h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

🆕 blog! “NHS Goes To War Against Open Source”

The NHS is preparing to close nearly all of its Open Source repositories.

Throughout my time working for the UK Government - in GDS, NHSX, i.AI, and others - I championed Open Source. I spoke to dozens of departments about it, wrote guidance still in use today, and briefed Ministers on why it was so…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/nhs-goes-to-war-against-open-source/
⸻
#government #nhs #OpenSource #politics

This AI chatbot is not aware of anything that occurred after 1931. Fascinating to ask it questions about future history.
https://talkie-lm.com/chat

"The World’s Longest-Running Experiment Is Still Teaching Us Physics" https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/resources/science-experiments/the-worlds-longest-running-experiment-is-still-teaching-us-physics/

It's live! New single on Bandcamp
https://frontalot.bandcamp.com/track/common-loot-feat-mcgwire

With playable music video RPG:
https://frontalot.com/loot

Really? Really? Really? The word “really”, expressed forcefully, was the crux of a long-running comedy routine more than a decade ago, on the American TV program Saturday Night Live. A recent study takes a really good look at the equivalent word in the mandarin Chinese language. https://improbable.com/2026/04/28/really-really-really/

Here are the names of some English parish councils with scheduled elections this May.

Gunthwaite and Ingbirchworth
Peakirk
Whittle-le-Woods
Horton-cum-Studley
Duns Tew
Cliviger
Shenington with Alkerton
Shipton-on-Cherwell and Thrupp
Fingringhoe
Great & Little Wigborough
Messing-cum-Inworth
Ducklington
Folksworth and Washingley
The Stukeleys
Stow Longa
Shudy Camps
Pidley-cum-Fenton
Billinge Chapel End
Shipton under Wychwood
Yelling
Loggerheads
Thriplow

I couldn't stop thinking about this so I had to make it and share it

do you ever look back at your life and think, “boy i wish i knew what strange and interesting new snacks, drinks, and cereals came out last year?"

i'm here for you, friend. here's my short-awaited 2025 food garbage round-up!!

https://cabel.com/the-snacks-cereals-of-2025/

📮 Received any election leaflets in the post recently?

📸 Before recycling, please consider snapping a photo and uploading it to https://electionleaflets.org/. Journalists, social scientists, historians and your fellow voters will thank you!

ℹ️ Over 1,000 leaflets have been added to the database this year alone!

#ukpolitics #localelections #scottishpolitics #welshpolitics #ukelections

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/