I’m involved in starting a housing co-op, and as of today we have a (shitty placeholder) website! 🎉
I wanted to have it hosted by Web Architects because they’re a cool tech co-op doing good things, and also because then I could copy the system that we use over on Corvus Co-op. Jez (who set up the Corvus Co-op website) lent me a hand, and along the way taught me what SSH was, which was a whole lot of fun. I am now unstoppable.
I’m trying to start a housing co-op, and doing some financial planning to try and work out how to make that happen. We want to be a Radical Routes housing co-op, and that means that we need to stick to having our rent be equal or lower than local housing allowance (LHA) which is the amount you get for rent if you’re on benefits. This is pretty rad because it means that a) anyone can be involved in a housing co-ops (not just those in high-paying jobs) and b) it means that the project is lower risk than it might be otherwise - if someone loses their job then theoretically they can still pay rent just fine and the project sails on. However, in London, LHA is not really enough to actually pay rent, because of late-stage capitalism, neoliberalism, and years of conservatives governments. Which makes making the numbers add up for a new housing co-op in London quite hard.
I use logseq most days. It keeps my entire life in (something resembling) order. I rely on it quite heavily. I also find it quite fun.
To make it work for me I’ve set up several default queries. Default queries show their results at the bottom of today’s journal page. You can add them by editting the logseq/config.edn file. Here’s what I’ve got:
This is a live post - I may update it. Check the git history if you want to see what was said in previous versions
I’ve wanted to tell a few people about the tech we’re using for Perennial Housing Co-op (don’t look it up, there’s nothing public yet, but there will be “soon”! ✨ tl;dr I’m part of a group setting up a Radical Routes housing co-op in NE London) recently, because I spent a while working it out and while it’s not perfect I think it’s relatively rad.
Just putting this out there in the vague hope that someone (possibly future me) finds it instead of wasting a whole bunch of time trying to work this out.
To use a different engine for running code in a Quarto document you need to manually set the path to that engine.
Lots of places quote the path for Octave as '/usr/local/opt/octave/bin/octave' or some version of that, but I think that must be what it is on Linux.
And sure, it makes sense that if you’re using Octave (open source), RStudio (open source), and Quarto (open source), you might be on an open source operating system, but I’m not.
So, the path I needed was: C:/Program Files/GNU Octave/Octave-6.1.0/mingw64/bin/octave-cli.exe
I use logseq for my daily note-taking (and for my work!) and I have a template which I have honed over the years. It will continue to evolve, but here’s what it looks like right now.
This week I’m at the Open Science Retreat in the Netherlands. It’s an “unconference” where folks discuss on the first day of the event what their shared interests/passions/frustrations are, form loose groups, and work together for the rest of the week. It tends to be the case that lots of “I’ve been wanting to work on X for ages, but I haven’t had the time/space/resources…“-type projects come up. Last year I started this blog and wrote a blog post about a collaborative knowledge management system that I’d set up - both things that I thought were important/valuable, but that I hadn’t made the time to do during “normal life”.
This year, the project I’m working on is “Research in 2050”.
I blame thank my Turing Way colleague Arielle Bennett for planting the seed of this idea in my brain - they’re working on a paper on this subject currently, though sadly I’ve missed most of the work meetings so far for that project.
The idea has stuck though.
It appeals to me because I believe that we need to imagine futures before they can become reality.
In the Open Science world I think we spend a lot of time thinking about incremental improvements that we might be able to make to our world, but I think there’s value in pushing ourselves to imagine a more distant future.
Today I’m starting something that I’ve been daydreaming about for years. Feeling like I should be doing for years. Today I’m making my work notes public.
Thanks to the support of the e-ReproNim Fellowship I was able to attend the Digital Research Academy’s in-person “Train the Trainer” event in Munich at the start of September, and the e-ReproNim folks asked me to write up my experiences, so I figured I might as well share them here too. This was one of a pair of pilot events (one digital and one in person).
This is a “living” blog post. I will update it as my practice changes. Its history can be found here.
I lost my phone a while back, which sucked. One especially sucky thing was that I didn’t have my Signal chats backed up. Some people like to treat their messages as ephemeral. I don’t. Not my style at all. So I (now) have a backup system that runs automatically every night.
This blog is adapted from an informal talk I gave at the Open Science Retreat. Thanks to those who joined and asked cool questions!
Last summer two things happened in quick succession - the NIH mandated that we stop using paper lab notebooks, and my PI found an issue in some data that that had been collected and pre-processed ~10 years ago.
Something had been done wrong during the preprocessing, but of course the people who had actually performed this preprocessing were long gone, and there were no clear notes on exactly what preprocessing had been performed. My PI spent a great deal of time trawling through archives and old emails to understand what had happened, and everything worked out in the end, but it wasn’t a fun experience for anyone.
And so my PI turned to me and said something along the lines of “Hey Danny, you’re interested in this lab infrastructure stuff, and reproducibility, can you look into something that could replace lab notebooks, and also mean that I never have to do that again?”.
I wrote this blog at the Open Science Retreat. Thanks to the organizers for giving me the time and inspiration to finally get this done!
Yesterday I added a blog to my website, because I wanted to write a blog post. I couldn’t find clear instructions for doing this, and I ended up going down several dead ends, so here’s what worked for me.