Belfast TradFest | Traditional Music Belfast
Belfast TradFest have republished this blog post of mine and I must say, I really like the photo they’ve used—doesn’t my mandolin look lovely!
Link tags: elf
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Illustrated Talk: The Session.org with Jeremy Keith
I’m giving an afternoon talk during Belfast Tradfest—come along if you’re around!
Join Jeremy Keith for an insightful talk about his pioneering work with TheSession.org—the world’s leading online hub for traditional Irish music. Discover how Jeremy helped build this vibrant digital community that connects musicians, shares tunes, and preserves Ireland’s rich musical heritage. Learn about the challenges and triumphs of creating an online space where thousands of players worldwide can collaborate, learn, and celebrate traditional music together.
My solar-powered and self-hosted website | Dries Buytaert
This is a neat project form Dries:
This project is driven by my curiosity about making websites and web hosting more environmentally friendly, even on a small scale. It’s also a chance to explore a local-first approach: to show that hosting a personal website on your own internet connection at home can often be enough for small sites. This aligns with my commitment to both the Open Web and the IndieWeb.
At its heart, this project is about learning and contributing to a conversation on a greener, local-first future for the web.
Against Disruption: On the Bulletpointization of Books ‹ Literary Hub
It seems to me that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the way readers interact with books and the way the hack-your-brain tech community does. A wide swath of the ruling class sees books as data-intake vehicles for optimizing knowledge rather than, you know, things to intellectually engage with.
In a world where tech billionaires dominate so much of our culture, it’s troubling to see books treated like mere vessels for self-betterment the way that cold-water therapy and Fitbits are. Some of us enjoy fiction.
Nelson’s Weblog: Goodreads lost all of my reviews
Goodreads lost my entire account last week. Nine years as a user, some 600 books and 250 carefully written reviews all deleted and unrecoverable. Their support has not been helpful. In 35 years of being online I’ve never encountered a company with such callous disregard for their users’ data.
Ouch! Lesson learned:
My plan now is to host my own blog-like collection of all my reading notes like Tom does.
Using Google Fonts Breaches GDPR – Interdependent Thoughts
Remember when I said you should avoid third-party dependencies?
Meet the Self-Hosters, Taking Back the Internet One Server at a Time
Taking the indie web to the next level—self-hosting on your own hardware.
Tired of Big Tech monopolies, a community of hobbyists is taking their digital lives off the cloud and onto DIY hardware that they control.
This Website Will Self-destruct
You can send me messages using the form below. If I go 24 hours without receiving a message, I’ll permanently self-destruct, and everything will be wiped from my database.
Self Treat
It’s been an absolute pleasure having Holly, Laçin, and Beyza at Clearleft while they’ve been working on this three-month internship project:
Self Treat is a vision piece designed to increase self-management of minor health conditions.
You can also read the blog posts they wrote during the process:
Basil: Secret Santa as a Service | Trys Mudford
Trys writes up the process—and the tech (JAM)stack—he used to build basil.christmas.
Why Suffolk Libraries chose to build their own self-service app.
It’s so great to see the initial UX work that James and I prototyped in a design sprint come to fruition in the form of a progressive web app!
In the case of this web-app, if the tablets go offline, they will still store all the transactions that are made by customers. Once the tablet comes back online, it will sync it back up to the server. That is, essentially, what a Progressive Web App is — a kind of a website with a few more security and, most importantly, offline features.
Failing to distinguish between a tractor trailer and the bright white sky | booktwo.org
James talks about automation and understanding.
Just because a technology – whether it’s autonomous vehicles, satellite communications, or the internet – has been captured by capital and turned against the populace, doesn’t mean it does not retain a seed of utopian possibility.
Social Cooling
If you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior. Big Data is supercharging this effect.
Some interesting ideas, but the tone is so alarming as to render the message meaningless.
As our weaknesses are mapped, we are becoming too transparent. This is breeding a society where self-censorship and risk-aversion are the new normal.
I stopped reading at the point where the danger was compared to climate change.
A 5 day sprint with Clear Left exploring library self-service machine software – Leon Paternoster
Myself and Batesy spent last week in Ipswich doing an intense design sprint with Suffolk Libraries. Leon has written up process from his perspective as the client—I’ll try to get a case study up on the Clearleft website soon.
This is really great write-up; it captures the sense of organised chaos:
I can’t recommend this kind of research sprint enough. We got a report, detailed technical validation of an idea, mock ups and a plan for how to proceed, while getting staff and stakeholders involved in the project — all in the space of 5 days.
How David Hume Helped Me Solve My Midlife Crisis - The Atlantic
A fascinating detective story of the Enlightenment, told from a very personal perspective.
The Making of Aprilzero
The first in a series of posts looking at the process behind builfing this “quantified self” site:
As with most decisions in my life, I asked myself: What would Tony Stark do?
Did we miss your tweet from earlier?
In case you missed it earlier…
Paris and the Data Mind - The Morning News
Craig writes about the hologram of his quantified self.