eRambler

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 always feel like I have so much to write, so much that I want to write.

Content Note For reasons that will become apparent as you read the introduction, this post has tangential references to a number of oppressed groups and other fascist newspeak as encoded in Library of Congress metadata standards.

Recently I was at the 2024 Make Data Count Summit, at Wellcome Trust HQ in London.

Why do we celebrate “efficiency” so much?

This weekend I started reading Donella Meadows' Thinking in Systems: A Primer and I cannot overstate how profoundly glad I am to have come across Systems Thinking as a whole field of study.

Why is it that so many beginner programming tutorials assume that the learner is both a) comfortable with maths; and b) motivated to learn by seeing simple arithmetic?

I was hanging the laundry the other day, and ended up thinking about reasons why you might ignore those coded instructions on the care label of your clothing.

One of the reasons I’ve been blogging less lately is that the more I’ve progressed in my career the more aware I’ve been of representing my employer as well as myself and, let’s be honest, I have enough anxiety already without adding to it myself.

My handwriting!

If it seems like I haven’t posted here much lately then you’re right.

Just a quick note to say that since I’ve deleted my Twitter account, I’ve set up a static archive of all my tweets.

Last week I received an email from a friend inviting me to submit a video to a panel 'Missing narratives around diversity and inclusion in Research Software Engineering' hosted as part of SeptembRSE 2021, the goals of which are: help create inclusive comm…

I’ve enjoyed learning Rust (the programming language) recently, but having only really used it for solving programming puzzles I’ve been looking for an excuse to use it for something more practical.

I forgot to mention it at the time, but I’ve added “normal” comments back to the site, as you’ll see below and on most other pages.

Wow, it turns out to be 10 years since I wrote this beginners guide to Twitter.

My last post covered the more “traditional” lectures-and-panel-sessions approach of the first half of the SSI Collaborations Workshop.

I’ve just finished attending (online) the three days of this year’s SSI Collaborations Workshop (CW for short), and once again it’s been a brilliant experience, as well as mentally exhausting, so I thought I’d better get a summary down while it’s still fr…

I’ve decided to try switching this website back to using Hugo to manage the content and generate the static HTML pages.

The Disability Support Network at work recently ran a survey on “accessible communications”, to develop guidance on how to make communications (especially internal staff comms) more accessible to everyone.

I started running my own Matrix server a little while ago.

@JanetHughes on Twitter: What do you miss the least from pre-lockdown life?

And the handwritten blog saga continues, as I’ve just received my new reMarkable 2 tablet, which is designed for reading, writing and nothing else.

Updates 2021-02-04 Thanks to Gene @dzshuniper@ausglam.space for suggesting ADHO and a better attribution for the opening quote (see comments below for details) See comments & webmentions for details.

I’ve updated my blog theme to use the quasi-proportional fonts Iosevka Aile and Iosevka Etoile.

If I’m going to train an algorithm to read my weird & awful writing, I’m going to need a decent-sized training set to work with.

I wrote the following text on my tablet with a stylus, which was an interesting experience: So, thinking about ways to make writing fun again, what if I were to write some of them by hand?

Introduction As I mentioned last year, I was awarded a Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship to pursue the project of setting up a Cultural Heritage/GLAM data science network.

Under Construction Grunge Sign by Nicolas Raymond — CC BY 2.0 Every year, around this time of year, I start doing two things.

Here is a selection of talks that I’ve given. {{% template %}} <%!

I wrote a post on the problems with ISBNs as persistent identifiers (PIDS) for work, so check it out if that sounds interesting.

I’m just back from IDCC20, so here are a few reflections on this year’s conference.

Iosevka is a nice, slender monospace font with a lot of configurable variations.

I’m honoured and excited to be named one of this year’s Software Sustainability Institute Fellows.

Just a quickie to say that I’ve replaced the comment section at the bottom of each post with webmentions, which allows you to comment by posting on your own site and linking here.

It looks like I’ve accidentally taken charge of bridging a bunch of The Carpentries Slack channels over to Matrix.

Discussions of neurodiversity at #mozfest Photo by Jennifer Riggins The other weekend I had my first experience of Mozilla Festival, aka #mozfest.

Today1 the office conversation turned to blocking out background noise.

It barely seems like it, but I’ve been at the British Library now for nearly 6 months.

Photo by me I sit here writing this in the departure lounge at Philadelphia International Airport, waiting for my Aer Lingus flight back after a week at the 13th Research Data Alliance (RDA) Plenary (although I’m actually publishing this a week or so later

Photo by Sear Greyson on Unsplash I recently attended a workshop, organised by the excellent team of the Turing Way project, on a tool called BinderHub.

I’ve found it increasingly difficult to make time to blog, and it’s not so much not having the time — I’m pretty privileged in that regard — but finding the motivation.

Following on from the excitement of having built a functioning keyboard myself, I got a parcel on Monday.

I’m typing this post on a keyboard I made myself, and I’m rather excited about it!

“Wenniger aber besser” — Dieter Rams {:.big-quote} I can barely believe it’s a full year since I published my intentions for 2018.

Python is great, but I find it useful to have an alternative language under my belt for occasions when no amount of Pythonic cleverness will make some bit of code run fast enough.

Photo by Andrew Hughes on Unsplash I’ve chosen not to make any specific resolutions this year; I’ve found that they just don’t work for me.

!!!

When you’re writing analysis code, Python (or R, or JavaScript, or …) is usually the right choice.

Trees reflected in a lake Joshua Reddekopp on Unsplash It seems like ages ago, but way back in November I committed to completing Advent of Code.