This past week, the CUNY Academic Commons — the home for this blog — was offline for a few days, as they were migrating to new hosting. Then, when it came back, you may have noticed that the theme for the blog was all wonky, and some of the functionality was not working. Anyhow, this […]
On Saturday, March 14th, 2020, the day after we were sent home on account of the plague’s arrival in New York, I started keeping a log of all of the work things that I did. With very few exceptions, I’ve kept logging every day since then. The log is now approaching 10,000 entries, so I […]
Since my last post, I’ve been moving more things over to GitHub Actions. It has been an interesting journey. Some things are pretty straightforward to port from PythonAnywhere Tasks. Others have puzzled me a bit more. As an example of the latter, I wanted to set up my rss-to-mastodon bot as a GitHub Action. It’s […]
Today I moved some bots from PythonAnywhere over to GitHub Actions. This is a follow-up to my previous post about migrating the front-end of the bots over to mastodon.ocert.at. Now I’m modernizing the back-end with GitHub Actions. There were a few reasons for this switch: I get GitHub Pro services for free via the GitHub […]
This week, I have a new paper out titled “Coding with those who show up: Two methodologies on technical committee work” in Information Technology and Libraries. It is licensed CC-BY-NC, so you can read it for free here. The point of the article is that the literature on “laissez-faire leadership” is disproportionately (and in my […]
I checked the date of my previous post, and it has been eight months that I have been running Debian on this old HP laptop. Here are a few things that have struck me about the move from Ubuntu: The desktop environment can be pretty much identical. I am still running Gnome now — as […]
The past two days, I have been at CUNY’s 23rd annual IT Conference. It’s a conference I enjoy, even though it’s geared toward IT professionals, which I am decidedly not. Nonetheless, the smattering of librarian presentations is usually enough to keep me occupied and contented throughout the conference. I did catch some of the presentations […]
Caroline Jedlicka and I recently published a paper in the Journal of Web Librarianship called “Creating a Homemade Mobile Augmented Reality Game in a Community College Library: An Open Source Approach.” This link will get you past the journal’s paywall. For me, the standout message of the article is that you do not need a […]
It is getting to be time for my annual post about the Thanksgiving Challenge. Previous editions of this post can be found here, here, and here. Basically, the challenge is to spend the entire Thanksgiving long weekend coding by yourself. I’ve already covered the questionable productivity benefits (and very real mental health downsides) of doing […]
I’ve been using cmus to listen to music lately. It is rather glorious software. To see what I mean take a look at this screenshot: It runs in the terminal and has weird key bindings. To get it running I had to build it from source. It lets me play music off my hard drive, […]
