Bassam is a free Arab social network that allows you to join the Fediverse and escape from the dictatorial and oppressive social platform.

It runs on Rebased which is a a Fediverse backend written in Elixir, compatible with the Mastodon API.

I installed the Beeper Android app on my phone and gave it a try. You have to provide an email, fill in the confirmation code sent to it, and then you can choose a username (which will form your Matrix identity @username:beeper.com, although the app never tells you this).

Already at this point I'm starting to get disappointed - I can sort of understand hiding the complexity of Matrix instances from beginners, but no where in the app's preferences/settings could I find the full name of the Matrix account it created for me. Also, you never to get to set a password for the account you just created, meaning you can't use it from other Matrix clients.

The major problem for me is that the app does not let you connect any other Matrix accounts. I already have another Matrix account - the whole point of Beeper is to centralize your chats, so why can't I add it?

Maybe the self-hosted Beeper will let you add more than one Matrix account?

Links and notes

• https://www.beeper.com
• https://old.reddit.com/r/beeper/comments/16kwrrp/how_do_i_use_beeper_in_other_matrix_clients a post in this thread suggests you can request your password from support or something (sounds sketchy to me).
• https://blog.rayberger.org/migrating-matrix-accounts

Nick Buraglio and Brian E. Carpenter have released their comprehensive, continuously revised and edited resource on IPv6: A free and open source IPv6 textbook.
https://blog.apnic.net/2024/10/24/a-free-and-open-source-ipv6-textbook

The book's source is available on Github.

This is what the web is for.
Skip a few news cycles and read yourself.

Via @petergleick@fediscience.org.

Bra läsning för att påminna sig om solens, månens och planeternas rörelse på himlavalvet så som de upplevs från jorden.

Detta utbildningsprogram presenterar himlafenomenen som de ter sig för oss vanliga seende människor. Med ett i huvudsak geocentriskt perspektiv knyter det hela tiden an till vad läsarna direkt kan erfara.

With Python, you can just open a shell and quickly try out some code in a so-called REPL console. Guess what, you can do the same with Ansible. Browse your inventory, and even remote file systems in an interactive shell with ansible-console.

If you have installed Ansible via pip you already have this nifty tool installed.

I have invested some effort into Keycloak, but still not learnt enough about it to manage more than a single-user scenario.

The Authentik licenses look a bit complicated, though?

Via https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1eohsds/best_self_hosted_authentication_solution

Excellent page listing their feeds, and not only their published articles but also separate feeds for submissions and announcements.

Code shared on https://git.scipost.org, although many repos are sparse or have not been updated in years.

They also have their own Mastodon instance, with an account for each field.

All in all, very impressive work by what appears to be primarily Dutch academics.

First heard about it from 4 gravitons.

• https://scholar.social/@egonw@social.edu.nl/111669211425459067

Thanks to git log -1 it is trivial to view the latest commit in a repo, and combined with find ... -exec ... we can easily do that for multiple repos at once (for example see my commits bash function).

Turns out doing the same for the earliest commit in each repo is not at all trivial. Here is my approach (it should be said up-front that it's not pretty). But I wanted to get a handle on when I started working on some repos, and this pulled out the data I needed without having to do it manually for each individual repo.

taha@asks2:/media/bay/taha/projects/ansible/pub/roles
$ find . -maxdepth 2 -name ".git" -exec sh -c "git -C {} --no-pager log --all --pretty=format:\"%cs %h%d %s [%cn]\" | tail -n1" \; -exec printf " %s\n" {} \; | sort -n
2021-03-14 02506d4 Initial commit [taha] ./texlive/.git
2021-03-14 14ddd9a Initial commit [taha] ./desktop-tools/.git
2021-03-14 2bfe5bc Initial commit [taha] ./R/.git
2021-03-15 0c2deda Initial commit [taha] ./calibre-web/.git
2021-04-02 7a2bdb2 Initial commit [taha] ./iriun-webcam/.git
2021-04-13 167ef2d First commit [taha@asks2] ./shaarli/.git
2021-05-28 ca70e06 Initial commit [taha] ./wallabag/.git
2021-06-09 3d4891e Initial commit [taha] ./lxd-server/.git

The directory roles contains a bunch of git repos (and possibly also a few folders that are not repos, which we exclude from find with -name ".git". Then for each repo, we list all commits (across all branches) using a custom format but then, importantly, only showing the last one which is the earliest commit.
To be able to tail this git command (and not the entire find command) we need to put it inside sh -c ....
Then we use a second exec statement to append the current directory name (so we can orient ourselves in the output) and then sort the entirety on the output (which thanks to our custom git format lists the commit date in the first column). Note that piping strips the colour from the git output, so no need to set colours in our pretty-format.

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51376361/getting-commit-history-from-multiple-repositories-for-some-period
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5188914/how-to-show-the-first-commit-by-git-log (this approach with git rev-list --max-parents did not work in my case, not sure why)
• https://andrewrea.co.uk/posts/git-log-over-multiple-repos
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50882822/view-logs-of-multiple-git-repositories
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6712423/how-do-i-count-the-number-of-commits-made-in-to-all-repos-hosted-by-gitosis-on-m
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49388069/what-does-git-log-1-do
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/307015/how-do-i-include-a-pipe-in-my-linux-find-exec-command
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1371261/get-current-directory-or-folder-name-without-the-full-path

The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and preprints crawled from the World Wide Web.

Month-by-month moonsighting reports from around the world.

• Signal app and protocol (end-to-end encrypted by default, but centralized server, no federation)
• Matrix protocol (end-to-end encrypted, decentralized, federated, user gets to choose app to use)
• Delta Chat (I am not sure about this one, I know too little at the moment)
• Simplex Chat

Medfarm Play är en videoportal som skapats i samarbete mellan pedagoger och MedfarmDoIT.
Här kan du hitta tusetals undervisningsfilmer, många av dem indelade i ämnesspecifika kanaler.

Video recordings on many subjects from Uppsala University, such as Nobel lectures, doctoral conferment ceremonies, etc. Use the search function or browse the channels.

Let's say you are looking for old Ansible code dealing with multiple distros (meaning multiple files in the ./vars/ directory) to draw inspiration from. How can we quickly identify the roles with vars directories containing more than a single file?

$ cd /media/bay/taha/projects/ansible && find . -not -path "*/archived/*" -not -path "*/testing/*" -path "*/vars/*" -printf "%h\n" | sort | uniq -d && cd $OLDPWD
./pub/roles/apache/vars
./pub/roles/common-systools/vars
./pub/roles/desktop-environment/vars
./pub/roles/digikam/vars
./pub/roles/graphics-driver-nvidia/vars
./pub/roles/php/vars
./pub/roles/php-versions/vars
./pub/roles/python2/vars
./pub/roles/python3/vars
./pub/roles/R/vars
./pub/roles/sioyek-pdf/vars
./pub/roles/wallabag/vars

All of the returned paths indeed contain at least two files.
Note how we limited find to only directories named vars.

• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/396826/directories-with-two-or-more-files
• https://superuser.com/questions/899347/find-directories-that-contain-more-than-one-file-of-the-same-extension

The Research Software Directory is designed to show the impact research software has on research and society. We stimulate the reuse of research software and encourage proper citation of research software to ensure researchers and RSEs get credit for their work.

Arabic language library for Python, provides basic functions to manipulate Arabic letters and text

Note to self: please come back to this post with links on R, its packages and related resources.

Grammar of graphics

• https://github.com/tidyverse/ggplot2
• https://exts.ggplot2.tidyverse.org/gallery community-maintained list of extensions

Integration with reference manager Zotero

• https://github.com/oeysan/c2z (manipulate your Zotero collections, items from R; can be integrated with other tools such as cronR, mailR, or even HomeAssistant)

PDF tools

• https://ropensci.org/blog/2016/03/01/pdftools-and-jeroen (pdftools - A fast and portable PDF extractor)

Integration with GPG

• https://ropensci.org/technotes/2016/10/19/gpg-release (Encryption and Digital Signatures in R using GPG)

Web scraping

• https://blog.rsquaredacademy.com/web-scraping Introduction to web scraping with rvest, 2019
• https://www.brodrigues.co/blog/2018-11-01-nethack Scraping with rvest and building a data package, 2018
• My own package periodicdata uses rvest to create a data package

Email from R

• https://github.com/rstudio/blastula send great-looking HTML email messages from R
• https://github.com/datawookie/emayili send email messages from R
• https://github.com/rpremraj/mailR utility to send emails from R

Integration with MS Office (yes, yes, I know...)

• https://ardata-fr.github.io/officeverse
• https://github.com/davidgohel/officer
• https://github.com/davidgohel/flextable

Interfacing with Google Docs

• https://googlesheets4.tidyverse.org

Resources

• https://emilyriederer.netlify.app/post/team-of-packages (post of Emily Riederer's rstudio::global 2020 talk)
• https://indrajeetpatil.github.io/awesome-r-pkgtools Awesome R Package Development Tools, compiled by Indrajeet Patil, 2024
• https://win-vector.com/2017/02/05/evolving-r-tools-and-practices John Mount, 2017
• https://github.com/nanxstats/awesome-shiny-extensions
• https://zenodo.org/record/7023492#.YwnwHuxBxhH R from Zero to Hero, slides from talk by Batool Almarzouq (in Arabic)

Tools to consider

• https://alexioannides.com/2016/11/02/asynchronous-and-distributed-programming-in-r-with-the-future-package (the futures package: distributed computation, non-blocking async input/output, and more)
• https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/geomtextpath/vignettes/geomtextpath.html

The Open Knowledge Network connects specialists of the open movement and promotes them through the Open Knowledge Global Directory.

CKAN is an open-source DMS (data management system) for powering data hubs and data portals. CKAN makes it easy to publish, share and use data.

CKAN is a free open source Data Management System (DMS) to build open data portals, and its code is held in trust by the Open Knowledge Foundation.

• Open Knowledge Foundation joins the Digital Public Goods Alliance
• Related Shaarli post