@ldodds@mastodon.me.uk
@ldodds@mastodon.me.uk avatar

ldodds

@ldodds@mastodon.me.uk

Currently CTO at EnergySparks (https://energysparks.uk) a UK charity helping schools be more energy efficient.

Freelancing part time (my background is in open data, data standards, infrastructure and sharing)

Ex. Director of Delivery at the Open Data Institute.

Proud dad of two kids. Likely posting about data, tech, energy, books, cooking, ttrpgs, comics and other nerdery.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

ldodds, to random
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I just mis-read a media type as "mans/plain" and now I'm trying hard not to write the RFC for it.

ldodds,
@ldodds@mastodon.me.uk avatar

"The Mans/Plain media type is the lowest common denominator of Internet discourse..."

"Mans/Plain is usually delivered as a wall of text , often in a strident tone. That is, the characters start at the left margin of the display window, and advance to the right forever until the poster is blocked..."

ldodds,
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@pikesley Accept: mans/plain q=1.0; well/actually; q=0.5

ldodds,
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@Floppy @otfrom @pikesley

As you are the actual admin of the mastodon.me.uk server, I believe this not only checks out, but would also add "enabling our bullshit".

ldodds, to random
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If someone is going to and can take a photo of my Downpour creation in the arcade, I'd be extremely grateful (and very excited).

https://mastodon.me.uk/@CatherineFlick/112416061342024077

https://downpour.games/~ldodds/ripley-s-believe-it-or-not

ldodds,
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@CatherineFlick
Amazing thank you ๐Ÿ™

ldodds, to stackoverflow
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Taking a scorched earth policy whenever a platform does a deal with an AI developer is not a good way to maintain and build a thriving commons.

http://blog.ldodds.com/2024/05/07/acceptable-answers-only/

luis_in_brief, to random
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@ldodds @tarkowski do you have a good sense of why European Data Spaces never get mentioned in open data circles? Am I just in the wrong watering holes or what?

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/data-spaces

#opendata

ldodds,
@ldodds@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@tarkowski @luis_in_brief Agree with Alek.

  • data spaces has never really been positioned as part of "open data" (although obvs part of the overall picture)

  • as a primarily (AIUI) B2B data sharing solution its not relevant to the goals of many in the open data community (open science, transparency, open govt, etc)

  • other solutions and models exist for secure data sharing, so unproven

  • concept still seems largely nebulous and tech focused?

ldodds, to opensource
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Design organisations not licences

There's an article in the Register this week about Bruce Perens' "Post-Open Zero Cost Licence". In brief, Perens is aiming to try to fix one problem that some people have with open source. Specifically finding a way for maintainers to get paid to continue to develop software. I'm being careful not to write "fix open source" as they are a range of different issues around open source and not all of them are about money.

http://blog.ldodds.com/2024/05/01/design-organisations-not-licences/

ldodds, to random
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"Unless you obtain our express permission, you must not include more than 10 links to our Websites on any one of your web pages." and other insanity.

https://malcolmcoles.com/no-linking/

ldodds, to LV426
@ldodds@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Its April 26th which makes it Alien Day!

To celebrate I've made something daft using @v Downpour.

It's called Ripley's Believe It Or Not. It's about Alien but it's not really about Alien.

https://downpour.games/~ldodds/ripley-s-believe-it-or-not

ldodds, to random
@ldodds@mastodon.me.uk avatar

What Mastodon clients are people using on Android?

Ive been using mobile Web interface for the longest time and it's fine, but wanted an app with multi account support to help with bot wrangling.

Tusky is good, but it doesn't support long press on links for sharing and it's bugging me.

ldodds,
@ldodds@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@falken I just retried this. It works like your screenshot if I click on a post then long press on the link.

But not if I long press on a link in the timeline which I rarely ever leave.

I think maybe Tusky assumes any clicks there are to expand the post.

Edent, to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

Turning to Mastodon for tech support in an effort to save my sanity.

Gmail is rejecting mail forwarded to it. But only some of the time.

I own a domain - example.com
It has SPK, DKIM, etc.
It has a catch-all email address.
Any email sent to it is forwarded to a Gmail address.
This works 99% of the time.
But some of the emails aren't delivered - with the reason:

> SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data: 550 5.7.1 [ESA] Sender blocked.

Is that a me problem or a Gmail problem?

ldodds,
@ldodds@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@Edent I've also had an issue with Gmail intermittently rejecting errors.

On the Gmail side, the issue was logged as:

"This message is not RFC 5322 compliant, the issue is: 550-5.7.1 duplicate To headers. To reduce the amount of spam sent to Gmail, 550-5.7.1 this message has been blocked"

A system sending us emails had slightly odd gmail errors. Some combination of that and the content triggered the rejection.

Not sure if its the same thing as you, but sounds similar.

ldodds,
@ldodds@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@Edent meant to write "slightly odd email headers" due to multiple forwards I think. So it might be consequence of a particular routing?

Worth checking the headers if you can, but sounds like outside of your control. We just had to push the issue upstream.

ldodds, to DOOM
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A quick blog post about @doomwadbot

https://blog.ldodds.com/2024/04/25/doom-wad-bot/

ldodds, to random
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I notice that @okfn is hiring a lawyer to work on new/updated Open Data Commons licences

https://okfn.org/en/jobs/researcher-open-data-commons-licences/

Interesting gig for someone.

Looks like the licences will be based around this paper?

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4662511

Wondered if anyone familiar with and had any opinions on the paper (I've not read it yet), or if there was more information about the project elsewhere?

ldodds,
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@luis_in_brief thanks. I skimmed the abstract but it didn't immediately look to be recommending "entities"/"institutions", but will give it a proper read.

ldodds,
@ldodds@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@luis_in_brief also, I was pointed at this group recently, who were new to me.

https://tial.org

Institutional design seems key and I'm not sure I've seen a lot of deep experience in that area in open data efforts that I've seen so far.

ldodds, to random
@ldodds@mastodon.me.uk avatar

There's a lot to enjoy in @debcha "How Infrastructure Works". But I particularly enjoyed the details about the Dinorwig Power Station. The UK's largest battery. Had never heard of it before!

Here's an article she wrote about it for the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/nov/02/beauty-of-infrastructure-electric-mountain-dinorwig-power-station-north-wales

ldodds, to random
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A big yes to all of this.

https://interconnected.org/home/2024/04/12/radical

Floppy, to random
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@ldodds it's happening again https://botsin.space/

ldodds,
@ldodds@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@Floppy I keep meaning to gather some useful lists for bot authors, but I see this repo has some already:

https://github.com/andycyca/tracery-lists

I need to finish the bot I keep tinkering with, it's got SVG generation in there which is "fun" to do in Tracery.

ldodds, to random
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Space is cool

Floppy, (edited ) to random
@Floppy@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Anyone know a standard encoding scheme for binary data to alphabetical strings using only lowercase consonants?

I want to generate non-numeric IDs but avoid making real words, so cutting out the vowels seems the the best approach.

I could just make something up like convert it to hex, and then make b=0, c=1, d=2, f=3, g=4 etc, but is there anything standard?

EDIT: We have a winner, @pbarker pointed me at https://sqids.org which will do the job nicely!

ldodds,
@ldodds@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@Floppy a previous website I worked on had article ids that included both forward slashes and the prefix "art".

These were sometimes encoded into url parameters.

Some customers wondered why their urls contained farts: ...%2fart...

๐Ÿ˜†

ldodds, to random
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We go live now to our correspondent outside the Bauhaus who has some saddening news to report about Bela Lugosi

ldodds,
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@gilesdring @Floppy @pikesley we're in a maze of twisty cultural references all alike...

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