How much time do you spend performing various activities? In 2022, I spent 506 hours answering email, or 63 full work-day’s worth of time. At that point, my reading for pleasure had dropped to virtually nil and I just thought: this is not how I want to spend my time. After a radical reorganization of my life and work, I wanted to see how well I have done this year. The answer is… 108 hours spent answering email.

Shadow libraries, that is, illegal massive repositories of books of all kinds, are of course prone to takedowns by police and disappearance from the internet. In recent days, one of the most prominent shadow libraries, Library Genesis (libgen), was taken down and its archive removed from public consumption. The takedown of LibGen was no massive shock. Indeed, several projects were already continuing LibGen’s legacy.

Since I last wrote, I have had a few more thoughts on Samuel Moore’s book. Again, these are not necessarily things that he does not discuss or things that he should have discussed. They are merely thoughts that occurred to me in response to reading his work.

On Christmas day, we had a quiet time this year. One of the things I did was to read Moore, Samuel A., Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons (University of Michigan Press, 2025). This is a most enjoyable book that outlines a project and worldview that I know Sam has been cultivating and refining for many years. I should stress that I am not writing a “review” here.

There has been a major furore in recent days on social media about the rise in AI citations that have been hallucinated. These citations appear in manuscripts sent out for peer review, and even in the published literature.

This year we had a familiar argument in my household about when the Christmas tree should go up. My other half insists that it should be a late arrival, just a few days before Christmas ideally, whereas I would prefer to have the month of December as a lead up and infused with festive spirit, etc. In the end, because my mother was coming to visit, we decided that it would go up around the 14th or so of December.

As is my custom, I am writing, for my own historical logging, to show what I read and wrote this year. This year I have been working at Knowledge Commons, which has been a great environment with lovely people and a worthwhile project. It has meant that much of my time has been consumed with technical matters as is proper, but I did still manage to get up early in the morning and write.

Today I had a weird problem. Our BuddyPress activity stream comments were just not working. When you clicked the reply icon, then typed a response and pressed “post”, it simply grayed out and never succeeded. I could see, in the logs, that there was a 403 Forbidden error being thrown.

Another annoying error that you can get, during a docker build, that basically does not explain what’s going on is something like:

I spent the morning bashing my head against a brick wall, trying to sort out a problem with my Lando install. This worked on Friday, but by Monday was misbehaving. I hadn’t touched the codebase, but every time I hit the primary URL, I got: “404 page not found”. I could see that my nginx server was running on https://localhost:32840.

I have a script (a custom static site generator) that produces the output at https://ticitaci.com – a page for the record label on which I have released music (and that I really, really love).