Just a quickie to say that I’ve replaced the comment section at the bottom of each post with webmentions, which allows you to comment by posting on your own site and linking here. It’s a fundamental part of the IndieWeb, which I’m slowly getting to grips with having been a halfway member of it for years by virtue of having my own site on my own domain.
I’d already got rid of Google Analytics to stop forcing that tracking on my visitors, I wanted to get rid of Disqus too because I’m pretty sure the only way that is free for me is if they’re selling my data and yours to third parties. Webmention is a nice alternative because it relies only on open standards, has no tracking and allows people to control their own comments. While I’m currently using a third-party service to help, I can switch to self-hosted at any point in the future, completely transparently.
It looks like I’ve accidentally taken charge
of bridging a bunch of The Carpentries Slack channels
over to Matrix.
Given this,
it seems like a good idea
to explain what that sentence means
and reflect a little on my reasoning.
I’m more than happy to discuss the pros and cons of this approach
Slack (see also on Wikipedia),
for those not familiar with it,
is an online text chat platform
with the feel of IRC (Internet Relay Chat),
a modern look and feel
and both web and smartphone interfaces.
By providing a free tier that meets many peoples’ needs on its own
Slack has become the communication platform of choice
for thousands of online communities, private projects and more.
The other weekend I had my first experience of Mozilla Festival,
aka #mozfest.
It was pretty awesome.
I met quite a few people in real life
that I’ve previously only known (/stalked) on Twitter,
and caught up with others that I haven’t seen for a while.
I had the honour of co-facilitating a workshop session
on imposter syndrome and how to deal with it
with the wonderful Yo Yehudi and Emmy Tsang.
We all learned a lot
and hope our participants did too;
we’ll be putting together a summary blog post
as soon as we can get our act together!
Today1 the office conversation turned to
blocking out background noise.
(No, the irony is not lost on me.)
Like many people
I work in a large, open-plan office,
and I’m not alone amongst my colleagues
in sometimes needing to find a way
to boost concentration by blocking out distractions.
Not everyone is like this,
but I find music does the trick for me.
I also find that different types of music
are better for different types of work,
and I use this to try and manage my energy better.
It barely seems like it, but I’ve been at the British Library now for nearly 6 months. It always takes a long time to adjust and from experience I know it’ll be another year before I feel fully settled, but my team, department and other colleagues have really made me feel welcome and like I belong.
One thing that hasn’t got old yet is the occasional thrill of remembering that I work at my national library now. Every now and then I’ll catch a glimpse of the collections at Boston Spa or step into one of the reading rooms and think “wow, I actually work here!”
I sit here writing this in the departure lounge at Philadelphia International Airport, waiting for my Aer Lingus flight back after a week at the 13th Research Data Alliance (RDA) Plenary (although I’m actually publishing this a week or so later at home). I’m pretty exhausted, partly because of the jet lag, and partly because it’s been a very full week with so much to take in.
I recently attended a workshop, organised by the excellent team of the Turing Way project, on a tool called BinderHub. BinderHub, along with public hosting platform MyBinder, allows you to publish computational notebooks online as “binders” such that they’re not static but fully interactive. It’s able to do this by using a tool called repo2docker to capture the full computational environment and dependencies required to run the notebook.
I’ve found it increasingly difficult to make time to blog, and it’s not so much not having the time — I’m pretty privileged in that regard — but finding the motivation. Thinking about what used to motivate me, one of the big things was writing things that other people wanted to read.
Rather than try to guess, I thought I’d ask!
Those who know what I'm about, what would you read about, if it was written by me?
I'm trying to break through the blog-writers block and would love to know what other people would like to see my ill-considered opinions on.
Following on from the excitement of having built a functioning keyboard myself, I got a parcel on Monday. Inside was something that I’ve been waiting for since September: an Ultimate Hacking Keyboard! Where the custom-built Laplace is small and quiet for travelling, the UHK is to be my main workhorse in the study at home.
Here are my first impressions:
Key switches
I went with Kailh blue switches from the available options. In stark contrast to the quiet blacks on the Laplace, blues are NOISY! They have an extra piece of plastic inside the switch that causes an audible and tactile click when the switch activates. This makes them very satisfying to type on and should help as I train my fingers not to bottom out while typing, but does make them unsuitable for use in a shared office! Here are some animations showing how the main types of key switch vary.
Layout
This keyboard has what’s known as a 60% layout: no number pad, arrows or function keys. As with the more spartan Laplace, these “missing” keys are made up for with programmable layers. For example, the arrow keys are on the Mod layer on the I/J/K/L keys, so I can access them without moving from the home row. I actually find this preferable to having to move my hand to the right to reach them, and I really never used the number pad in any case.
Split
This is a split keyboard, which means that the left and right halves can be separated to place the hands further apart which eases strain across the shoulders. The UHK has a neat coiled cable joining the two which doesn’t get in the way. A cool design feature is that the two halves can be slotted back together and function perfectly well as a non-split keyboard too, held together by magnets. There are even electrical contacts so that when the two are joined you don’t need the linking cable.
Programming
The board is fully programmable, and this is achieved via a custom (open source) GUI tool which talks to the (open source) firmware on the board. You can have multiple keymaps, each of which has a separate Base, Mod, Fn and Mouse layer, and there’s an LED display that shows a short mnemonic for the currently active map. I already have a customised Dvorak layout for day-to-day use, plus a standard QWERTY for not-me to use and an alternative QWERTY which will be slowly tweaked for games that don’t work well with Dvorak.
Mouse keys
One cool feature that the designers have included in the firmware is the ability to emulate a mouse. There’s a separate layer that allows me to move the cursor, scroll and click without moving my hands from the keyboard.
Palm rests
Not much to say about the palm rests, other than they are solid wood, and chunky, and really add a little something.
I have to say, I really like it so far! Overall it feels really well designed, with every little detail carefully thought out and excellent build quality and a really solid feeling.
I’m typing this post on a keyboard I made myself, and I’m rather excited about it!
Why make my own keyboard?
I wanted to learn a little bit about practical electronics, and I like to learn by doing
I wanted to have the feeling of making something useful with my own hands
I actually need a small, keyboard with good-quality switches now that I travel a fair bit for work and this lets me completely customise it to my needs
Just because!
While it is possible to make a keyboard completely from scratch, it makes much more sense to put together some premade parts. The parts you need are:
