h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

In my latest blog post, I spend time hanging around a street corner in Rotterdam.

https://therantyhighwayman.blogspot.com/2025/12/a-street-corner-in-rotterdam.html

Apollo VIII Christmas menu, 1969 https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:cz30ps80r

[$] The current state of Linux architecture support

There have been several recent announcements about Linux distributions changing the list of architectures they support, or adjusting how they build binaries for some versions of th [...]

https://lwn.net/Articles/1045363/ #LWN

TIL that the Land Registry has a SPARQL endpoint! Semantic web strikes again.

https://landregistry.data.gov.uk/qonsole

UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/23/unix_v4_tape_successfully_recovered/

Crucial early evolutionary step found, imaged, and ... amazingly ... works

<- by me on @theregister

When the King demands they build him a big, Big, BIG ship: "An archaeologist who has studied the remains of the ship in great detail thinks it sank because the gun deck was far too heavy–the result of its having been designed and built by someone with no experience building such a well-armed ship, Chatterjee writes. It didn’t help that the king rushed the building process." https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bizarre-story-vasa-ship-keeps-giving-180964328/

Why do people leave comments on OpenBenches?

I'm still a believer in the promise of Web 2.0. The idea that giving people a curated space to chat produces tiny sparks of magic.

My wife Liz and I have been running the OpenBenches project for about 8 years - it's a crowd-sourced repository of memorial benches. People take a geotagged photo of a bench's plaque, upload it to our site, and we share it with the world. Might sound a bit niche, but we have around thirty-nine thousand benches catalogued from all over the world.

From the start, we had a comment form under each bench. Of course, we pre-moderate any comments. That helps with our Online Safety Act obligations and prevents spam from being published. We don't collect any personal data, to reduce our GDPR exposure. Our comments are self-hosted using the excellent Commentics - which means we don't send people's data off to a 3rd party.

We thought that this would be used to tell us that an inscription was wrong, or if a bench had moved, or something like that.

We were completely wrong!

People use OpenBenches comments for all sorts of things. Of course, there are a few which provide details about the bench itself:

Other provide a little context about the person:

But those sorts of comments are hardly the majority. The comments break down (roughly) into these categories:

I want to know more about this person

I sat on this bench, searched for the inscription and found this site. I want to share my feelings

Thank you for putting a bench here

This has moved me

My heart has broken

I can't visit this bench, but I'm glad someone has shared a photo

Thank you for adding a photo

I don't know the person this bench commemorates, but I want to let them know they're still loved and remembered

That's nice

Hundreds of people sharing connections. Wanting to express their feelings. Understanding the terrible pain of loss and the hope that, someday, someone will think fondly of us.

You can view all the comments on OpenBenches.org.

Ran into a problem in prod?
Just generate a fake cloudflare error page and blame it on them - gives you time to fix.

https://github.com/donlon/cloudflare-error-page

#foss #devops #cloudflare #infosec

Fun conversation between me and @clmarohn of @strongtowns, motivated in part by my complaints about the transit chapter in his "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JziNvY6CxJo

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 The Electoral Commission has published a report on automatic voter registration pilots in three Welsh council areas; overall these seem to have been a striking success.

🗂️ The pilots used sources such as council tax data to identify people not on the register and add them.

📊 14,576 new electors were registered, with very high accuracy and very low opt-out rates.

🏫 A further 1,476 14-15 yr olds were also registered; they will be able to vote when they become 16.

https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/research-reports-and-data/electoral-registration-research/automatic-registration-pilots-evaluation