Like many people I often read things and feel the urge to share them with other people. I've experimented with a few different ways to do this, but having a "newsletter" feels like a second job. I set up a section on this blog just for sharing links but I looked at all my open tabs today and decided they might warrant a full blog post. This is my blog, I can break the rules if I want to 😛.
Nearly Universal Principles of Projects (NUPP)
As you might expect from the name, NUPP identifies project management principles rather than trying to provide a toolkit. The principles all seem sensible, and I especially like this comment on planning document templates:
Looking for a “template” is the opposite of doing something based on a purpose.
Vale
Getting involved in more open source software projects has exposed me to the wide range of linting tools for software developers. Long-term readers of this blog may know of my interest in plain text, and I've dreamed recently of a customisable linter for prose writing. Enter Vale, "an open-source, command-line tool that brings your editorial style guide to life".
I spent a little bit of time yesterday setting up configuration for Vale, including downloading a Hunspell Australian English dictionary. Expect me to write more on this topic in a future post!
Jupyter Notebooks that run entirely locally
Normally running Jupyter notebooks requires a special server. Jupyter Lite is a new project leveraging WASM to run Jupyter notebooks from any modern web browser:
The goal is to provide a lightweight computing environment accessible in a matter of seconds with a single click, in a web browser and without having to install anything.
Blacklight Query
Blacklight from The Markup shows how many trackers a given website uses. Try your local university or state-owned media site - you may be surprised. For researchers testing hundreds of sites at a time, the Blacklight interface can be tedious, so they have introduced a command-line tool called Blacklight Query.
It Is Now Legal to Hack McFlurry Machines (and Medical Devices) to Fix Them
This story from 404 Media is about US law but many countries tend to follow where the US leads. This story caught my attention because it exists in the same universe as tech companies blatantly violating copyright laws to build "AI" tools. It seems politicians aren't interested in letting people fix things they own, but would like to help corporations plunder intellectual property.
Governance on Fediverse microblogging servers
This report from Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi outlines their findings from a research project about governance on medium-to-large sized fediverse servers. I appreciate the thoughtful approach to how this report is presented: there are both web and PDF versions, and they have also provided "suggested reading pathways" rather than a single "executive summary".