h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

Today’s poem is called ‘An Invention of Collective Nouns’.

May 7th: Scottish & Welsh Parliament and English local elections.

The folks at @DemocracyClub are doing their usual crowdsourcing of candidate information at
https://candidates.democracyclub.org.uk/. They already have pages for all the candidates, but most lack information: campaign pages, social media links (there's a field for Mastodon links!), contact emails. If you have a few moments, lend a hand to help support an informed democracy in the UK.

#uklocalelections2026 #scottishparliament #welshparliament

We've recently added the PeeringDB Facility ID property to @wikidata:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P14320

Where this is present, there's also now a link to PeeringDB from datacenter infoboxes on Open Infrastructure Map.

A couple of months ago, Linus Media Group got in contact, asking me to review its range of screwdrivers. After many weeks of testing (fixing two PCs, 3D printer and some shelves), my review of the #LTT screwdrivers is now live!
https://bigl.es/ltt-screwdrivers-review/

Today's #Muppets GIF of the Day is...

bad news: we've updated pricing on lots of domains
good news: downwards

https://www.mythic-beasts.com/blog/2026/04/13/domain-price-reductions-2/

#magazine #layout #design #space #planet #planets #science #humor #humour #fun #funny #astronomy #uranus #photo

📝 We've made our lists, and checked them twice. 25,047 candidates have been nominated to stand in the English local elections on 7 May.

📊 The full list of parties and candidates can be found here: https://democracyclub.org.uk/blog/2026/04/13/2026-local-election-data-summary/

👀 Want to know who's on your ballot? https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/

#ukpolitics #localelections #ukpol #england

As we were travelling on Easter Monday and so listened to some of the Classic FM Hall of Fame, I wondered how pieces had changed position over the years. Thankfully they’ve used the same IDs for the past ten years, which meant I could this evening make this:

https://dracos.co.uk/wrote/classicfm-hall-of-fame/

Today is one of those days where a group of volunteers has to semi-manually digitize the list of people standing in 2,824 local elections in May, because the UK is very weird and the only official data is published as PDFs.

https://candidates.democracyclub.org.uk/

Farmers won their right-to-repair fight against John Deere. The settlement includes a 10-year “agreement by Deere to provide ‘the digital tools ​required for the maintenance, diagnosis, and repair’ of tractors, combines, and other machinery”. https://www.thedrive.com/news/john-deere-to-pay-99-million-in-monumental-right-to-repair-settlement

My first piece of work for Pimoroni talks about the new Badgeware range. Badger, Tufty, and Blinky may sound like cartoon characters, but they are the new RP2350 powered boards. Badger is e-paper, Tufty is an IPS LCD, and Blinky is 872 bright white LEDs.
https://blog.pimoroni.com/tiny-screens-big-ideas-show-us-your-badgeware-projects/

New post: Sparrowhawk

https://www.rousette.org.uk/archives/sparrowhawk/

CW for the linked post: contains some descriptions of natural predation event.

#nature #birds

*** New blog post *** in which I revisit a village in Zeelandic Flanders and sing the praises of a bypass road.

https://therantyhighwayman.blogspot.com/2026/04/ive-seen-things-you-people-wouldnt.html

Vancouver, Canada: The public transit grid is thickening! https://humantransit.org/2026/04/vancouver-the-grid-thickens.html

You'll likely catch this image a million times in your various feeds: Earth as seen by Reid Wiseman from Artemis II en-route to the Moon.

My first thought? That's *really* noisy 🧐

But then I realised – it's the *nightside* of Earth, illuminated by the almost full Moon, not the Sun 🌕

The bright limb at lower-right is where the dayside starts, & the fact that you can see aurorae, airglow, & cities in Europe, Africa, & S & N America also gives the game away.

Cool.

#Photography #Artemis

We may have a winner here. The official NASA tracker, https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis-ii/arow/ has a hidden DIV for accessibility. This shows the live telemetry.

Holy shit this is detailed. Can you believe the hubris to silently collect all this information on users?

#privacy

https://browsergate.eu/how-it-works/