Happy new 2026 everyone! I've had a wonderful journey through Udaipur and the lake palaces, and am currently in Vijayawada exploring my ancestral village for the next few days. I've caught up on some reading, so here are my book thoughts (and podcasts for the first time) from the past year!

How much time do you spend performing various activities? In 2022, I spent 506 hours answering email, or 63 full work-day’s worth of time. At that point, my reading for pleasure had dropped to virtually nil and I just thought: this is not how I want to spend my time. After a radical reorganization of my life and work, I wanted to see how well I have done this year.

Here are the books I read in 2025. My goals for the year were to get some more variety, and I think I managed that.

In this post I’ll use R to recap my running data from 2025. Previous round-ups are here (2021, 2022, 2023, not sure why I didn’t post one for 2024…). I had a goal of running a total distance of 3650 km in 2025.

Sandwich compounds are the colloquial term used for molecules where a metal atom such as an iron dication is “sandwiched” between two carbon-based rings as ligands, most commonly cyclopentadienyl anion (the “bread”) as in e.g. Ferrocene – a molecule first discovered in 1951.

Do it yourself. I don’t mean that as a descriptive phrase. It’s a complete sentence, in the imperative. Do it yourself. Pick up the pencil, pen, stylus, paintbrush, airbrush, mouse, keyboard, scissors, rolling  pin, hammer, drill, wrench, saw, welding torch, sewing needle, instrument, guitar pick, pickaxe, shovel, dumbbell, jump rope, paddle, piton, hiking pole.

Part 3 in a series of posts going back 14 years

Jan. 2026Ryan Gibb. Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) .

For years, the Invenio community has been known for powerful open-source repository solutions - especially InvenioRDM. But many institutions need more than a repository: they need a modern, flexible platform that also supports collections, loans, acquisitions, and patron services.

Shadow libraries, that is, illegal massive repositories of books of all kinds, are of course prone to takedowns by police and disappearance from the internet. In recent days, one of the most prominent shadow libraries, Library Genesis (libgen), was taken down and its archive removed from public consumption.

2025 is gone, bringing with it another opportunity to share some highlights from a warehouse worker’s swing at studying our living history a sheaf of genome graphs and shelves full of protein-forms at a time.