For Christmas, we bought a new iPad and our first Apple Pencil. I asked my brother, a professional illustrator, to recommend a drawing program and he suggested Procreate. I'm so glad he did. I've been having a blast. Playing around with Procreate is convincing me that you don't need a full desktop app to make great artwork. This is a bit of a paradigm shift for me. I'm still very interested in learning desktop apps like Inkscape better (check out my drawing of my dog), but it's a lot of fun to sketch and play and I love the portability of an iPad.

A while back, when I started using git, I thought it would be a good idea to keep my binary files outside of git. I created a directory called “incfiles” on my server at the time. It was for files I want to include elsewhere. These days that directory lives at http://thedurbins.com/static/incfiles. I just found a pic of some cacti in there: I was just pleasantly surprised that Hugo allows me to use non-local files as the featured image, like this:

At the recent OFA conference I met someone who has brought her copy of Coding Freedom to Harvard to get it signed by the author, Gabriella Coleman, who is a professor in the department of Anthropology. I've read a lot of history of open source but never from the perspective of an anthropologist, never as part of a serious academic exercise. I just finished the book and I'd recommend it. It's a bit academic and dry at times, but maybe it's the sort of book I should have on my bookshelf to review the dense parts now and then.

The other day I was minding my own business when an email hit my inbox: “OpenForum Europe is organising the OpenForum Academy Symposium in Boston on 13-14 November at Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard Business School. It is an academic conference that covers questions related to the social, political and economic impact of Open Source. We found your website Boston Open Dev for the open source meetups and we thought of sharing the invitation in case you and your networks might be interested.

Listening to the JS Party episode about Jerod Santo's tool box motivated me to finally get Ollama working properly. I had already played around with Ollama when I gave my friend Slava's datachat a whirl. In that case, per the README, I spun up a Docker image and ran the following to pull the 4-5 GB model in: docker exec -it ollama /bin/bash ollama pull llama3 Then Slava's app, which is pretty neat by the way, worked just fine.

Today I made a quick sketch of my dog, Midnight. He's a Shorkie, half Shih Tzu, half Yorkshire Terrier. I was inspired by all the Inkscape content during the 20th anniversary celebration today. I joined session one early this morning and then caught up on videos by Martin Owens. In one, he explained a new template he created for making zines. Flip open my zine and you see my doggo.

I watched a video on YouTube called Large Language Models and the End of Programming by Matt Welsh, hosted by CS50. I considered attending the talk in person but didn't make time for it. I'm glad it was recorded. It's really good! I first heard about Matt when he blogged about leaving Harvard back in 2010. It was nice to hear he's doing well and right in the middle of the AI revolution that's suddenly surrounding us all.

The best paragraph in Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes is the last: From our perspective, the digital world appears to be populated by technologies that impose walls between people, rather than by technologies that create windows between them. We suggest that understanding how to design digital systems so that they mesh with human behavior at the individual and collective levels is of immense importance.

The first two open source meetups in Brookline were a ton of fun. We had ten and then eleven people. Due to travel we're skipping February, but we're on for March: When: Sunday, March 26, 2023 at 5pm (Google Calendar) Where: Hamilton Restaurant & Bar (in the back room), 1366 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446 (Google Maps) Come one, come all. If you'd like to RSVP (which certainly isn't required!

I've been in the market for a new laptop for a long, long time. I bought my last laptop in 2011 and have run Linux on it, but I've been very disappointed with the hardware (a ThinkPad X220T). I had dreams of using the Wacom tablet built into the screen to make artwork, but it just didn't work out, and it wasn't cheap either. It was time for a change. Maybe every other laptop can be for Linux.

Over the past few days, I binge listened to (and sometimes watched) all the videos from the Creative Freedom Summit that took place last week. I heard about it on the Sustain Open Source podcast. The agenda was packed with interesting talks, but here are some of my favorites: Automation in Inkscape by Máirín Duffy Inkscape's Multipage Feature by Martin Owens Creating Fedora Wallpapers with Krita by Madeline Peck Blender: Grease Pencil Speedpaint by Paul Caggegi Freelancing with Free Software by Ryan Gorley A quick painting demo using Krita by David Revoy Brand & Badges: How Fedora Designers Create with Inkscape by Marie Nordin and Jess Chitas (I'll update the links above as edited videos are available.

The first open source meetup in Brookline was a blast. Holmes and I were joined by eight other open source and decentralized web enthusiasts over drinks and dinner. We decided we'll do it again at the same place: When: Sunday, January 22nd, 2023 at 5pm (Google Calendar) Where: Hamilton Restaurant & Bar (in the back room), 1366 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446 (Google Maps) All are welcome, of course.

Today I listened to Syntax 548, titled “Rendering Methods Explained”, which covered a question in the State of JS survey that asks, “Which of the following architecture and rendering patterns have you used in the last year?” The survey is ongoing but an issue and a localization file show the following options: Single Page Application (SPA): Apps that run entirely in the browser Multi-Page Application (MPA): Apps that run entirely on the server, with minimal client-side dynamic behavior Static Site Generation (SSG): Pre-rendered static content, with or without a client-side dynamic element Server-Side Rendering (SSR): Dynamically rendering HTML content on the server before rehydrating it on the client Partial Hydration: Only hydrating some of your components on the client (e.

I'm co-organizing an open source meetup in Brookline about a week from now: When: Sunday, December 18th, 2022 at 5pm (Google Calendar) Where: Hamilton Restaurant & Bar, 1366 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446 (Google Maps) Who's coming? Well, the two co-organizers for sure. If you'd like to be added to the list below, please email me at philipdurbin@gmail.com. Philip Durbin (co-organizer), developer for Dataverse Holmes Wilson (co-organizer), creator of Quiet … This will be a very casual event.

In yesterday's post I mentioned that I was having trouble remembering the specifics of a talk from years ago. Somewhat ironically, this was in the context of a conversation about chat apps where we touched on the usefulness (or not) of old chat logs. I was asked, “When do you find yourself going back to old chat logs?” To find those specifics, I found myself going back to old chat logs!

Today I met with the creator of Quiet, a new chat app that doesn't require a server. That is, it's peer-to-peer and completely decentralized. We quickly got into how much we appreciate how the Internet itself is decentralized and both want to keep it that way. I started talking about Scott Bradner and his use of the word “anarchy” as a positive attribute of the Internet. I struggled to explain what Scott was saying but later I dug up his article, The importance of restrained anarchy.

We bought an erg, mostly for our daughter, but it took me a few days to get on it because I wasn't sure if I'd set a new personal record. Here's the data: date piece time split stroke rate 2022-07-12 2000m 9:33 2:23 26 2022-07-31 2000m 9:14 2:19 27 2022-08-06 2000m 8:57 2:14 26 2022-08-22 2000m 8:42 2:11 26 I had managed to shave off a few seconds each time. Could I keep this up?

Today I was messing around with GitHub Actions for OpenDP. I found an answer on Stack Overflow that got me unblocked. I ended up splitting up my single step into multiple steps so I could indicate that I'm ok with one of the steps failing with continue-on-error. I'm reminded that I should check out the GitHub Actions advent calendar Ed Thomson made. I got a chance to meet him last year at FOSDEM.

As of today I'm working 60% on Dataverse and 40% on OpenDP. My role for Dataverse will continue to be software development, but in OpenDP I'll focus on community management. My guess is that to some extent, I'll work in both code and communities for both projects. I've been known to give a talk or two about Dataverse, but I'm fairly new to OpenDP. The “DP” is short for differential privacy.

Today is #ShutDownSTEM (or #ShutDownAcademia) and I spent a little time attending two webinars and hanging out in a Slack channel called #fighting-antiblackness. Someone linked to Police: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. It was funny and interesting but I kept thinking that I should be listening to what black people have to say. Thankfully, at the very end, he played a speech by Kimberly Jones, author of I'm Not Dying with You Tonight.