Matrix self-hosting

I started running my own Matrix server a little while ago. Matrix is something rather cool, a chat system similar to IRC or Slack, but open and federated. Open in that the standard is available for anyone to view, but also the reference implementations of server and client are open source, along with many other clients and a couple of nascent alternative servers. Federated in that, like email, it doesn’t matter what server you sign up with, you can talk to users on your own or any other server.

Friday 12 March 2021 Jez Cope Technology Matrix Communication Self-hosting DWeb

What do you miss least about pre-lockdown life?

@JanetHughes on Twitter: What do you miss the least from pre-lockdown life?

I absolutely do not miss wandering around the office looking for a meeting room for a confidential call or if I hadn’t managed to book a room in advance. Let’s never return to that joyless frustration, hey?

10:27 AM · Feb 3, 2021

After seeing Terence Eden taking Janet Hughes’ tweet from earlier this month as a writing prompt, I thought I might do the same.

Friday 26 February 2021 Jez Cope Stuff Reflection Pandemic

Remarkable blogging

And the handwritten blog saga continues, as I’ve just received my new reMarkable 2 tablet, which is designed for reading, writing and nothing else. It uses a super-responsive e-ink display and writing on it with a stylus is a dream. It has a slightly rough texture with just a bit of friction that makes my writing come out a lot more legibly than on a slippery glass touchscreen.

If that was all there was to it, I might not have wasted my money, but it turns out that it runs on Linux and the makers have wisely decided not to lock it down but to give you full root mess.

Saturday 6 February 2021 Jez Cope Technology Writing Gadgets

GLAM Data Science Network fellow travellers

Updates

2021-02-04 Thanks to Gene @dzshuniper@ausglam.space for suggesting ADHO and a better attribution for the opening quote (see comments below for details)

See comments & webmentions for details.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” — African proverb, probably popularised in English by Kenyan church leader Rev. Samuel Kobia (original)

This quote is a popular one in the Carpentries community, and I interpret it in this context to mean that a group of people working together is more sustainable than individuals pursuing the same goal independently. That’s something that speaks to me, and that I want to make sure is reflected in nurturing this new community for data science in galleries, archives, libraries & museums (GLAM). To succeed, this work needs to be complementary and collaborative, rather than competitive, so I want to acknowledge a range of other networks & organisations whose activities complement this.

Wednesday 3 February 2021 Jez Cope Data science GLAM Librarianship Humanities Cultural heritage

Series: GLAM Data Science Network

I’ve updated my blog theme to use the quasi-proportional fonts Iosevka Aile and Iosevka Etoile. I really like the aesthetic, as they look like fixed-width console fonts (I use the true fixed-width version of Iosevka in my terminal and text editor) but they’re actually proportional which makes them easier to read.
https://typeof.net/Iosevka/

Tuesday 26 January 2021 Jez Cope Font Writing Stuff

Training a model to recognise my own handwriting

If I’m going to train an algorithm to read my weird & awful writing, I’m going to need a decent-sized training set to work with. And since one of the main things I want to do with it is to blog “by hand” it makes sense to focus on that type of material for training. In other words, I need to write out a bunch of blog posts on paper, scan them and transcribe them as ground truth. The added bonus of this plan is that after transcribing, I also end up with some digital text I can use as an actual post — multitasking!

Monday 25 January 2021 Jez Cope Technology Machine learning Handwriting Blogging

Blogging by hand

I wrote the following text on my tablet with a stylus, which was an interesting experience:

So, thinking about ways to make writing fun again, what if I were to write some of them by hand? I mean I have a tablet with a pretty nice stylus, so maybe handwriting recognition could work. One major problem, of course, is that my handwriting is AWFUL! I guess I’ll just have to see whether the OCR is good enough to cope…

Read more...

Friday 22 January 2021 Jez Cope Meta Machine learning Writing

What I want from a GLAM/Cultural Heritage Data Science Network

Introduction

As I mentioned last year, I was awarded a Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship to pursue the project of setting up a Cultural Heritage/GLAM data science network. Obviously, the global pandemic has forced a re-think of many plans and this is no exception, so I’m coming back to reflect on it and make sure I’m clear about the core goals so that everything else still moves in the right direction.

Monday 18 January 2021 Jez Cope Data science GLAM Librarianship Humanities Cultural heritage

Series: GLAM Data Science Network

Writing About Not Writing

Discount signs in a shop window — Under Construction Grunge Sign by Nicolas Raymond — CC BY 2.0

Every year, around this time of year, I start doing two things. First, I start thinking I could really start to understand monads and write more than toy programs in Haskell. This is unlikely to ever actually happen unless and until I get a day job where I can justify writing useful programs in Haskell, but Advent of Code always gets me thinking otherwise.

Friday 8 January 2021 Jez Cope Stuff Reflection Meta Writing

When is a persistent identifier not persistent? Or an identifier? [Link]

I wrote a post on the problems with ISBNs as persistent identifiers (PIDS) for work, so check it out if that sounds interesting.