Very few people like thinking about the fact they will die. But it can prove a substantial administrative headache to loved ones if they don’t know about all of your finances, your passwords, your emails etc. At the same time, you shouldn’t be writing down passwords in any document that could be stolen or seen; it’s bad cybersecurity practice.

I had a problem with my Tor relay last night. For some reason, the application (daemon) started but then after about 5 seconds it stopped listening. The Tor Metrics site was displaying a red button saying my node was unreachable and when I did “sudo ss -ltp” I got nothing. The application literally wasn’t “listening” (in network socket terms). The answer was actually embarrassingly simple.

Among the works of fiction in the feminist canon, few are as celebrated as Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”. This short story, or novella, depending on how you want to define those categories, details the abuse suffered by a woman in the supposed name of mental health, at the whim of her male “carers”. The story is now, as Catherine J. Golden notes, “among the most studied texts in the English-speaking world”. In this piece I

This text is derived from a lecture I gave to first-year undergraduates about a decade ago. It was languishing on my computer and I thought it better to put it out there for general educational benefit, in case it helps anyone starting out with her poetry.

Dark times at the moment. Authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere and censorship regimes become ever more common. None of the material on my blog is particularly sensitive. Some two decades out-of-date information security stuff, posts about English literature, some posts about health, and posts about scholarly communication. It’s not really the kind of stuff that will get me in trouble.

This week, I have started work at Michigan State University, as interim technical lead on the Knowledge Commons project. I'll probably say more about this at some point soon. However, a huge part of onboarding at new digital/software places is getting your head around the stack and trying to get a development environment setup and ready to use.

This week, over Christmas 2024, I have read two pieces about digital preservation: Ian Milligan’s Averting the Digital Dark Age ¹ and Ageh et al. ’s “The Preservation of Knowledge in the Digital Age” for Arcadia. ² It is, in truth, fairly difficult to reconcile these two accounts of the state of digital preservation.

“Content drift” is an important concept for digital preservation and web archiving. Scholarly readers expect to find immutable (“persisted”) content at the resolution endpoint of a DOI. It is a matter of research integrity that research articles should remain the same at the endpoint, as citations can refer to specific textual formulations.

Like most years, a mixed bag for me here. Kidney failure continues to be a truly challenging medical fiasco, with AV fistulas, overnight dialysis, hormone therapies, and much much more. I also continue to feel the severe difficulties of my rheumatoid arthritis, which required a hip replacement in April.

The UK currently has an assisted dying bill going through parliament and I am very conflicted about it. On the one hand, I am a member of DIGNITAS, the organization that supports assisted dying and that runs a “clinic” in Switzerland to which members who are terminally ill can travel to end their lives. I have no desire for the end of my life to be a mess of literally unbearable suffering and nausea, even with palliative care.

People are obsessed with the short-term effects of Covid, prioritising them over the longer-term impacts. “It was just like a minor cold, really”, they say, perhaps not realising that even mild cases of Covid have been shown to cause lasting cognitive impairment. But I also take exception with this comparison to the common cold. Because, for me, a simple cold led to lifelong disability and severe chronic health problems.