Simon Wood
Lecturer in Medical Education at Cardiff University, lapsed mathematician, garden railway builder & Doctor Who appreciator.
Lecturer in Medical Education at Cardiff University, lapsed mathematician, garden railway builder & Doctor Who appreciator.
@FediFollows Thanks for including me in your gardening picks! Every garden should have a railway running through it I feel… 😁
#Gardening picks of the day (continued):
➡️ @Capheind - Garden Punk posting on gardening, food & other topics
➡️ @jblue - Organic gardener & theatrical composer
➡️ @simonwood - Videos of model railways running through real gardens
📰 GARDENING MAGAZINES:
@BackyardGarden - Backyard Garden Lover
@BHG - Better Homes & Gardens
@BobVilacom - BobVila.com
@GdnsIllustrated - Gardens Illustrated
@HomesGardens - Homes & Gardens
@HouseDigest - House Digest
@VerandaMag - Veranda
3/4
I keep seeing photos of the teenagers i went to school with, and they're all old people now. Weird.
The Fediverse is intended to be an interoperable, decentralized social network where users can connect across platforms and tools. In practice, though, the reality is more fragmented.
According to Wikipedia:
The majority of Fediverse platforms are based on free and open-source software, and create connections between servers using the ActivityPub protocol.
Still, networks like Bluesky, Nostr, and Diaspora take their own technical paths toward the same vision, which means the fediverse isn’t fully connected just yet.
To help address this gap, Ryan Barrett (@snarfed.org) began developing Bridgy Fed, a tool designed to connect these otherwise separate networks:
Bridgy Fed connects web sites, the fediverse, and Bluesky. You can use it to make your profile on one visible in another, follow people, see their posts, and reply and like and repost them. Interactions work in both directions as much as possible.
With even more networks on the list.
While it’s not a native solution, it does help connect people today—and I really appreciate the perspective of Anuj Ahooja (@quillmatiq), CEO of A New Social, the organization behind Bridgy Fed:
The future of the open social web is people connecting with people no matter what technology they happen to choose. And if bridges and duct tape is what’s necessary, then we’ll continue building bridges, because it’s connections and community over everything.
You can easily connect your blog to Bluesky using Bridgy by following a few simple steps.
You can connect your blog to Bluesky using any self-hosted WordPress site or a paid WordPress.com plan.
First, go to the ActivityPub settings and open the Screen Options at the top right. Enable the Advanced Settings checkbox and click Save.
This will reveal the Advanced tab in the settings, where you’ll find the Following User Interface option. Enable that as well.
Once this feature is active, you’ll be able to access the Following subpage.
To follow the Bluesky account, enter bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy into the input box on the left and click Follow. The account should appear in your list shortly. After a few minutes, your follow request will be accepted, and the account will follow your blog back.
You can verify the connection by checking your Followers list. From this point on, all your new blog posts will also be published on Bluesky. You’ll receive reactions to your posts and even follow requests from Bluesky users.
That’s it! All your upcoming posts will also be published on Bluesky, you will receive all reactions to your posts and even follow requests.
If you ever want to stop the bridge from publishing, simply unfollow the Bridgy account and remove it from your Followers list.
Happy cross-posting bridging :)
Even though following other accounts is now possible, there is currently no way to view their incoming posts. Aside from the specific use case described above, following others doesn’t offer much benefit at this stage. Please be cautious if you think you need to follow more people, as it may increase traffic to your site without a clear purpose.
We’ll let you know as soon as the full reader experience is implemented and will enable all necessary (currently hidden) features at that time.
As a proof of concept, you can now also follow our updates on Bluesky via @activitypub.blog.activitypub.blog.ap.brid.gy
On bridging between networks vs cross-posting:
"They’re similar, but they’re different in some important ways. Notably, bridging results in more unified conversations, while cross-posted conversations are more fragmented."
That's why Bridgy Fed's approach is so interesting - and, imo, important.
“from an executive perspective, lighting comically large piles of money on fire trying to teach graphics cards how to read is, surprisingly, the logical play. The rest, well, that’s all just creative marketing….” #AI https://malwaretech.com/2025/08/every-reason-why-i-hate-ai.html
In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen
The mathematician John Venn was born on this day in 1834. To commemorate the occasion, here’s a poem in the form of a Venn diagram.
It's very simple really. There are Drives and Sites. You can find your Sites in Teams where they are called Channels. Or Files in Channels. Sites are also in SharePoint. Drives are also in SharePoint but you can't access them that way except by accident. Libraries are Groups that are also Files (but Teams calls these Knowledge Bases). You can save things in Notebooks which are saved in a Drive but can also contain Drives or Sites (but not Teams, which are what Teams calls Teams and where Channels are stored, which SharePoint and OneDrive call Sites). Copilot is both a way to access Sites and Drives, and a way to produce lies. Nobody knows what 365 means. If all of this is overwhelming, consider speaking to your administrator about whether Microsoft Death is right for you.
In 2019, UNESCO member states took a bold step by adopting the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER)! This decision gives national governments a list of recommendations to foster open education and collaborate across borders 🌐.
Astonishing that the list omits both Jon Pertwee’s “Who is the Doctor” and Macnee and Blackman’s “Kinky Boots”… https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/jul/31/best-songs-by-actors-ranked
“the story where Doctor Who realises the extent to which the TARDIS is a machine for travelling between genres” #DoctorWho #TheTimeWarrior https://buttondown.com/cooray_smith/archive/the-time-warrior/
IT BEGINS
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/07/scientists-use-peacock-feathers-to-make-frickin-laser-beams/
@moira AI bunnies are bad, obviously. But without them we wouldn’t have had the guy on TikTok singing
“If a bot can inhabit
An unknowing rabbit
It might manufacture
The way you make me feel”
Germ brings end-to-end encrypted messages to Bluesky https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/30/germ-brings-end-to-end-encrypted-messages-to-bluesky/
@LoneLocust Not sure this 1996 paper still stands up, but maybe Costco are just a bit behind? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8991013/
