If you pick dates close to each other, they also make for a great “find the differences”-puzzle. tl;dr: One can now create before/after maps of OpenStreetMap with osm-mapping-party-before-after right in the browser, thanks to MyBinder. Just click here to launch it. For a good 6 months now, I’ve been contributing to OpenStreetMap virtually every day.

Ever since a certain someone bought Twitter, I’ve been quite invested into using the Fediverse as my main social web efforts. My Mastodon timeline does a good job for short-form text updates. And Pixelfed is a great nascent Instagram-replacement. One thing I particularly enjoy about both of them is the fact that they bring back the simple, chronological timeline.

tl;dr: I handed in my resignation back in early July and will be leaving my job - and the UK - at the end of October to go on a sabbatical. This could have been a long and rambling post about all the problems with academia and/or the tech industry, but at the end of the day Lucidity’s Quitting My Job For The Way Of Pain already made most of the aspects in a more fun way than I could hope to deliver them, so I’ll try to

I have recently started to move my personal code repositories away from GitHub, in favor of hosting them with a smaller, independent and collectively managed alternative - including for this static website. In the same spirit, I was also interested in whether I could be doing my small part to diversify my overall web hosting approach.

A video of Panoramax in action. Starting out with a map view which has small orange lines for where images are available. Then going into the actual 360 degree images and moving around. Above: a video showcasing the panoramax viewer, with a map to see where (most ^[1] ) images are, and the 360º views.

In the last blog post, I had mentioned that I was looking to move away some of my personal code hosting away from GitHub (GH), to avoid being locked in into yet another tech giant. Instead, I wanted to move to a proper free alternative. On Mastodon, lots of folks recommended checking out Codeberg as a potential alternative that is based on forgejo and provides static page hosting.

Or: Why 2024 is my personal year of Linux on the desktop According to Doctorow, enshittification might be coming for absolutely everything . I’ve more and more felt this was for my own digital devices and means of digital production: Be that Apple’s just increasing love for walled gardens - especially since having the opaque app review processes (c.f. cpython’s --with-app-store-compliance), Microsoft’s (successful?)

{""=““} Image: Apple As is custom, Apple gave a sneak peek into the new features that will come with the new versions of their operating systems later this year at the WWDC.

{"=““} tl;dr : metrics-obsessed capitalism is the reason why we can’t have nice things – and watch @tante’s talk Back in Paris, I was semi-joking with friends about how the rate of technological innovations seem to have slowed down or come to a halt. The last “big” innovation that we could think about were smartphones, as carrying the internet permanently in our pockets was quite a change.

Enoch’s Hammer of Luddite fame, at the Tolson Memorial Museum. I gave a talk at the Pint of Science Festival – an international science festival that takes places at local pubs and cafes across the world – this evening.