Digital Migration

We are well into the process of rearranging our lives. It is now also time to work on my digital migration. I have never used facebook and see no reason why I ever would. I do have a presence on linkedin which I don't really use. I don't quite see …

The Deliberate Consumer

In the small town where I grew up there were essentially two places where you could buy records and CDs. They also sold personal stereos, TVs and washing machines. They had a pretty good selection but nothing unusual. I had to go to the city for a specialist record shop …

Small Edinburgh - Part 2

After I published my last post on how our world has become smaller during the Covid-19 crisis I was asked about how this compares to previous years. Well, I have all the data and with some python scripts this question can be answered. The histogram shows the percentage of blips …

Small Edinburgh

We don't own a car. So during the Covid-19 crisis our world was reduced to places we can walk or cycle to. Given that I geotag most of my blip journal entries and I tend to collect GPX tracks for my photo walks it seems quite a natural idea to …

New Blog

I have decided to wean myself off google services and migrate my blog to pelican. Pelican is a static website generator written in python with theme support. There are many advantages to using a static website. From my perspective the main advantage is that there are fewer things that can …

Research Software Engineering Conference, Birmingham 2019

Day 1 The conference started with a keynote by Andy Stanford-Clark, IBM UK Chief Technology Officer, on IoT, AI and Quantum Computing. The talk was very much fun. Although I must say I am still not convinced by IoT and I am somewhat worried by AI. The issue of needing …

AI Crystal Ball

I went to very interesting talk by Howard Covington from the Alan Turing Institute on Glimpsing our AI Future at the Bayes Centre, University of Edinburgh. The talk was very interesting albeit short on technical detail and maybe somewhat worrying. This is a summary of what stuck in my mind …

FLOSSUK Conference

The FLOSSUK conference was held in Edinburgh last week. I attended the two day conference and the hacking the raspberry pi workshop. The conference was excellent. Abstracts of all talks are on the FLOSSUK website. What follows are some notes from the talks I particularly liked. Reproducible Build Talk by …

New Flickr Design

So, flickr.com updated its site layout quite drastically. I think it's a mixed bag. The new design is really good for viewing photos. However, I think it is quite difficult to get the information that used to be easily available. In particular the new home page is very difficult …