Posts between 2017/07 and 2017/08 (30 out of 30)
- Continued to read many docs on new topics.
- Started to properly understand aleph's data model, and poke around with the code. Wrangled spreadsheets.
- Renewed my LetsEncrypt certs.
- Mostly dockerized IndieAuth.com. Didn't get around to checking I could get various ID providers to work properly though.
- Made it to the Flea Market at Stup. Pretty cool.
- Discovered my Bosnian SIM card doesn't seem to want to receive SMS ever. Phone shop was mysteriously closed when I went to try to debug this.
- The power socket of my oven started smoking. My landlady was mysteriously absent when I went to try to debug this.
- My Bosnian SIM can receive texts... from one of my work colleagues, at least.
- My landlady appears deeply concerned about the oven thing, and is calling an electrician.
- Spreadsheets.
- Spent a day tracking down bugs that would have taken someone else 30 seconds to fix BUT learnt a lot about Python packaging in the process.
- Accidentally went to a yoga class taught in Bosnian. It was fine.
- My oven outlet was repaired in a timely manner and is no longer a fire risk.
- Climbed Hum Hill.
- Ate at Karuzo twice.
- Signed a new contract with OCCRP to come back part time (3.5 days per week) until December (my initial contract was only until this month).
- Made some progress with converting my site and logs data to the updated AS2 namespace and reshuffling everything into useful graphs to separate content produced by me from notifications created by others, and things that aren't (b)logposts from things that are.
- Factory reset my phone. It works normally again!
- Watched a lot of DS9.
- The blender I bought from the flea market didn't work. Czesiek disassembled and reassembled it today and now it works. Nothing changed. Guess it just needed shaking up.
- After I reinstalled Fairphone OS at the weekend, my 3G stopped working. Fairphone has a number of places to tinker with SIM card and data connection related stuff, and I tinkered with them all. Figuring maybe my contract had expired a few days early, I went to find out from the m:tel shop. The lady confirmed my contract was still active, and fiddled around with my phone for five minutes shrugging and saying 'I don't know' the whole time. Then she handed it back to me, suddenly working. She had no idea why or how.
- Spreadsheets.. Work stuff..
- Took buses to Southampton via Frankfurt, Brussels and London. Left at 9am Friday, arrived at 3am Monday. Some delays.
- Figured out how to watch great quality netflix over Megabus restricted wifi (a VPN and periodic mac address change).
- Stifling my social media use whilst travelling so my mum wouldn't realise I was coming back to the UK.
- Sarven Capadisli (csarven.ca): works on tooling (dokie.li) to improve decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions, and an initiative (linkedresearch.org) to improve openness and access to scholarly communication Web.
- Amy Guy (rhiaro.co.uk): is part-time W3C staff, part-time academic, and part time other things; studying how decentralisation affects people, and working on technology that might do some good in the world.
- Spent the week in Southampton and one day in Oxford talking about decentralisation, scholarly communication, LinkedResearch, personal data stores and the like with cool people like emax, csarven, bblfish, TimBL, Wendy, Nigel, Ramine, Jun, DDR..
- Imagined eprints as a tiny LDN-powered JS app (ldprints).
- Net magazine issue 296 came out in print.. With an article about Linked Data Notifications!
- Missed a bunch of buses.
- Spent a couple of hours eating great food at the Southbank Center food market, just like summer 2014 weekends. Remembered why I love and hate London.
- Surprise visited my Mum. Now I can tweet again.
- Visited family in Lincolnshire. Ate lots of chips.
- Dealt with another wisdom tooth infection. This time resolved by UK dentist. Cheaper than Japan.
- Visited friends in London. Ate lots of chips.
- Went to the TAG Developer Meetup.
- Took a bus to Sarajevo via Brussels and Cologne.
- My flat has been overtaken by spiders. I cleared cobwebs from the bathtub. Everything is fine.
- Had lunch at Superfoods in Sarajevo. It was underwhelming.
🗁Added 17 photos to album Sarajevo, 2017-18.
Karuzo, Kibe, flea market, misc.
Week in review: 26 June - 2 July
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2017/07/week-in-review
Update:
In other news, I discovered I clean up spreadsheets much faster with DS9 on in the corner. Wish I'd discovered this last week.
🗁Added 11 photos to album Sarajevo, 2017-18.
Good times and great food at Karuzo.. The only place in Sarajevo that deliberately makes vegan food.
🗁Added 9 photos to album Homemade food.
Breakfasts. Vegan not-omelette is gram flour (equal parts with water), nutritional yeast, ground flaxseed, herbs and spices, vegetables.
🗁Added 42 photos to album Sarajevo, 2017-18.
Photos from my run up to Hum Tower, a disused TV transmitter. Stunning views and sunset, tempered only by disconcerting presence of stray dogs. Home just in time for a lightning storm.
Nog is class. That is all.
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2017/07/nog
See?
Is there a spinoff of his time at Starfleet Academy? Would watch.
Week in review: 3 - 9 July
Experienced two technological marvels already this week and it's only Monday. Either that, or technological failings entirely on my part.
In reply to: http://boffosocko.com/2017/07/11/the-facebook-algorithm-mom-problem/
Heh, my mum does exactly the same thing on Twitter, liking every single one of my tweets regardless of what it is about. Fortunately, as far as I know, Twitter's algorithm isn't using this for anything meaningful. Also, her account is protected so nobody can see the likes but me so it doesn't even make my tweets appear more popular than they really are.
But anyway, relatable.
🗁Added 3 photos to album Sarajevo, 2017-18.
Misc city at night, and Drew's band.
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Amy added 23 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-eu-2/
A few hours wandering around Frankfurt between buses
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Amy added 19 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-eu-2/
An evening and morning in Brussels with Michael. Sunset at Calais.
Week in review: 10 - 16 July
Web Standards Column: Linked Data Notifications
This article was published in issue #296 (Summer 2017) of net magazine!
You may by now have come across the notion of 're-decentralising' the Web, particularly the Social Web. This is about gaining better control over where we store our personal data. It has become common practice to hand over our data to a few major companies in exchange for 'free' services like games, productivity apps, email, and of course social media. Linked Data Notifications (LDN) is a W3C Recommendation, and one of several protocols standardised by the Social Web Working Group as a core mechanism to make decentralisation possible.
Decentralisation
Right now, when you get a notification from your favourite social networking app (or your calendar, or your hotel reservation site) you can view it once within that closed system, and then it tends to disappear. Imagine if you could choose a trusted location to store your notifications data (for example a personal data store or server) and grant access to different applications. Notifications are no longer locked in to the system which generated them in the first place; data from one application can be reused by another.
There are clear benefits of this practice. The end user is free to switch between applications without having to input the necessary data from scratch each time, as well as changing where their data is stored without disrupting the apps they use, because applications can just re-discover the new location. This benefits application developers too, who can now focus on their core product or service. LDN integration means that applications can nonetheless enhance their functionality when users choose to share notification data from complementary services, and benefit from a standard mechanism for doing so rather than depending on the proprietary API of a third-party social network provider.
The Protocol
LDN is a simple HTTP-based protocol which describes three roles in notification-oriented interactions: senders, receivers, and consumers. Any resource on the Web (from a user profile to a single blog post) may advertise a receiving endpoint (their "Inbox"). Doing so is like pointing to a webhook URL, with LDN standardising the discovery mechanism. The receiver accepts requests from senders (for new notifications) and exposes received notifications in a standard format for other applications (consumers) to reuse. The sender can place any data in the contents of a notification - as much or as little as the application determines is useful for its own future reuse, or for sharing with other consumer applications in the same domain. Consumer applications which discover and read in the notification data could use notification contents to trigger another process in a system, or simply display it in a user interface.
So far we have seen decentralised notifications applied in social networking scenarios, as well as for archival activities and scientific experiments through monitoring the state of online resources, datasets and files, or sensor outputs, and sending notifications when changes occur.
Building Blocks
LDN serves as a building block rather than a complete solution for re-decentralisation. The three roles (sender, receiver, and consumer) can be implemented independently from each other (if you want to build a sender, you don't need to build a receiver to do so), or all together in one system. If you don't want to build your own "Inbox" (and let's face it, most people won't) you can rent one from a third-party you trust. Just like outsourcing the hosting of your social media profile today, but without the service-specific lock-in. No matter where your "Inbox" resides, any application can send notifications there. The protocol works well alongside other emerging or completed W3C standards such as ActivityStreams 2.0, ActivityPub, and the Web Annotations Protocol.
You can get started with LDN today; check out a growing list of reference implementations, and run your implementation against the test suite. Although the standardization process is complete, new implementors are nonetheless encouraged to run the tests and submit the automatically generated implementation reports. The W3C Social Web Community Group is the place to go for follow-up questions and comments about integrating this standard into your applications.
Week in review: 17 - 23 July
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Amy added 12 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-eu-2/
Southampton, Oxford, London.
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Amy added 5 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-eu-2/
Lincolnshire.
🗁Added 6 photos to album Homemade food.
Zucchini courgette noodles with courgette fresh from Mum's garden (plus chilli, tomato, lemon juice, lime juice, soya sauce, sesame seeds).
Two curries and chapati. Lentil and potato; mushroom, kidney bean, tomato, peppers, onions.
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Amy added 42 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-eu-2/
Hanging in London with nice people and eating a lot. Starring the Sky Garden, Borough Market to excess, two Toms, and Squidge the bird puglet.
BRB going on another 43 hour bus ride.
Meet the Man Who Has Lived Alone on This Island for 28 Years... Morandi endures long stretches of time - upwards of 20 days - without any human contact.
Goals.
Failing to sleep on the night bus. Maybe.. maybe it's because I slept on the day bus.
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Amy added 9 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-eu-2/
Greenbay vegan supermarket in West Brompton; lunch at 222 Veggie Vegan; pictures from buses back to Bosnia.
Important announcement: Vego is the best non-dark chocolate ever, and if you get the opportunity just buy it for me okay?
I particularly love the chunkiness of the bars which are perfect for just filling your whole face with chocolate. It's also made with pureed hazelnut or something so the chocolate is kind of fluffy and not as hard as normal block chocolate.
Mostly available in Germany or places that import health foods stuff from Germany. Keep an eye out.
Week in review: 24 - 30 July
I finished DS9.