A couple of days ago - in light of Mozilla (once again) doubling down in poor decision making - I was saying how it’s a good idea to donate to alternative projects instead, every time Mozilla fails us. But all joking aside, given the state of the world , it’s indeed a good time to support our best shots at maintaining independent software stacks.
A couple of days ago, I stumbled over a Mastodon post by @johl, in which [he shared vimwiki](https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki) as his approach for taking notes in vim. Which immediately piqued my interest, as I have so far been just taking my notes in plain vim without a way of linking them.
For the first half of November, I’ve been in Peru to do some hikes close to Cusco with friends: First, we did a 5 day trek to the Inca site of Choquequirao and back. After a day and a half of rest back in Cusco, we then did the 4-day Inca trail to Machu Picchu as well. Of course, I wanted to use those opportunities to do some surveying and mapping for OpenStreetMap (OSM) along the way as well.
tl;dr: People’s motivations to engage with online citizen science are complex and change over time Apparently, last week iNaturalist released a blog post, demoing their mock-up of how they envision using LLMs to process user-contributed wildlife observation data.
This morning I woke up to the notice that my Garmin watch had now collected enough data to provide me with a Health Status insight - a new beta feature I hadn’t heard about before. Curious, I opened it to see how Garmin approaches making health status predictions – and was greeted with a familiar view.
Reading RSS/Atom feeds as a way to aggregate and keep track of updated news, blogs etc. has been something that has accompanied me for around 20 years by now.
Last weekend was the 21st birthday of OpenStreetMap (OSM), and with some friends we celebrated the occasion with a little mapping party. Our plan was to combine flying drones to collect aerial imagery and collecting street-level imagery with more traditional field mapping. Due to high winds, we mostly ended up with street-level imagery and doing field mapping though, using a variety of tools.
tl;dr: I made a Mastodon Bot that posts updated statistics for the Panoramax federation alongside randomly selected images once a day. Since posting about Panoramax about a year ago, I’ve been an active contributor, uploading around 530,969 360° images taken during trips in Europe and here in Argentina.
In some ways, there has been little news in the iNaturalist ‘GenAI’ story: Beyond some vague posturing towards “going to work on improving ways to get feedback from the community” , saying (but not demonstrating) that they are ‘listening’, and somehow doing some ‘webinar’ at some point in the future, there’s been very little commitment from any iNaturalist staff or leaders.
A couple of days ago, iNaturalist – a citizen science project/platform for observations of living beings in the natural world – announced that they were going to be part of a grant/program of Google to implement generative ‘AI’ (or “GenAI” 1 ) into their tooling.
tl;dr: Inspired by this conversation started by Ethan Marcotte, I’ve gone ahead and added a small link blog to this website too. Instead of having links of interest disappear into the stream of time that is my Mastodon timeline, I thought it would be nice to collect them also here, in a more findable way.