Danny Garside
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da5nsy.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Danny Garside
@da5nsy.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Thinking about what the future of research might look like. Community manager for https://mastodon.social/@digiresacademy

#OpenScience #AcademicPublishing
#Color #Colour […]

🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://social.coop/@da5nsy, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact
Re: https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.positive.news/society/born-to-be-mild-celebrating-banality-with-the-dull-mens-club/

So, I'm enjoying a lovely Christmas in bed with tea reading #positivenews* and fell down a lovely hole learning about the #dullmensclub - a community (Facebook group) where […]
Original post on social.coop
social.coop
December 25, 2025 at 12:38 PM
RE: https://mastodon.social/@digiresacademy/115702812560956273

I attended the dry-run of this course* recently and it was pretty mind-blowing - I'd seen before how #pixi can be used for python packaging but this course introduced me to a few new example use cases:

- Reproducible data analysis […]
Original post on social.coop
social.coop
December 12, 2025 at 11:24 AM
I made a gap of the Broad Rental Market Areas (BRMAs) in #qgis (because I wanted it, and also an excuse to try QGIS)

https://www.dannygarside.co.uk/blog/BRMA_QGIS/

#gis
December 12, 2025 at 1:34 AM
Reposted by Danny Garside
"Why don't you just Amazon it?" asks my mum.

Because I walked up to the local shopping centre and I bought Christmas cards and actual gifts from a little gift shop. I get to handwrite the cards and wrap the gifts myself and it feels personal. I touched these soft toys and wrapped them and wrote […]
Original post on beige.party
beige.party
December 9, 2025 at 1:17 PM
I'm setting up a new phone today (still a #fairphone3, just a less broken one...) using #lineageos for the first time, and I'm curious to see how far I can get without using #GooglePlay...

#fdroid delivering so far...
December 6, 2025 at 4:42 PM
Doing the #riso 101 at House of Annetta this evening! #houseofannetta
November 25, 2025 at 8:14 PM
I'm looking to get 2 tickets to #39c3 - I'll be trying the sale on Monday (I was unsuccessful at the last one) but I thought I'd just put a note on here in case anyone can no longer make it!
November 15, 2025 at 12:06 PM
Reposted by Danny Garside
Time for an updated #introduction:

I’m Jost (they/them). PhD in astroparticle physics (#supernova #neutrinos), now Senior Research Software Engineer at King’s College London. I help researchers across the university write better code to enable better research. (Still work on software for […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
June 16, 2024 at 10:00 PM
Who do I know (ideally in the UK) who is working on making "open science" less about the science? Send me your heros in the open research in the arts and humanities please! 🎭 📖 🎨 ✨

#openresearch #openscience #artsandhumanities #academia
November 11, 2025 at 1:09 PM
Reposted by Danny Garside
Data rescue for World Digital Preservation Day 2025
Today, Thursday 6 November 2025 if I actually manage to finish and publish this today, is World Digital Preservation Day so I thought I would try and get a blog post out about some work I’ve been doing to rescue at-risk data. I’ve briefly mentioned this in my post about Library of Congress Subject Headings but not in much detail. The project is Safeguarding Research & Culture and I got involved back in March or April when Henrik reached out on social media looking for someone with library & metadata experience to contribute. I said that I wasn’t a Real Librarian but I’d love to help if I could, and now here we are. The concept is simple: download public datasets that are at risk of being lost, and replicate them as widely as possible to make them hard to destroy, though obviously there’s a lot of complexity buried in that statement. When the Trump administration first took power, there were a lot of people around the world worried about this issue and wanting to help, so while there are a number of institutions & better resourced groups doing similar things, we aim to complement them by mobilising grassroots volunteers. Downloading data isn’t always straightforward. It may be necessary to crawl an entire website, or query a poorly-documented API, or work within the constraints of rate-limiting so as not to overload an under-resourced server. That takes knowledge and skill, so part of the work is guiding and mentoring new contributors and fostering a community that can share what they learn and proactively find and try out new tools. We also need people to be able to find and access the data, and volunteers to be able to contribute their storage to the network. We distribute data via the venerable BitTorrent protocol, which is very good at defeating censorship and getting data out to as many peers as possible as quickly as possible. To make those torrents discoverable, our dev team led by the incredible Jonny have built a catalogue of dataset torrents, playfully named SciOp. That’s built on well-established linked data standards like DCAT, the Data Catalogue Vocabulary, so the metadata is standardised and interoperable, and there’s a public API and a developing commandline client to make it even easier to process and upload datasets. There are even RSS and RDF feeds of datasets by tag, size, threat status or number of seeds (copies) in the network that you can plug into your favourite BitTorrent client to automatically start downloading newly published datasets. There are even exciting plans in the works to make it federated via ActivityPub, to give us a network of catalogues instead of just a single one. We’re accidentally finding ourselves needing to push the state of the art in BitTorrent client implementations. If you’re familiar with the history of BitTorrent as a favoured tool for _ahem_ less-than-legal media sharing, it probably won’t surprise you that most current BitTorrent clients are optimised for working with single audio-visual streams of about 1 to 2½ hours in length. Our scientific & cultural data is much more diverse than that, and the most popular clients can struggle for various reasons. In many cases there are BEPs (BitTorrent Enhancement Proposals) to extend the protocol to improve things, but these are optimal features that most clients don’t implement. The collection of BEPs that make up “BitTorrent v2” is a good example: most clients don’t support v2 well, so most people don’t bother making v2-compatible torrents, but that means there’s no demand to implement v2 in the clients. We are planning to make a scientific-grade BitTorrent client as a test-bed for these and other new ideas. Myself I’m running one of a small number of “super” nodes in the swarm, with much more storage available than the average laptop or desktop, and often much better bandwidth too. That’s good, because some of our datasets run to multiple terabytes, plus to ensure new nodes can get started quickly we need to have some always-on nodes with most of the data available to others. Since BitTorrent is truly peer-to-peer, it doesn’t matter how many people have a copy of a given dataset, if none of them are online no-one else can access it. This is all very technically interesting, but communications, community, governance, policy, documentation, funding are also vitally important, and for us these are all works in progress. We need volunteers to help with all of this, but especially those less-technical aspects. If you’re interested in helping, please drop us a line at contact@safeguar.de, or join our community forum and introduce yourself and your interests. If you want to contribute but don’t feel you have the time or skills, well, to start with we’re more than happy to show you the ropes and help you get started, but as an alternative, I’m running one of those “super” nodes and you can contribute to my storage costs via GoFundMe: even a few quid helps. I currently have 3x 6TB hard drives with no space to mount them, so I’m currently in need of a drive cage to hold them and plug them into my server. Special shout-out also to our sibling project, the Data Rescue Project, who are doing amazing work on this and often send us requests for websites or complex datasets for our community to save. I’ve barely scratched the surface here, but I _really_ want to actually get this post out for WDPD so I’m going to stop here and hopefully continue soon!
erambler.co.uk
November 6, 2025 at 9:32 PM
Reposted by Danny Garside
#stephencollins lays the #AIHype bare...because now #AI is in your peas!

#cartoon #comic #funny #rofl
November 7, 2025 at 12:06 PM
Reposted by Danny Garside
Wanted: a lightweight open-source OCR engine, ideally as light as the OCR engine built into Windows 10/11 (apparently intended for mobile apps while MS was still trying to play that game), so not one of the current heavy deep-learning-based implementations, but also as good as handling color […]
Original post on toot.cafe
toot.cafe
November 5, 2025 at 5:07 PM
Reposted by Danny Garside
I wrote a post for the #reclaimopen blogathon about my website as a junk drawer. Iz here: https://www.laurahilliger.com/writing/my-website-is-a-junk-drawer/
We all have a drawer somewhere in our house or our flat, behind the counter in the office or, not as a drawer but a shoebox, a container, let’s just call it a drawer – we all have the junk drawer. It’s the place you put stray rubber bands and the promotional laser pointer from the accountant down the street. Maybe there are ribbons or address stickers, glasses cleaner, a single cough drop, highlighters, an old USB drive or spare headphone ear cover thingies in there. There’s a good chance that there is something highly useful, like a roll of tape or new post-it notes in the junk drawer, but we still call it “the junk drawer” because useful or not, it is still a lot of junk. It is the place in our home where we put all the superfluous items. It is exactly the right place for these items to live because you know that if you are looking for something that is rarely necessary, it lives in the junk drawer. My website is a junk drawer. It is the place I put all the random digital things. Unlike a physical junk drawer, I put all the useful things in there too. A multiple decade long storage facility that holds mainly texts, but also decks and images, audio and videos. When I think about archival in the real world, I don’t think about the junk drawer. But in the digital world, the junk drawer, my website, is where it all goes. Years ago, and still today on the indie web, people used the acronym POSSE. It means Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. I was never great at keeping the junk drawer that is my website organised, and I certainly haven’t published everything to my own site first. But who on Earth has an organised junk drawer? About once every five years I try to organise my drawer, but within weeks whatever scheme I’ve organised with is faded into disorder. It is simple the Tao of the junk drawer. Isn’t the wild organisation in our homes, brains and personal online portals what make life interesting? It’s wonderful to find the unexpected in my junk drawer. Fascinating to find things that I placed there long ago and forgot about. And it’s wonderful to rummage through other people’s junk drawers (the digital ones, it’d be weird if I showed up at your house and started rummaging around in your drawers). The web has these places still. The wild and free and full of random exists on the Web still. It’s nice to have a community of people who care about these places. #ReclaimOpen because you all surely have weird, wonderful and inspiring stuff in your junk drawers and that is the most interesting drawer in the house.
www.laurahilliger.com
November 4, 2025 at 4:01 PM
@solaradmin
Hi! I've been trying to sign up for an account but I think I'm stuck at the email verification stage (no email comes through). Any suggestions?
November 4, 2025 at 5:46 PM
Reposted by Danny Garside
I'm crowdfunding for my new short film, a #solarpunk story focused on direct democracy, and need your support. I can't do a kickstarter since all such platforms only allow creators from particular countries, excluding mine, yet I really want to imagine a future without capitalism and central […]
Original post on mograph.social
mograph.social
November 2, 2025 at 6:15 AM
Just looking into this event - looks awesome: "Feÿtopia Open Science & Human Pyramids"

https://feytopia.com/events/openscience-humanpyramids2

I've wanted to visit #Feÿtopia for a while (a seasonal commune in a French château...) and this seems like it might be the crossover for me […]
Original post on social.coop
social.coop
October 29, 2025 at 2:29 PM
[polyamory, blood donation, UK]

So, I got removed from the blood donor register in the UK because I am #polyamorous, and I'm pretty upset and annoyed about it.

I think was an incorrect interpretation of their guidance but when I tried to query this I got a boilerplate "we don't have time to […]
Original post on social.coop
social.coop
October 29, 2025 at 1:01 PM
Reposted by Danny Garside
knowing git doesn't mean you don't commit git crimes, it just means you know how to get away with them
October 21, 2025 at 4:00 PM
Reposted by Danny Garside
The Python Software Foundation shows more spine than every single tech giant in just one single decision.

> Diversity, equity, and inclusion are core to the PSF’s values

https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.html
The PSF has withdrawn $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program
In January 2025, the PSF submitted a proposal to the US government National Science Foundation under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI. It was the PSF’s first time applying for government funding, and navigating the intensive process was a steep learning curve for our small team to climb. Seth Larson, PSF Security Developer in Residence, serving as Principal Investigator (PI) with Loren Crary, PSF Deputy Executive Director, as co-PI, led the multi-round proposal writing process as well as the months-long vetting process. We invested our time and effort because we felt the PSF’s work is a strong fit for the program and that the benefit to the community if our proposal were accepted was considerable. We were honored when, after many months of work, our proposal was recommended for funding, particularly as only 36% of new NSF grant applicants are successful on their first attempt. We became concerned, however, when we were presented with the terms and conditions we would be required to agree to if we accepted the grant. These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, **but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole**. Further, violation of this term gave the NSF the right to “claw back” previously approved and transferred funds. This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are core to the PSF’s values, as committed to in our mission statement: > _The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of**a diverse and international community** of Python programmers._ Given the value of the grant to the community and the PSF, we did our utmost to get clarity on the terms and to find a way to move forward in concert with our values. We consulted our NSF contacts and reviewed decisions made by other organizations in similar circumstances, particularly The Carpentries. In the end, however, the PSF simply can’t agree to a statement that we won’t operate any programs that “advance or promote” diversity, equity, and inclusion, as it would be a betrayal of our mission and our community. We’re disappointed to have been put in the position where we had to make this decision, because we believe our proposed project would offer invaluable advances to the Python and greater open source community, protecting millions of PyPI users from attempted supply-chain attacks. The proposed project would create new tools for automated proactive review of all packages uploaded to PyPI, rather than the current process of reactive-only review. These novel tools would rely on capability analysis, designed based on a dataset of known malware. Beyond just protecting PyPI users, the outputs of this work could be transferable for all open source software package registries, such as NPM and Crates.io, improving security across multiple open source ecosystems. In addition to the security benefits, the grant funds would have made a big difference to the PSF’s budget. The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14. $1.5 million over two years would have been quite a lot of money for us, and easily the largest grant we’d ever received. Ultimately, however, the value of the work and the size of the grant were not more important than practicing our values and retaining the freedom to support every part of our community. The PSF Board voted unanimously to withdraw our application. Giving up the NSF grant opportunity—along with inflation, lower sponsorship, economic pressure in the tech sector, and global/local uncertainty and conflict—means the PSF needs financial support now more than ever. We are incredibly grateful for any help you can offer. If you're already a PSF member or regular donor, you have our deep appreciation, and we urge you to share your story about why you support the PSF. Your stories make all the difference in spreading awareness about the mission and work of the PSF. How to support the PSF: * Become a Member: When you sign up as a Supporting Member of the PSF, you become a part of the PSF. You’re eligible to vote in PSF elections, using your voice to guide our future direction, and you help us sustain what we do with your annual support. * Donate: Your donation makes it possible to continue our work supporting Python and its community, year after year. * Sponsor: If your company uses Python and isn’t yet a sponsor, send them our sponsorship page or reach out to sponsors@python.org today. The PSF is ever grateful for our sponsors, past and current, and we do everything we can to make their sponsorships beneficial and rewarding.
pyfound.blogspot.com
October 27, 2025 at 4:04 PM
Gah this is very exciting - finally trying the #signal cloud backup feature!
It's still in beta, but the "click the Google play beta button" rather than "install this sdk on a spare phone and expect to lose all your data to a bug" (🤞)
October 27, 2025 at 1:39 AM
Reposted by Danny Garside
Tired: "Sorry for cross posting"

Wired: "I'm posting this to several lists, and I think it's relevant to this one because..."
October 24, 2025 at 8:22 AM
Reposted by Danny Garside
with the way things are going, my next computer is going to have to be a cyberdeck made from random parts i pick up in a huaqiangbei e-market (⌒_⌒;)

wrote a new blog about my linux adventures, building a computer, and homepage updates lately: https://ellesho.me/page/website/now/#serial-experiments
October 23, 2025 at 10:25 PM
Reposted by Danny Garside
homepage update: played with css svg filters on my flat pages this week and made them look like xerox prints ^-^

wrote about that and also more of my ongoing framework/fedora adventures on my blog: https://ellesho.me/page/website/now/#linux-xerox
September 11, 2025 at 10:48 PM
Reposted by Danny Garside
didn't do much on my homepage this week other than small clean ups. i mainly just played in linux for the past 2 weeks and customized it so much that no one but me will know how to use my computer (⌒_⌒;)

long blog post about it here: https://ellesho.me/page/website/now/#elle-in-hyprland
September 26, 2025 at 1:30 AM