Are you keeping cozy during eternal Caturday?
I understand that, when you are staring at a factory spewing toxic chemicals and carbon into the atmosphere, someone who shuffles over and whispers in your ear “Go plant a tree and save the world”; your first instinct isn’t to thank them for their keen insight but to launch a broadside in their direction.
And yet…in twenty years the factory could be thoroughly reformed or closed for good, and meanwhile, you played an instrumental role in growing a forest.
We are in the “planting trees” era of American #politics and #openweb technology right now. It will take a whole lot of effort and feel silly or pointless at times…and there will be moments when the desired future for our society seems farther away than ever before.
Don’t let the temptation of bitter despair take hold. Go plant a tree and save the world. Future generations are counting on you to do right by them.
“Art is the only thing that helps people stay alive, and it is the only thing that has allowed people to create joy in this insane, suppressive universe. And art is the only thing that they can’t get rid of. They’ve tried, but ultimately they can’t stamp it out.”
–Juliette Lewis
* 141 new species observed, of those, the top three kinds:
* 79 plants
* 20 insects
* 16 fungi
* 56 challenge badges earned
June was the month I observed the most new species in 2024, followed by March, and then July.
Seek also gave me a graph of observations per month, and also a map of where I made my discoveries.
Rather than posting screenshots of the Year in Review that Seek provided me in the app, I am posting the relevant content here in a post on my personal site, which I know I’ll be able to search and look up in the future.
Seek is a delightful free (like actually free, free of tracking, free of surveillance) native mobile application for identifying species.
Made by the iNaturalist folks (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app), Seek works without creating an account, and is able to work completely offline to identify species out in the wild (and add them to your local collection).
Seek awards you Species Badges when you discover a number of species of a particular grouping, as well as Challenge Badges when you complete one or more of their monthly challenges that they post.
In some ways it’s like Pokemon Go, except based on finding and collecting observations of real living things.
I have found it quite useful especially when traveling, and wondering is that plant (or animal) the same as one I’ve seen elsewhere, perhaps around home, or is it a slightly different species?
I also really like the good example that Seek provides for how an app can be immediately useful without requiring extra labor (like creating an account, or logging on) on behalf of the person using it.
Lastly, Seek is an excellent example of a truly offline capable app where nearly all of its functionality works just fine without a network connection.
Both of these capabilities (offline first, no login wall) are what we should aspire to when we build #indieweb apps or websites for ourselves and our friends.
This is post 8 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #yearInReview #iNaturalist #SeekApp
← https://tantek.com/2025/012/t1/eight-years-webmention
→ 🔮
Glossary:
login wall
https://indieweb.org/login_wall
offline first
https://indieweb.org/offline_first
This is for my fellow Yanks out there: Take care of yourselves and your loved ones this weekend.
I just want you to know I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with all of the people out there who have even more reason to be afraid come January 20th than I do (being a white man). I know how hard this must be for you, because there are people I love very close to me who—if you pay attention to the rhetoric—are living with MAGA targets on their backs. It’s shameful. It’s appalling. It’s #politics with very few guardrails left.
And yet…we will get through this. We must. I keep telling that to myself every day. We have to keep going. Because the alternative is…unimaginable.
So I wish you all good wishes, and know that you are not alone. Millions upon millions of your fellow Americans are just as appalled as you are, and this ain’t over. MAGA can believe they “won” all they want, but the war for the soul of this nation continues, and we live to fight another day. Resist! ✊
Hey San Diego, some of the lovely people in Fan Favorite are presenting next week: Navigating Fractured Realities and the Need for Clean Air (“During the Pandemic” is Right Now). January 21, 6:30pm–8pm at Centro Cultural de la Raza. Masks required and provided? Air purifiers? You know it! 😷💛
Also, check out and share the Instagram post.
Having long been frustrated by unnecessary unevenness and other quirks of the Gregorian calendar, I designed and wrote up a more ordered, mathematically simpler, and more continuously consistent calendar.
Building up from the atomic calendar unit of a 'day':
* five day weeks
* six week (30 day) months
* two month (60 day) + a sync day bims¹
* six bim years (minus a day for non-leap-years)
After giving it an obvious name, “New Calendar”, and somehow getting a short speakable .org domain (newcal.org), I wrote code to do all the calendar computations and conversions.
The simpler calendar computations made me realize I had invented something that would help solve a completely different problem I was working on: an efficient date-based storage format for my new blog.
It‘s rare that an invention, or reinvention of something inelegant, actually serves a useful purpose. This was one of those rare exceptions.
I also taught myself and have kept practicing the use of ISO 8601 Ordinal dates for my own personal calendaring, which literally gave me a new perspective of time. A much smoother and more linear progression of time across the duration of a year.
Previously: https://tantek.com/2019/015/t1/10-years-ago-today-new-calendar
¹ https://tantek.com/2015/228/t3/bim-definition
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Ordinal_dates
