport photo
requirements include that the subject needs to face the camera straight on, needs a clear background without shadow, no glare on glasses and most importantly; no smile.
It seems almost impossible for any kind of self-expression.
The series tries to challenge these official rules by testing all the things you could be doing while you are taking your official document photo.
…
I love this weird, wonderful, and truly surreal photography project. Especially in this modern age in which a passport photo does not necessarily involve a photo booth – you’re often
permitted now to trim down a conventional photo or even use a born-digital picture snapped from an approved app or via a web application – it’s more-feasible than ever that the cropping
of your passport photo does not reflect the reality of the scene around you.
Max’s work takes this well beyond the logical extreme, but there’s a wider message here: a reminder that the way in which any picture is cropped is absolutely an artistic
choice which can fundamentally change the message. I remember an amazing illustrative example cropping a photo of some soldiers, in turn
inspired I think by a genuine photo from the second world war. Framing and cropping an image is absolutely part of its reinterpretation.
One of the benefits of being in a camera club full of largely retired people who were all into photography long before digital was ever a thing, is that lots of them have old film,
paper and gear lying around they’re happy to give away.
Last year I was offered a photographic enlarger for making prints, but I initially turned it down because I didn’t think I’d have the space to set up a darkroom and use it. Well,
turns out with a little imagination our windowless bathroom actually converts into a pretty tidy darkroom with fairly minimal setup and teardown – thankfully we also have an
ensuite so my partner can cope with this arrangement with only minimal grumbling
…
My friend Rory tells the story of how he set up a darkroom in his (spare) windowless bathroom and shares his experience of becoming an
increasingly analogue photographer in an increasingly almost-completely digital world.
Every morning, Lena Forsen wakes up beneath a brass-trimmed wooden mantel clock dedicated to “The First Lady of the Internet.”
It was presented to her more than two decades ago by the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, in recognition of the pivotal—and altogether
unexpected—role she played in shaping the digital world as we know it.
Among some computer engineers, Lena is a mythic figure, a mononym on par with Woz or Zuck. Whether or not you know her face, you’ve used the technology it helped create; practically
every photo you’ve ever taken, every website you’ve ever visited, every meme you’ve ever shared owes some small debt to Lena. Yet today, as a 67-year-old retiree living in her native
Sweden, she remains a little mystified by her own fame. “I’m just surprised that it never ends,” she told me recently.
…
While I’m not sure that it’s fair to say that Lena “remained a mystery” until now – the article itself identifies several events she’s attended in her capacity of “first lady of the
Internet” – but this is still a great article about a picture that you might have seen but never understood the significance of nor the person in front of the lens. Oh, and it’s
pronounced “lee-na”; did you know?
