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sbrl.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy
Starbeamrainbowlabs
@sbrl.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy
Computer Science PhD Student Researcher @ University of Hull, I love to learn 🌟

#OpenSource • #Linux • #Sysadmin • #AI • #Piano • #Parkour • #Cats […]

[bridged from https://fediscience.org/@sbrl on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
Because all the existing tools I could find were either badly documented or terrible to install, I wrote a little image deduplication tool that's actually sane and is:

1. Easy to install (hopefully)
2. Has actually decent documentation

https://www.npmjs.com/package/idedupebox

If it doesn't […]
Original post on fediscience.org
fediscience.org
November 14, 2025 at 6:13 PM
November 14, 2025 at 12:45 AM
Useful character: the unicode zero width space '​'.

Ever wanted to @​mention someone without pinging them, but felt awkward doing the space thing ala @ mention?

With the zero-width space assigned to your compose key, you have a solution at your fingertips :D

#unicode #composekey […]
Original post on fediscience.org
fediscience.org
November 13, 2025 at 3:37 AM
Solved sekrets management for my budding NixOS pi application cluster (kinda :P)!

In this case, it's transcrypt to the rescue: https://github.com/elasticdog/transcrypt

....I really should have initialised it in aes-256-ctr instead of the aes-256-cbc default tho.......

But yeah, transcrypt + […]
Original post on fediscience.org
fediscience.org
October 16, 2025 at 11:33 AM
First experiences with @nixos_org on Raspberry Pi:

• Documentation is just *bad* at explaining things in a way that I understand
• Got confused abt the image download
• Learning Nix has been a struggle

.....but:

I LOVE the experience of declarative service definitions on the server!

It's […]
Original post on fediscience.org
fediscience.org
October 13, 2025 at 11:46 PM
Polite notice to app developers: when something doesn't work, don't fill the system logs up complaining about it :P

#sysadmin #linux #applicationdesign #sysadminchatter
October 13, 2025 at 7:54 PM
TIL that one can publish a docker port to localhost instead of the default external interface (e.g. if you wanna put it behind a reverse proxy etc) like so:

```bash
sudo docker run -it --rm --publish 127.0.0.1:5000:5000 --name registry registry:3
```

...this example using the default docker […]
Original post on fediscience.org
fediscience.org
October 7, 2025 at 9:05 PM
It's done. It's *finally* done.

It does not feel real at all and I am constantly second guessing myself but my corrections were accepted \o/

My PhD is, as far as I know, complete pending paperwork.

Title: Using Big Data and AI to Dynamically Map Flood Risk (link to thesis pending said […]
Original post on fediscience.org
fediscience.org
September 5, 2025 at 8:41 PM
It's definitely not perfect but I made a thing! It's a shiny card effect 🎴 with 3d perspective, done in mostly-pure CSS with a bit of Javascript for cursor positions etc.

📱 Doesn't work very well on mobile at the moment though - it's on my todo list.

In other news, CSS container queries are […]
Original post on fediscience.org
fediscience.org
July 8, 2025 at 12:31 AM
Discovered a cool online (and open source!) ascii diagramming tool that is very cool and is better and asciiflow:

https://monosketch.io/

Great for drawing diagrams for a range of purposes!

#Website #AppRec #tool #ascii #monosketch
MonoSketch - Unleash your ideas with ASCII
MonoSketch is a powerful ASCII sketching and diagramming app that lets you effortlessly transform your ideas into visually stunning designs.
monosketch.io
July 6, 2025 at 12:32 AM
I don't know how to word it, but mental health issues in academia are frighteningly common, and often are caused by the system. More scary still is the culture of normalisation around this.

It's okay to be not okay, but this *has* to change somehow.

I don't have any answers, but surely if we […]
Original post on fediscience.org
fediscience.org
July 5, 2025 at 12:04 AM
Wanna make a tiny planet from an image with imagemagick? That's easy:

`magick IN.png -distort arc 360 OUT.png`

Wanna blend the 2 sides together? That's MUCH harder........

`in="IN.png"; w="$(magick identify -format '%w' "${in}")"; h="$(magick identify -format '%h' "${in}")"; magick "${in}" […]
Original post on fediscience.org
fediscience.org
May 27, 2025 at 12:15 AM
Just discovered the PPA for Firefox Next on Launchpad hasn't had any new packages for 34 weeks, which suggests it's been discontinued - latest version of Firefox there is 131, when latest beta is 139.

If you're using <https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-next>, then the […]
Original post on fediscience.org
fediscience.org
May 15, 2025 at 9:08 PM
I found a kewl compact long-period clock for Minecraft redstone yesterday, but calculating the settings to get the period I wanted was a pain.

With a bit of HTML, CSS, and JS and an unknown amount of my evening, I am now +1 period calculator for said clock […]
Original post on fediscience.org
fediscience.org
April 29, 2025 at 8:24 PM
Cute little script is cool! I wrote a little bash script to wrap around a thesaurus .txt file I found in a unix stack exchange answer (link in script).

It started out as a one-liner, but I adapted it after the results were not completely terrible, though I'm always looking for better ones.

Why […]
Original post on fediscience.org
fediscience.org
April 26, 2025 at 11:39 PM
Did #colliderfest today on the Viper HPC stand! It was fun talking to people about supercomputing/HPC and AI, but also exhausting.

https://colliderfest.co.uk/

Used my UMAP word cloud demo to talk about how foundational language models (e.g. like ChatGPT, Ollama, etc) work, and how […]
Original post on fediscience.org
fediscience.org
March 15, 2025 at 9:53 PM
If anyone from the University of Hull follows me, did you know I maintain a set of latex templates that support the Hull Harvard referencing system? I don't remember who I inherited it from, but it's pretty cool and I've taken up the torch of maintaining it myself.

Yesterday, I updated it to […]
Original post on fediscience.org
fediscience.org
March 12, 2025 at 11:01 AM
When you need to find *another* synonym of "further" for the fourth time to add to your thesis while doing corrections......

#ughijustwannabedonewiththemalready #phd #phdThesis #phdcorrections #suck #academicchatter
March 6, 2025 at 5:18 PM
While I try to find time to write a PhD update blog post, here's a Cool Graph I plotted recently for my rainfall radar model.

One of the things I have been asked to do in my PhD corrections is to assess the model's stability. To this end, I trained a series […]

[Original post on fediscience.org]
March 3, 2025 at 1:37 PM
@admin I've been trying to debug why Bridgy Fed isn't bridging my account into BlueSky, because some of my academic colleagues are on BlueSky and not on the fediverse.

However, bridgy fed doesn't seem to be receiving messages from fediscience.org - so I was wondering if there was anything on […]
Original post on fediscience.org
fediscience.org
March 3, 2025 at 1:16 PM