Don Thompson @guardeddon@social.cleverlibre.org

«According to Utrecht University, the rankings place “too much emphasis on scoring and competition,” while the university says it considers collaboration and openness of scientific research to be more important»

Great decision.

«Utrecht University chose not to be included on the Times Higher Education rankings» https://nltimes.nl/2023/09/29/utrecht-university-chose-included-times-higher-education-rankings

I've got no clue who actually started doing that in my household, but using old toilet paper rolls to prevent cables from entangling inside the storage boxes is actually a brilliant idea! 💡#organisation #storage #cables #recycling

Week in Fediverse 2023-09-29

Servers

- ActivityPub for WordPress v1.0.1
- WriteFreely v0.14.0
- Misskey v2023.9.0
- Lemmy v0.18.5
- Castopod v1.6.5

Clients

- Mastodon for Android v2.1.4
- IceCubesApp v1.8.4
- Jerboa v0.0.48
- Vernissage v1.11.0
- TootRain v1.7.2
- Photon v1.14.0
- Pachli v1.2
- Mastodon Bird UI v1.7.8
- Alexandrite v0.8.8

Tools

- PeerTube Livechat Plugin v8.0.0
- Fediverse Redirect v1.6.0
- activitypub-testsuite: Server-independent, fully-automated test suite primary focused on ActivityPub server compliance testing

Articles

- Community Spotlight: Casey Kolderup, creator of Postmarks, has joined the W3C’s Social Web Community Group!
- FediForum September 2023
- Last Week in Fediverse – episode 36

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#WeekInFediverse #Fediverse #ActivityPub

Previous edition: https://mitra.social/objects/018abe04-9009-9355-814c-65d9d417159e

PhD defense Qing Li, 12 October 2023, Kalman filter based integration of multiple sensor data for the estimation of vehicle trajectories https://www.tuwien.at/en/mg/geo/events/event-details/news/rigorosum-qing-li

Countering the Gish gallop

Journalism/social media thoughts: Well, I'm coming to the conclusion that X/Twitter is now almost useless as a method of promoting my work. So I may just stop using it altogether soon. And yes I know social media is supposed to be for socializing, opining, etc — but I and many other journos have been using it to promote our work too, which is (I believe) an important part of how the web ecosystem has worked over the past decade.

@Teri_Kanefield I really like Library Extension. I go to Amazon, look up the book, and Library Extension tells me my local library has it and provides a button so I can place a hold. Saves me a lot of money — and some time as well.

Look forward to reading the book.

Library Extension:
https://www.libraryextension.com

Good news! It looks like the noise you have all made has convinced Philips Hue to reconsider. They will not force data sharing on user accounts, according to their response in this The Verge article. We do await the exact changes to their policy.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23892761/philips-hue-app-account-changes

Raspberry Pi 5 is coming

With more than twice the speed of Raspberry Pi 4, and featuring our brand new RP1 chip, we’ve refined the Raspberry Pi experience.

It’s the everything computer. Optimised.

Priced at $60 for the 4GB variant, and $80 for its 8GB sibling, units are already available to pre-order from many of our Approved Resellers, and will ship at the end of October.

raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/

#Pi5
#RaspberryPi

Big uptick in new people here from Twitter - WELCOME PALS, I hope you enjoy it here as much as I am.

For those unfamiliar with the fediverse, the most important thing to note is that favs do absolutely nothing to help me pay my bills. Please boost my toots. Feel free to mock the way that sounds till you're blue in the face, as long as you still boost my toots.

My toots: boost them.

Does anyone know of a multi-browser testing app/website which can test uploaded (rather than web-hosted) pages?
I've got an offline page we use as a synthetic response in a CDN config and I want to just check it's working on older browsers - it works fine on Firefox/Safari/Chromium latest and is simple, so it *should* work fine but i'd like to test on a few older browsers if poss.

Woke up this morning, had an idea and an hour to spare, so here's a lo-res spinning globe of lighthouses around the world. Kid started dancing. 😊

#rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Sit back and enjoy @Mer__edith being right about things: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/25/signals-meredith-whittaker-ai-is-fundamentally-a-surveillance-technology/

Lighthouses of the United Kingdom. I rather like how this turned out. And it didn't take 42 hours. 😅

#rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

The German state of Saxony has started their own #mastodon server at https://social.sachsen.de/

The server is intended for the departments and organisations that are part of the government of Saxony.

It is run by the Saxon Data Protection Authority ( @sdtb ), who states:

“I am pleased that I can provide public bodies with a data protection-compliant social network for their public relations work."

https://www.datenschutz.sachsen.de/social-media-sdtb-startet-mit-eigener-mastodon-instanz-6314.html

@Dtl I got my .co.uk and my DNS hosting with @beasts who seem like Good People. (recommended way back by Philip Kendall iirc)

SO good -- the best follow the money reporting on who's behind the global attack on digital privacy yet.

TLDR: it's law enforcement x AI companies posing as NGOs w a commercial interest in selling scammy mass scanning tech. Deeply cynical, deeply shady.

https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the-eus-fight-over-scanning-for-child-sex-content/

AoIR will not be using Twitter/X during #AoIR2023. We will be posting here. Please see this announcement for additional information and details. https://aoir.org/aoir2023onmastodon/

I'd really welcome *technical* and NOT *political/ethical* answers to this question

I am still trying to get my head around Bluesky

Is the AT Protocol - in what it can do already, or in the short term will be able to do - better than ActivityPub that is behind Mastodon?

I can find nothing decent that explains this in layperson's terms…

First truly magical #auroraborealis of the season for me. Glad I got dressed and ventured outside. And the dog got an extra walk so he was happy too! #aurora #northernlights #norrsken