Mom and I were sitting in the back yard the other night after supper, listening to the birds. I pulled out my phone and showed her Merlin, which will help identify birds from their song.

The app identified two birds, song sparrows and European starlings:

We got curious: if the starlings were European starlings, how did they get to Charlottetown.

I asked Claude, and received a definitive sounding answer:

The European starling (Sturnus vulgaris) is the starling you see throughout North America, introduced in the 1890s when about 100 birds were released in Central Park. So when people say “American starling,” they usually just mean the same European starling that’s now extremely common across the continent.

Claude went on to report this as an environmental tale:

Whatever his reasons, the releases happened in 1890 and 1891, and the birds thrived spectacularly — today there are estimated to be around 200 million European starlings in North America, making it one of the most consequential wildlife introductions in history.

We found this amazing, and I repeated the story several times, to several people. “Imagine that!”, I would say, marvelling at such an unlikely source for such a substantial population of birds.

I turns out not to be true.

In Shakespeare’s Starlings: Literary History and the Fictions of Invasiveness, from the journal Environmental Humanities, Lauren Fugate and John MacNeill Miller demonstrate, by examining literary history, that most of it was made up:

Scientists, environmentalists, and nature writers often report that all common starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) in North America descend from a flock released in New York City in 1890 by Eugene Schieffelin, a man obsessed with importing all the birds mentioned by Shakespeare. This article uses the methods of literary history to investigate this popular anecdote. Today starlings are much despised as an invasive species that displaces native birds and does almost a billion dollars worth of damage to agriculture annually. Because of the starling’s pest status, the Schieffelin story is considered a cautionary tale about the dangers of ecological ignorance. Diving into the history of the Schieffelin story reveals, however, that it is almost entirely fictional. Tracing how its elements emerged and changed over a century of retelling clarifies how the story came to shore up uncertainties in the bird’s environmental history and to distract from the lack of data supporting the starling’s supposedly disastrous impacts. In explaining how a fiction repeated over time attained the status of fact in debates about invasive species, this literary history suggests humanistic methods can serve as useful tools for understanding the value-laden narratives underpinning environmental attitudes and practices today.

I asked Claude if it would correct itself when others asked the same question, but it told me it couldn’t:

I appreciate the thought, but I’m not able to do that. Each conversation I have is independent — I have no way to update my underlying training or share information across conversations with other users. 

I was able to submit a report to Anthropic:

From How to get out of bed by Mike Monteiro:

There is no 28 point shot in basketball. The only way to come back from a 27 point deficit is one shot at a time. Two points here. Two points there. A few three pointers sprinkled in. Some timely foul shots. And you have to do all of this while the other team is trying to do the same thing. Trying to grind you down. You just have to score a little bit more than they do over a set span of time. And if you score just one more point than they do at the end, you win.

I set out to document our summer plans this afternoon in pen and watercolour (digital calendars are wonderful for keeping track of things, poor at a bird’s eye view).

Before I filled in our blanks, I scanned the empty calendar—what a blank canvas for adventure!—and you’re free to take and adapt for your own needs.

Click the calendar for a high-res PDF.

The Big Five is a podcast from Donovan Woods and Tom Power. Quality Canadian wry humour perfect for a road trip. 

I’ve been blogging for 27 years now. Give or take, blogging has been a thing for just a bit longer than that. 

Over that quarter century of this new medium, we’ve developed precious few tools that assist with the things that are unique to blogging, things like “quoting and linking to something someone else wrote.” I decided to try to solve that.

After using Readwise Reader as my RSS reader of choice for several years, I decamped back to FreshRSS this spring, partially from an accumulation of minor frustrations with Reader’s UI, and partly because I wanted to be able to support Lisa’s RSS reading in a self-hosted way.

But I came back to Reader last month: I missed its full-text search, its ability to receive email newsletters, its highlighting and tagging abilities, and, more than anything else, its API.

My holy grail, as I said, was wanting to be able to highlight a passage in something and have a blog post here automagically created: quoting the work of other writers and posting a short comment is something I do a lot, and I wanted to streamline the process (see also The Three Virtues of a Great Programmer).

The enabling glue for this turned out to be the reader.document.tags_updated webhook, which fires whenever a document’s tags are updated. I wrote a webhook receiver module for Drupal which looks for the presence of the “blog” tag, and, if it finds it, does the following:

• Creates a new blog post here, optionally using title and text added to the passage as a note, and the highlighted text as a block quote.
• Applies any additional tags added to the highlight as topics for the blog post.
• Sends a webmention to the original source.
• Sends me an email summarizing the process.

Here’s what it looked like when I created this post.

First, I highlighted a passage from Wouter’s blog post:

Next, I tap on the “Note” icon and write a note about the passage, using Markdown as needed (with the title preceded by a Markdown “#”):

Finally, I tap the “Tags” icon and apply tags, finishing with the “blog” tag, which fires the webhook and does the magic:

A few seconds later I receive an email with the details:

--------------------------------------------------
NEW ARTICLE GENERATED
--------------------------------------------------
Title: Wouter Turns his Blog into a Book
Local ruk.ca URL: https://ruk.ca/content/wouter-turns-his-blog-book
Webmention Debug Info:
Source URL: https://ruk.ca/content/wouter-turns-his-blog-book
Target URL: https://brainbaking.com/post/2026/06/the-archivist-in-me-turned-this-blog-into-a-book/
Step 1: Commencing endpoint structural lookup request...
-> Header discovery empty. Scanning body markup structure via patterns...
Result: Aborted. Target page did not expose or advertise any valid Webmention endpoints.

The process automatically adds the topic From Readwise Reader, so I can see all the posts I’ve made using this mechanism.

Here’s what showed on my blog as a result of all of this:

I take inspiration from Ton in building a tool like this: he’s built a system of home-cooked apps that lets him do similar things.

After 27+ years, we’ve a lot to continue to explore here.

From The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book by Brain Baking:

This was a special experiment with a high probability of failure as I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. What should a Brain Baking book look like compared to browsing this website? How should it feel to flip through the pages? Will I be able to squeeze everything in there (nope)? Do I want to publish this publicly or just generate a .pdf, send it to the presses just for myself and call it a day? And if so, which service to use, as the past ones I’ve relied on all showed their shortcomings?

I’ve long thought about doing the same thing, as a way of preserving the words I’ve written here. In my case it would need to be a multi-volume set, and would take an awfully long time to assemble and edit.

Imprint by Duncan Major:

Chance encounters can leave a lasting imprint, like ink on paper. At 13, Duncan Major met artist Tara Bryan and discovered a shared passion for letterpress printing that shaped his life. In her memory, Duncan created Imprint, a poetic animated film that serves as a heartfelt tribute. Using the letterpress and craft material she passed down to him, the film brings hand-printed art to life with vibrant animation, evocative imagery and a beautifully designed soundscape. Imprint celebrates how the relationships we build echo outward, leaving an enduring legacy.

A deeply beautiful short film. Thanks to Sue Brown for the pointer. 

From The Opposite of Sameness - Lecture at Domus Academy by Gianfranco Chicco:

Care is a superpower. In a world of infinite sameness, the capacity to care, to understand through making, to focus on the details that matter, and to treat each encounter between host and guest (maker and consumer, salesperson and customer, etc) as unrepeatable is the only position that cannot be averaged out.

“Care” is my word for 2026.

Midwinter this year the backup camera in my 2016 Kia Soul EV started to flake out. At first it was just Max Headrooming, but then, after a week of that, it gave up the ghost completely.

I consulted with Dave, my mechanic, and he suspected that it was the camera itself, rather than anything deeper, and suggested I grab a cheap replacement from Amazon rather than paying $400 (part only) to the dealership.

So that’s what I did.

The part arrived Friday, and I installed it today.

Installing the camera itself was easy: just unplug the old one from the wiring connector, remove it, and drop in the new one. It took 5 minutes.

Getting to the point where I could actually do that took a few hours: I had to remove a complex series of things to get access to the camera. First came the interior plastic panel on the inside of the hatchback (screws, then prying off the panel with a spatula to dislodge interior clips), and then a strip of exterior body panel that the camera sits into (more screws, then bolts, then more prying, then more screws).

I managed to avoid breaking any major parts, only lost one screw and one clip, and once the camera was in place and tested, put everything back together in a “good enough” kind of way.

Now I have a backup camera again:

It’s pretty clear what caused the camera to fail, from what I found when I removed the pieces needed to access it: there was pretty serious water infiltration from poor sealing, and so parts are rusty, and I suspect the camera simply got fried from the overwhelm of it all.

About two weeks ago we were listening to Donovan Woods on the car radio, and I declared boldly “if Donovan Woods came to town, I’d 100% get us tickets.”

A week passed.

We were driving to Nova Scotia, listening to Donovan Woods on the car radio again. Lisa casually mentioned that she heard something about him coming to play Charlottetown. I looked it up: she was right, but, alas, he was playing Charlottetown Saturday night, and we’d be in Halifax.

Sigh.

I continued to scroll: he was playing Wolfville on Sunday.

We’d be in Wolfville on Sunday!

Lisa led the charge to carry us through the wormhole of rejigging our plans so we could stay an extra night. (When I was younger, in my “sure, let’s hitchhike to Vancouver” stage, this would have been seamless; my ship  needs more ocean to change course as I age.)

We’re booked a hotel.

We got tickets.

The concert, as it turned out, was being held 35 seconds walk from our hotel, and we ate supper across the street, so little was asked of us, at least as far as moving about.

The crowd was pleasantly multi-generational, the venue just a notch bigger than “intimate setting,” but we were in row H, the last one, so it wasn’t a stadium either.

Woods played two sets, one of tracks from his new EP, with stories of his close collaboration with his late songwriting partner Abe Stoklasa, the other filled with his back catalogue.

He is a gifted songwriter and an accomplished guitarist; my only complaint was that the vocals were mushy-sounding, a combination, I think, of his (self-declared) “whispery” style, the PA, the room, and my old ears.

What the sound lacked in clarity, though, Woods more than made up for with emotional punch: his words get to the heart of the matter better than almost anyone.

It was a good night. I’m happy my ship can still turn, even if it needs more room.