I built 2 pippygs today, stuck one outside for an hour and a half (from 17.45 to 19.15) and had 200 bat detections, 5 species according to the BTO, definitely 4 species minimum, and there was a distant passing Noctule that I missed in my visual scan of the sonograms. Yay!

Every time I add a new feature I have to update the damn PDF. It drives me CRAZY. Can't people just work this stuff out telepathically without me having to tell them?

The lovely and much-missed Claire’s final paper is published today, on the science results of the Bats in Churches project - besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

I know everyone's (quite rightly) excited about TTFKA Prince Andrew, but I'm really excited because we watched The Other Guys yesterday, and it's even funnier third time around.

Can you believe that in 2 days’ time Bohemian Rhapsody will be 50 years old? Blimey.

Well, I just finished The Rose Field. And I must say, it would have been a much better read if he’d bothered to write an ending.

Just saw the Springsteen film. Ignore the negative reviews, it's a proper film, emotional and real and moving and quite brilliant.

Not sure what The Sun have been smoking - Riot Women was quite brilliant. And Rosalie Craig was on fire throughout, and I'm sure she spent a higher percentage of her screen time playing drunk than any other woman in recent history. www.thesun.co.uk/tv/37030834/...

The implementation of windowed apps on iOS 26 is a trainwreck. Fortunately there is a setting to force all apps full-screen. Unfortunately the iPad just randomly unsets it, and jumps back into windowed operation. I have submitted a bug report but honestly, do Apple even read them nowadays?

I really didn’t like this record when it came out. A massive tonal shift away from Taking Tiger Mountain, and unrecognisable as a piece by the guy who recorded Here Come the Warm Jets. It took me decades to recognise and appreciate its brilliance.

I just discovered you can turn off windowing in iPas OS 26 and have everything full-screen again, the way God intended. Apple have got the windowing thing massively, horribly wrong. It’s a total UX trainwreck and Steve Jobs would have fired the whole team. Does nobody ever ask “What would Steve do?”

Oooh, more live Bonzos that I'd never seen before - a truly epic "Canyons of Your Mind" from 1969. Featuring an even worse version of Neil Innes' already worst guitar solo of all time. Practice man, practice. youtu.be/FClubknzYWY?...

It's true, bats are simultaneously cute and FULL-ON BADASS!! Let's hope this doesn't trigger some batlash, peregrines do this sort of thing half a dozen times a day and are much loved www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Griff the USB microphone finally got his own device page (like a product page but he isn't a product), linked from the QR code on the revised Griff Mini PCB : www.pippyg.com/griff.html

I’m too old and too male to be in the Rainbows, but as a result of some volunteering / educational outreach we did a couple of weeks ago on behalf of the @wiltsbatgroup.bsky.social I am now the very proud owner of a Rainbows “Bat activity” patch. It is deeply excellent.

Great day out at @nationaltrust.org.uk Lacock this week. Sunshine, apple trees heavy with fruit and Mistletoe, and the remarkable volunteer Naomi using forensic science skills to preserve historic floor tiles. Plus a DAZZLING early colour (Devin Tricolor) photo exhibition.

Kestrel keeping a wary eye on us this afternoon. Eventually it ran out of power poles and shot off.

Ooh ooh ooh - TK Maxx in Swindon, a single pair of the most PERFECT wireless headphones for folks to use with Bat Detector on their iPhone. So anyone in the @wiltsbatgroup.bsky.social needs to get a move on to secure them - I left them REALLY visible :)

There's now an Android option for iPhone-deprived people who want to go bat detecting with a Griff : play.google.com/store/apps/d... Thank John Mears for this, not me. And don't contact me with Android problems, I have never in my life used an Android device, so I will be of zero help to you.

A trip to Buscot Park yesterday, where they now allow photography in all rooms. I skipped snapping the Rembrandt - and it is a GOOD Rembrandt! - and made straight for the immense Briar Rose sequence by Burne-Jones, the most exquisite immersive art installation you ever saw. Photos by iPhone 16e.

The revised user manual for Bat Detector - 2.4, the next release - has a new final page with a plea for decency from folks who enjoy using high-quaility, free software with zero profit motive. The app is free and has no nag screen, it tries to be as nice to you as possible, so please be nice back.

Bat Detector 2.3 is now live on the App Store, featuring simultaneous saving of wavs and sonogram JPGs for rapid visual scanning of recordings taken on a bat walk. Grab it here : apps.apple.com/gb/app/bat-d...

My iPad Air 3rd gen was just updated to iOS 26 - I have to for software dev reasons - and it has been reduced to sub-glacial pace. Progress, eh? Poor thing was dead snappy and now it permanently limps.

Bat Detector v2.3 build 17 live on TestFlight. It creates sonograms as it captures wavs, so you can do a rapid visual scan of your recordings folder to see where the interesting stuff happened. Great for spotting Horseshoes that you missed due to noisy pips and crickets :) Images are from the app.

TestFlight link for bugfix candidate of Bat Detector version 2.3 build 10 : testflight.apple.com/join/M5R8kipW

WARNING FOR USERS OF BAT DETECTOR ON IPHONE AND IPAD. The just-released iOS 26 has broken Bat Detector. There's a fix coming real soon, will be on TestFlight today, in the store ASAP. If you are affected by the change, please pick up version 2.3 build 10 from TestFlight, incoming in about an hour.

I had an “OH NO! Mouse in the house!“ moment today, we turned the living room upside down, turns out it was a shrew, and very sweet it was too. Managed to get it out without it dying of shock, and it was INSANELY good at getting into tiny gaps. I think it just wanted out of the nasty hail storm.

Lovely titchy little Grass Snake on our walk about the village just now. Nothing beats a chance reptile encounter, it’s so unusual nowadays.

Since today was the #NatBatConf I had to pop outside for a bat walk. More of a bat dash to be honest, I was only outside for 7 minutes, here's the first minute after I closed the front door behind me - 4 or 5 species in here, plus a fox, highlight was 3 big, fast Serotines whipping inches overhead.

So, is Tim Burton a Jane Austen fanboy? Season 2 of Wednesday featured not one but 2 Fanny Prices. Also Lady Gaga and Joanna Lumley, who if I think hard enough I'm sure I can convincingly link to Jane Austen.

I’m postponing my personal International Bat Night until the rain stops.

Queen never improved on this : www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgz3...

Griff Mini build : 8 minutes start to finish including hotplate melt. youtu.be/BxvpKR9f3o0

Well, they are ringing the church bells again next door so I just had to bury my head in some Mott The Hoople. The really scary Punch and Judy laughing on the studio version is ACE, but the live version has such fierce guitar work I just had to listen to it twice. www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2r8...

I'll preface this with I hate AI. Hate it. But I just realized quite how valuable a guitar tuition tool the Logic Pro stem splitter is. Take your favourite song, remove all the guitars, and play along until you get it right. It's amazing. I do really hate that AI occasionally has its uses.

I've now hit 8500 unique downloads of Bat Detector from the iOS App Store. I really want to hit 10k before the end of this bat season but I fear the milestone may have to wait until next year. Unless of course there's a big Australian surge in a month or so ... so, COME ON AUSTRALIA!!!

Great project that needs more support!

Once the Serotines rolled up yesterday evening things got pretty bonkers. Bonus, the BTO Pipeline thinks it heard a Barbie in all this chaos, and having reviewed the recordings I think it’s right. God knows how it spots them at the edge of perceptibility, it’s total voodoo. youtu.be/-Mashes5kJQ?...

This morning there was a wedding at the church next door featuring AN ACTUAL TINY TINY PONY. It was the sweetest thing I have ever seen, ever. Then I saw my first ever Jersey Tiger. Plus the Self Drive Rental Spitfire from the local airfield went over the house this morning. What a day.

Stick it on your guitar, 4 built-in kits, 8-bit companded samples, the whole point being the "Guitar body noises" kit to make KT Tunstall / Ed Sheeran / Danish Pete looped noises using just a magnetic soundhole pickup. I'll publish this for folks to build, but THERE WILL BE ZERO TECH SUPPORT.

Tonight's mammal action featured Common and Soprano pips, Brandt's / Whiskered, Serotine, Noctule and 3 foxes in a 15 minute walk around the church yard, down the road and back. In other news, The Old Guard 2 was *terrible*. That ending - did they run out of storage on their SD card and just stop?

Brilliant evening of bush cricket detection last night. Such a shame that those noisy annoying bats kept butting in and ruining my recordings ...

Done! 4 sampled kits of 8 drums. Hard Rock, Linn, 808 and Latin, which probably needs a tweak - clueless about that genre. The 2 LEDs indicate the kit, binary coded, the little pads are previous kit / next kit. Hard Rock incorporates my synthetic “Glitterclap”. Guitar goes in, output goes to looper.

I've been quiet on the bat front for the last month because I've been coding and building a drum machine to use with a looper pedal. Guitar goes in, guitar or drums comes out, selected by a switch. 3 sampled kits, 1 modelled. Build cost under £10. No support will be provided, at all. So don't ask.

Here's 20+ minutes of bat joy from just over a week ago, 9th July - there were newly-fledged pipistrelle pups flying with their mothers, brief flashes of myotis, and a bunch of Serotine action to finish off, all with simultaneous 16x time expansion and heterodyning. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kflP...

Anybody watch Ironheart? If so, quite how did she make that Iron Man suit out of a 1971 Plymouth in 8 hours flat using only the resources of an abandoned auto shop? I know Marvel shows inherently require more or less suspension of disbelief, but really ... that was just daft.

Wildly exciting batting yesterday evening. Newly-fledged common pips on the wing, flying in crazy tight circles with their mothers, inches from our faces, tons of feeding buzzes. Plus a pair of Serotines - loud! - low and slow in the gloom. And a bonus prize of a fox in the field next to the church.

Serotine outside the front door last night, and so close above my head - 4 feet ish - it was clipping harder than Roger Taylor's drumming on Sheer Heart Attack. But had it not been so close I would have struggled to see it, lots of tree cover and getting dark at almost half past ten last night.

This one really is the last update. Manual frequency override! So you can turn your awesome auto-scanning, time-expanding, full-spectrum recording iPhone into an old-school manually tuned detector, just like the cavemen had back in the 1990s. It's like a heritage rock act, but for bats.

A new one for me - Box Tree Moth.