Now that USB cables are no longer just naive bundles of conductors, is there a way to test them to find out which spec they conform to? I have a bunch of A to C cables that clearly only have the four USB 2.0 pins at the A end, but apart from that it's hard to tell.

Something like this was always going to happen and people were right to be wary of #astral: https://astral.sh/blog/openai Does Astral's suite of tools have excellent engineering behind them? Yes. But Astral was a startup company and the primary mode of operation for most startups is to "exit" […]

I'm getting a lot of 503 errors from Outlook Web this morning trying to load my calendar and email. Is this a wider issue or just me?

got inspired by some questions from phd students the other day; hope useful for others too! 🩷 https://olivia.science/cheating "[Junior colleagues report] pressure from peers to use AI that they fear for their careers if they don't. If this describes you[,] then this is for you. [...] I assume […]

It wasn't DNS; it was a trivial IPv4 route configuration error

Well, after over 7 years at the British Library, it's time for me to move on. After Easter I'll be starting my new job as Research Data Manager at the University of Warwick, working with the wonderful Yvonne Budden and the rest of the scholcomms team there. Last day at the BL will be 2 April […]

You'll get to do some innovative work on linked data, federated web services (ActivityPub!) & peer-to-peer data archiving (BitTorrent!), in support of a global grassroots network of data rescuers and archivists! Including me! * 2 years fixed term at 0.5FTE * Starting salary 57708 EUR pro rata […]

:loudspeaker: Job opportunity to work on safeguarding at-risk data & culture :tada: Technische Informatzionsbibliothek (TIB, Germany's national library of science & technology) are recruiting a software engineer to work on developing the https://sciop.net platform for safeguarding at-risk data […]

:loudspeaker: Job opportunity to work on safeguarding at-risk data & culture :tada: Technische Informatzionsbibliothek (TIB, Germany's national library of science & technology) are recruiting a software engineer to work on developing the https://sciop.net platform for safeguarding at-risk data […]

One of the reasons our project can't move to a CI/CD service other than GitHub Actions or a forge service other than GitHub is precisely because of npm and JSR's dependency on GitHub. If you want to use trusted publishing for your JavaScript packages on npm or JSR, you are forced to use GitHub […]

Thoughts on good quality, easily managed network gear for home networking? Going to be moving house soon, and thinking it's time to replace my cobbled-together collection of crappy desktop switches and old OpenWRT-flashed routers with something a bit easier to manage. From what I can tell […]

Thoughts on good quality, easily managed network gear for home networking? Going to be moving house soon, and thinking it's time to replace my cobbled-together collection of crappy desktop switches and old OpenWRT-flashed routers with something a bit easier to manage. From what I can tell […]

Some dudes would rather clean up documentation for AI agents than make documentation easier to read for everyone, such as people

Super naive Python question: how do you configure your pyproject.toml for a library so that the name you import is different from the name of the project as listed in PyPI? Is this sensible or even possible?

An observation about "theory of mind deficits" in #autism: what's missing in our relationship to other minds is not a THEORY. It's a set of "click, whirr" automatic shortcut mechanisms for dealing with the social world that neurotypicals use INSTEAD OF the explicit, conscious reasoning that […]

Still annoys me when my feed is broken up by an image, often AI slop, that adds no information to its post and is only there because someone is habituated to adding an image to everything because it anecdotally boosts engagement or somesuch

Is the "official" matrix.org Slack bridge just dead now? I haven't seen any messages bridged since the end of November and it's just not available for me to add from the integration settings for rooms any more either.

New phishing scam pretending to be from an official Mastodon account. Mastodon does not send out verification requests like this. So don't click the link if you receive a message like this, just report it as spam.

Lately I have noticed that when you purchase a ticket you don’t get a static PDF/PNG anymore. Increasingly often, you get a .pkpass file, which is supposed to be opened in wallet apps (like Google Wallet or any 3rd-party). Since I don’t like to share information about the events I attend with […]

Next week, #ReproducibiliTea in the HumaniTeas in Cologne is organising a two-day extravaganza of Quarto workshops and talks: https://gschwier.pages.git.nrw/quartoworkshop2026/ We are making online attendance possible for the world to join in the fun! Online […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

what do you wish someone had told you about the Git command line interface when you started using Git for the first time? Especially curious about what you wish you'd known if you ended up choosing to use a IDE/GUI interface to Git. (mostly interested in replies from people who started using […]

New article by @kiru outlines a training course in bibliographic data science, bridging library science, digital humanities, and data science. It argues that bibliographic data analysis should become a core methodological skill for understanding large-scale cultural and historical patterns. The […]

Looking for #music suggestions - something lo-fi for reading to, with hot chocolate cosy vibes. My go tos are Nala Sinephro and Zero 7 but fancying something new. Bonus points for artists on @mirlo or at least #bandcamp.

tired: British English has no second person plural pronoun wired: "y'all" as 2nd person plural inspired: "you 'orrible lot" as 2nd person plural

The best of 2025 : Accountabiility.

[blog] Code Hosting Options Beyond GitHub rOpenSci activities generally rely on a GitHub-based workflow which can exclude users of other repositories. Here, @mpadge explores alternatives to GitHub for hosting code and describes ways in which to do so which also allow you to stay connected with […]

Can we please stop holding important conferences in the US? One of my students is affected by the full travel ban and for others it just doesn't seem sufficiently safe. I love my US colleagues and would have enjoyed attending HSP and ACL/CoNNL but it's simply not an option at this point.

“Why so dreach, Missus?”. It was Lang Wullie, one of the Picsties that live in my pantry; a towering outlier at a full sixteen and a half centimeters tall. “Big folk bein’ gobshites, Wullie.” “Aye gobshites come and go, but ye ken what yon Kelda says?” There was a rattling sound from the […]

📣 While I've been busy at #ff2025, my colleagues Blanka & Hannah have been putting together an exciting webinar on "The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data and Data Sovereignty", coming up this Thursday 11 December! It's packed with speakers and perspectives from Australia & NZ, North America […]

This is unreal. The 2026 code4lib conference has been cancelled unilaterally by Carnegie Mellon University because the Department of Education raised issues with the diversity scholarships: > An applicant must be a member of a group not well-represented within the code4lib community, including […]

London! I am in you! #ff2025

I am having a go at completing this year's #adventofcode in #racket! Here's my day 1 solution: https://codeberg.org/jezcope/aoc2025/src/branch/main/racket/day01.rkt This is the first Racket code I've written beyond (displayln "Hello World!"): I love functional programming in Haskell but all the […]

is glauca’s dns down?

it's happening!!! from now until the end of the day on Friday, November 28th (if it’s Friday anywhere, the sale’s still on!), all my PDF zines are 50% off, and print zines are 30% off! https://wizardzines.com

next: How Git Works! This is our best-selling zine of all time (probably because so many people struggle with Git ❤). It explains git’s core concepts (commits! branches! merging! remotes!) with minimal jargon and a focus on the actual problems that can ruin […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

next: Oh Shit, Git! This was a collab with the amazing Katie Sylor-Miller (@ksylor), the author of https://ohshitgit.com It's a reference for what to do to git out of a git mess https://wizardzines.com/zines/oh-shit-git/ (5/16)

My cartoon for this week's @newscientist.com

This captures a lot of my concerns about the rapidity of "AI" adoption. > "No matter how well “AI” works, it has some deeply fundamental problems, that won’t go away with technical progress. I’d even go as far and say they are intentional." > "When we let a model transform notes into a blog […]

As an FYI it's UK Disability History Month 2025https://ukdhm.org/

h/t @technihilism.bsky.social

✨We're delighted with the response to our survey for #neurodivergent staff in the #library & information sector It takes 10 mins, so if you haven’t already filled it in, please think about doing so (closing date is 30/11/25)⬇️ lancasteruni.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... psst. Pass it on!

«I just don’t think working at an evil company should define me. I’ve only worked here for seven years. What about the twenty-five years before, when I didn’t work here? In fact, I wasn’t working at all for the first eighteen years of my life. And for some of those early years, I didn’t even […]

Is anyone aware of any survey or interview studies on qualitative researchers' attitudes towards (or perhaps even resistance to) #OpenScience? Many thanks! 🙏 #qualifair #qualitativeresearch

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

OK, #adventofcode approaches so it's time to start deciding what language to use for this year's challenges. I've pretty much narrowed my choices down to either Haskell (because I find writing it a genuine pleasure) or a Lisp, probably Racket or Common Lisp (because I want to learn one of those […]