h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

Our robot agility work is featured on the cover of the new issue of Science Robotics on legged robots.

🗼 With the publication of the candidates for Blackpool South, we have now compiled a full set of candidates for the English and Welsh elections on 2 May.

🧮 That's 10,662 candidates across 2,015 ballots: councillors, mayors, PCCs, London AMs, and one MP.

🗳️Find out who's on your ballot at http://WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk!

✨Enormous thanks to our amazing volunteers who worked through the day and night to get the data into our system.

👨‍💻 The data is available to download here: https://candidates.democracyclub.org.uk/api/docs/csv/

With local elections upon us, and a general election coming sometime soon, a reminder that https://electionleaflets.org/ is a really useful #UKPolitics resource for seeing what candidates are parties are saying across the country. It relies on people uploading leaflets they get, so if you do get some, please pause to take a snap of them before they go into the recycling!

Curious about using 'public domain' British Library Flickr images? We've answered some common questions https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2024/04/curious-about-using-public-domain-british-library-flickr-images.html

#Flickr #PublicDomain #FreeImages #illustrations #Commons

🗓️ This Friday is SOPN DAY!

4pm on 5 April is the deadline for people to stand as candidates in the English & Welsh local, Mayoral and PCC elections.

Between 5 and 8 April, councils will publish the official candidate lists, Statements of Persons Nominated (SoPN).

Each year our amazing volunteers lend a hand extracting this information from PDFs and into our system, allowing voters to find their ballot via a postcode search.

It's a big task, and anyone can take part: https://candidates.democracyclub.org.uk/volunteer/

Does anyone have resources for restoring British phone boxes?

I see there are a few companies online selling parts, but I'm curious if there is any good documentation available, official or otherwise.

This will likely be something of a challenge to do in the US, but will be really cool if done the proper way.

Global Warming Is Slowing the Earth's Rotation.

Negative leap second approaching; appalling shitshow to result.

"This is another one of those 'this has never happened before' things that we're seeing from global warming: the idea that this effect is...
https://jwz.org/b/ykOa

Well, this is a transcendent level of evil: Facebook bought a VPN company and deployed it, in part, to spy on its users.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/26/facebook-secret-project-snooped-snapchat-user-traffic/

It's a reminder that VPNs have their own risks, beyond technical ones if operated incompetently -- namely, that you have to trust the VPN company itself.

Over 2,000 candidates have now declared their intention to stand in the next UK parliamentary general election.

Browse the full list:
https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/ppcs/

#ukpolitics #elections

Mythic Beasts is now certified by the Green Web Foundation. We've been this green for many years now - just finally done the work to get the certificate. https://www.mythic-beasts.com/blog/2024/03/25/green-hosting/

3 serious forks of #Redis to watch:

#KeyDB

Mutli-threaded fork of Redis based on Redis 6.
BSD 3 Clause license.
Owned by Snapchat.
https://github.com/Snapchat/KeyDB

#Redict

Recent fork by @drewdevault based on the last open source version of Redis 7.2.4.
On Codeberg.
LGPL 3.0 license.
https://codeberg.org/redict/redict

PlaceholderKV (searching for name)

Started by former Redis contributor(s) and AWS employees.
BSD 3 Clause license.
https://github.com/placeholderkv/placeholderkv

Boosts appreciated 🙏

#opensource #oss #foss #gpl

Who would know how to make a guess at the answer to this question: is internet traffic pretty much equal numbers of 1s and 0s, or is there noticeably more of one than the other?

For one week only, Muppet GIF of the Day is becoming Fraggle GIF of the Day to celebrate the release of #FraggleRockBackToTheRock Season Two! Keep an eye out starting today for an entire week of daily GIFs featuring the inhabitants of Fraggle Rock, both old and new!

Little announcement 📣

I’m now the Green Party’s parliamentary candidate for the Manchester Withington constituency. 💚🗳️

I’m here for climate justice, social justice, peace, trains, LTNs, digital rights, unionisation, trans rights, electoral reform, bins, and all that good stuff.

Author of “True Names”, arguably the first cyberspace story, Vernor Vinge, has passed.

https://file770.com/vernor-vinge-1944-2024/

“True Names” is on my short list of must read hacker fiction. If you haven’t read it you should.

#scifi #cyberpunk #cyberspace