Welcome to Simon’s Blog

This Blog is about a variety of topics that I’m interested in. My top posts are listed below. I also do regular posts on Audiobooks I’ve listened to and notes from conferences I attend.

The RSS for this site is here , you can subscribe to using a RSS reader such as NewsBlur

Transport in Auckland

Tech

Books and Movies

Misc

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Audiobooks – January 2025

Hidden in the Heavens: How the Kepler Mission’s Quest for New Planets Changed How We View Our Own by Jason Steffen

A review of the Kepler mission. I Found it very interesting and goes into interesting but accessible detail 4/5

Shake It Up, Baby! – The Rise of Beatlemania and the Mayhem of 1963 by Ken McNab

The year the Beatles when from obscure to megastars via a crazy number of songs, concerts and events. An excellent read even for non-fans 4/5

Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood by Ed Zwick

Talks about his career and the mechanics of directing. The good and bad experiences with big movies and named stars. Fun and interesting. 4/5

Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham

A mostly person-centric story of the Challenger Disaster. Follows the astronauts and other characters but still covers the tech well. 4/5

My Scoring System

  • 5/5 = Brilliant, top 5 book of the year
  • 4/5 = Above average, strongly recommend
  • 3/5 = Average. in the middle 70% of books I read
  • 2/5 = Disappointing
  • 1/5 = Did not like at all
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OzMoot 2025 – Day 3 – Afternoon

Corey’s Poetry Dice-Roll Activity

  • First Poem – Athelas
    When the black breath blows
    and death’s shadow grows
    and all lights pass,
    come athelas! come athelas!
    Life to the dying
    In the king’s hand lying!
  • Second Poem – Chip the Glasses
    • The First Tolkien poem most people ever skip

      Chip the glasses and crack the plates!
      Blunt the knives and bend the forks!
      That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates—
      Smash the bottles and burn the corks!

      Cut the cloth and tread on the fat!
      Pour the milk on the pantry floor!
      Leave the bones on the bedroom mat!
      Splash the wine on every door!

      Dump the crocks in a boiling bowl;
      Pound them up with a thumping pole;
      And when you’ve finished if any are whole,
      Send them down the hall to roll!

      That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates!
      So, carefully! carefully with the plates!
  • 3rd Poem – The Hoard

    When the moon was new and the sun young
    of silver and gold the gods sung:
    in the green grass they silver spilled,
    and the white waters they with gold filled.
    Ere the pit was dug or Hell yawned,
    ere dwarf was bred or dragon spawned,
    there were Elves of old, and strong spells
    under green hills in hollow dells
    they sang as they wrought many fair things,
    and the bright crowns of the Elf-kings.
    But their doom fell, and their song waned,
    by iron hewn and by steel chained.
    Greed that sang not, nor with mouth smiled,
    in dark holes their wealth piled,
    graven silver and carven gold:
    over Elvenhome the shadow rolled.

    plus more verses
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OzMoot 2025 – Day 3 – Morning

Corey Olsen Keynote Address

  • The Music of Words: Tolkien and Hip-Hop
  • I am not the “Hip-Hop Professor”
  • Poetry as an active literary for died in the 20th century – except here
  • Traditional Poetry: A framework vs the words you are saying. Rhythm and Rhyme
  • Example Dr Seuss – Starts with a perfect rhyme but there he varies it at the end and then later last line is a big twist
  • Origin DJ + MC in Harlem 70s street parties
    • Rhythm+Rhyme in a musical context
    • Has an actual beat and music
  • Run DMC – It’s like That
    • Preamble
      • The line breaks in printed lyrics match the meter
      • This is rarely true with normal printed lyrics
      • They are often also inaccurate
    • Review
      • The shape and packing is not unlike a normal song
      • But the music of the piece is entirely spoken words
    • Rhyme Scheme
      • Beats – beat 3 is where all rhymes are
      • “Thats the way it is” never rhymes with anything. Because the point of a song is that things are wrong
  • Redman: “Time 4 Sumaksion”
    • Beat 1 and 3 are the primary beats
    • Diagram – Blue is primary
  • Rakim: Guess Who’s back?
    • One of the few hiphop artists who does multi-syllabic rhyme
    • Much less rigid, less stuff on the 3rd beat
    • Signals change to rhyme ahead of time
    • Parody the “Simplicity of what Djs do”
    • The hip-hop version on enjambment
  • Tech N9in: Devil Boy
    • Empty first beat ( until the last time )
    • “god i ly” three syllable word
    • Lots of alliteration
    • Then transitions to new pattern for second half of the verse
  • Eminem: “Lose Yourself”
    • One of the most perfect and extraordinary passages of poetry in the English Language
    • “sweater and sweaty” don’t rhyme 100% but that isn’t important
    • Rhyme matches the narrative ( where is gets stuck in front of the crowd )
    • Main bit: 3 syllable rhyme at end of most lines ( gravity, rabbit he ) and separate 3 syllable rhyme at the start of each line.
    • ..and he keeps the narrative which varying the flow
    • In the chorus everybody dances . Transitions in simpler 1-2 syllable rhymes
  • Eminem: Without Me
  • Eminem: Lock it up
  • Eminem: Untitled
    • Raps in 6/8 measure (unlike 99% of RAP is in 4/4)
  • Eminem: Venom
  • Eminem: Godzilla
    • Extremely fast bit
    • Speed up? But has been performed live at similar space
  • Joyner Lucas: From ‘Lucky You’
  • “This is going to be quick, we’re just going to talk about two Tolkien Poems”
  • Tolkien: Gimli’s Song
    • Very Regular. Should be boring
    • But it isn’t boring, why?
    • The 3rd dimension of this poem is alliteration
    • Tolkien sees d/t and y/w as cousins in rhyming (see Tengwar )
    • Does a melody in the alliteration on top of the rhyme
    • Varies things at the end to indicate a closing (and pump up the final line)
  • Does he do this elsewhere, pick another poem
  • Tolkien: Boromir’s Lament
    • This poem is a more complicated meter and is more complex overall
    • Alliteration: W’s form the dominate theme
    • n’s and m’s also
  • Q: What Literature influenced early rappers?
    • Possibly just emerged and influenced each other
  • Q: Public Enemy?
    • Listened to a lot of that. And commentary on them

Presentation: Sam Lewis – The Elves and the Celts: Elvish Poetry in ‘The Hobbit’

  • Big disclaimer at start.
  • Tolkien’s Faerie
    • Mythology for England / Britain
    • But the Celts were already there
  • Creating a Celtic Britain
    • 1760 onwards , sometimes manufactured
    • Anglo-Saxon = Modern . Celt = mythical, stone-age, edge of world
    • Tolkien’s view
      • ‘The wild incalculable poetic Celt”
      • co-inhabitants of the same island
  • Teutonic and Celtic in ‘The Hobbit”
    • Three poems
  • The Withered Health
    • Dwarf poem from Queer Lodgings in The Hobbit
    • wind is usually interpreted as representing the swarves and/or providence/fate
  • O! What are you doing?
  • The Dragon has Withered
  • Talk a bit fast for me too keep up with notes

Presentation: Lauren Brand – The Music of Nimrodel

  • As the company enter Lothlorien they come across the stream the Nimrodel
  • How much music in Middle earth relates to fresh water bodies?
  • Mapped up occurances of references to bodies of water and looked for songs/music and other descriptive words
    • 1216 occurrences
    • 621 no description
    • 123 a sound
    • 231 visual description
    • 53 touch
    • 20 taste
    • 22 smell
  • Sound comes and goes in various stages. Some waters like the Brandywine is described
  • Mordor has little water but Sam and Frodo are obsessed with it’s lack so lot of descriptions
  • Where is is the music of waters?
    • “a dream of music that turns into running water”
    • “a voice singing mingled with the sound of water”
  • Other noisy places
    • Gate stream “trickling” , “a swish followed by a plop”
    • “A mighty roaring mingled with a deep throbing boom”
    • “Voice of Morgalduin … seemed cold and cruel”
  • Spirit of the River is common
    • Like to drag people underwater and drown them
    • Jenny Greenteeth
  • Goldberry
  • Nimrodel
  • Others
    • Raros
    • Mirrormere
    • Galadriel’s Mirror
  • In conclusion, listen to the sounds around you especially the sounds of waters
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OzMoot 2025 – Day 2 – Afternoon

Presentation: Cassidy Winter – Invertebrates in the Works of Tolkien and the Societal Impact of Those Portrayals

  • Hypotheses
    • Shelob = Hobbit
    • If Invertebrates written as evil by Tolkien
  • What is an Invertebrate?
  • Ungoliant
    • Takes the form of a Spider
  • Beorn’s Giant Bees
  • Mirkwood Spiders
  • Were-worms
  • Shortcut to mushroom: Spider, Centipede, Earthworms
  • Neekerbreekers
  • Morgul Flowers and Flies(?)
  • Sheblob – Spider
  • Butterflies
  • Gwaihir’s Moth pal – Film only
  • Ants, Glowworms, snails
  • Compiled list of all animal entries in Tolkien
  • Invertebrate by clade and alignment
  • Spiders mostly bad, butterflies mostly good
  • Stats
    • Horses good
    • Reptiles evil
    • invertebrates up in air
  • Horses have a capacity for evil matched only by Humans in my opinion

Presentation: Ilana Mushin – Pride and Prejudice

  • What does Tolkien mean by Pride / Proud?
    • “proud and fair” in the dead marshes
    • “pride and dispair” Gandalf to Denothor
  • Pride is French word with positives connotations
    • Once in Old English it started to become negative (haughty, overbearing)
    • Middle-English – Gets back some positive meanings
  • The Grammar of Pride / Proud
    • To complex for me to summarize
  • Around 30% uses were positive
  • Negative 37%
  • 33% not clear if it positive or negative
  • Who is proud?
    • Saruman
    • Individual Elves (but sometimes Noldor)
    • Denethor
    • Folk of Gondor
    • Shadowfax
    • Turin
  • Sauron and Morgoth are not described has having pride
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OzMoot 2025 – Day 2 – Morning

Presentation: Jordan Rannells – Exploring the Legendarium in 3D Audio

  • Created a 3D Audio experience for the Lord of the rings. Ambient sounds and music lines of the the Williams and Serkis audiobooks of the Lord of The Rings
  • Demo with Farmer Maggot and the Hobbits riding in his cart. Showing the way different channels are used
  • Demo from start of the Hobbit
  • People who know the stories can just listen to the soundscape and if the know the story well they can guess where they are without the actual audiobook words
  • So Far Hobbit, LoTR, First Happy Potter and Wheel of Time
  • Working on the Silmarillion. This is got a lot more music since Ambient is not so useful since words don’t usually directly describe things happening in real time.
  • Also working on more Wheel of Time and Tolkien “The Three Great Tales”
  • Origin of project
    • Started exclusively listening to audiobooks
    • Heard the Phil Dragash version
    • Listened to Star Wars versions but though they didn’t do as much music as liked
    • Heard some dramatizations and wanted to do with the full full text
    • Technology improved so multi-channels via headphones worked
  • Most of the Ambient sounds came from libraries but created some himself

Presentation: Julian Barr – World Breaker

  • Reading from his new Epic Fantasy Novel
  • Inspired by Aus bushfires and Covid lockdowns
  • Got comfort from old Fantasy Books
  • “Heroes still exist and bad times don’t last forever”
  • Rediscovered like of fairy-tales
  • Mashing fairy-tales with high-fantasy
  • Julian did a longing reading from the book
  • Maps? – Country fairly small but quite detailed
  • Languages? – No constructed languages in book
  • Please expand on Origins
    • Inspired by Australian communities surviving wildfires
    • 21st century seems to require a lot of resilience
    • Worried especially younger people despairing about the future
    • But people are more adaptable than many give credit for
    • Series says ordinary heroes still exist and can overcome
  • Planned for 3+ in series . But working on other projects too

Presentation: Stephen Vrettos – The Sound of Silver

  • Sliver is a motif in Legendarium
  • The sound of the word works will in hhrase
  • Sounds of silver: Soft tone
    • Movement of water
  • Gold in middle earth is often associated with evil
  • Water in a spring is described as “falling silver”
  • “murmuring of a silver stream”
  • “sheer, heart-piercing silver, rang her voice”
  • Brighter high-pitched sound than gold
  • Lots and lots of examples. I wasn’t able to keep up.
  • Goldberry – name is Gold, associated with Silver?
    • But her name mostly comes from Water Lilies
    • Probably the colour of the rushes
  • Also the Gold-Substance is partially seperate from Gold-Colour
  • Some discussion on the sound of Mithril
    • silver is bells, mithril is Tubular Bells

Additional question for morning Speakers

  • Some more discussion about Silver and other metals
  • Julian talked a lot about apples trees in the extract he read and how apples trees are big in mythology

Discussion Panel: Anthony Lawther, Phillip Menzies and Elizabeth (Dizzy) Rodrigues-Schifter – Exploring Espressione in “Exploring the Lord of the Rings”

  • Panel Discussion
  • Posted version of the Exploring the Lord of the Rings theme
  • Outlines who they started joining listening to the podcast
  • Gave an overview of the podcast and what it is about
  • “My Wife says: Can you put Corey on when we are in Bed so she can fall asleep”
  • Talks above favorite bits of the podcast. eg exactly where Frodo was stabbed, the Wargs
  • Poems each liked
    • Dizzy – Road goes ever on
    • Phil – I sit beside the Fire
    • Anthony – Gimli’s song about Durin
      • Giant Spreadsheet, showing stresses of words etc
      • Questions about listening to the podcast, how much is about the book and how much other stuff.

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OzMoot 2025 – Day 1

Welcome

  • In the grey area between fan convention and academic conference

Cover Versions: Exploring Adaptation Through Concepts of Legendarium Resonance by Louise Mathieson

  • Which cover of the song “Over the Rainbow” do you like?
  • People tend toward the original being best
  • For Tolkien people have trouble even agreeing what is “canon”
  • People criticise adaptations and what they change
  • Borrow from music and “the cover version”
    • Echos, resonance, harmony
  • Repetition without replication
    • Make the text or song ones own
  • A cover version of a new interpretation of an existing musical work
  • Difference between a cover version and a performance
    • Is a performance always trying to be identical?
  • Hetrocoosm – an adaption of an entire story world rather than a single story
  • The Hobbit Trilogy
    • Takes a children’s song and reconstructs as a complicated 3-part symphony
  • Reconstruction of rhythmic elements and driven by temporal elements
  • Harmonic and Dramatic deployment of consonance and dissonance
  • The Language of a Cover Version is useful for examining Tolkien Adaptations

John Sangster: Australian Jazz Composer and Lord of the Rings by Andrew Johnson

  • Born in Melbourne . 1928-1995
  • Recorded 4 double albums about Middle Earth between 1974-78
  • Overview of Career
    • Traveled to Europe, learned the drums on the way over on the boat
    • Learnt a lot over there and in US
    • Came back to Australia. Was on TV regularly in various roles. Did music for various shows (eg Hanna Barbarra)
    • Musical director of ‘Hair” musical in Australia
    • Very busy with TV during day, gigs in evenings
  • Tolkien
    • Introduced in 1958
    • Thought there should be more musical and adaptations of the stories
    • The Hobbit Suite – 1973
      • Sold well and had residuals from cartoon music. Gave him some time
    • Released “Lord of the Rings” in 1974. Very successful . Jazz
    • Created 16 more tracks and released as Volume 2 in 1975
    • Volume 3 in 1976
    • Lots of amusing songs titles
    • Two additional Albums with music
  • Music reissued following Jackson LOTR movies
  • Total seven hours of music
  • No issues with Tolkien Estate at the time
  • The album covers
  • Tracks for albums are listed here and nearby pages

Presentation: Phillip Menzies – The Words and Magic of Music in Rings of Power

  • Explanation of various bits of music in the Rings of Power
  • Themes from locations like Valinor
  • Themes for People like Galadriel ( one of the most common on the show)
    • Galadriel also has a second theme that hasn’t been heard in the show yet
  • Sauron’s theme. Ostinato
  • See the S1 Prologue scene (with young Galadriel’s boat) has some of Sauron’s theme
    • The Boy with Red Head might be a Sauron equivalent (or even him)
    • Red Hair in the series is often linked to evil
  • Had to skip the music in the Anatar revel in S2 due to time
  • What does Magic sound like?
    • Examples
  • The Stranger
    • Lots of hooks in with the Magic music. Like the magic is part of him
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Everything Open 2025 – Day 3 – Afternoon

tips to build and repair empathy with other teams by Cait Macleod

  • Consultant so often works with different teams
  • Tips
  • Signs
    • New to a Team and you notice weirdness
    • Feeling stressed or frustrated
  • Observe
    • Team contexts (eg ops vs dev)
    • Common pain points.
    • Misunderstandings
      • Defensiveness – maybe something else is going on
    • self-awareness
  • Influence
    • Working relationships with individuals
    • Giving Feedback – situation + behavior + impact
    • Challenge or Correct behavour
    • Restructure Interactions
    • Structural Change

I come to bury Ansible, not to praise it! by Daryl Tester

  • Ansible
    • A set of tools doing Infrastructure as Code
    • Runs a Domain Specific Language
    • Agentless
    • Idempotent
    • Inventories, Playbooks, facts, state based
  • Whats my beef with Ansible
    • Small Peeves
      • Transit python agent rather than true agentless
      • Lots of ssh sessions
    • Larger Peeves
      • Cognitive Overload with edge cases with launguage
      • YAML is difficult to work with. Lots of problems
      • Complexity of Variable precidence
      • Also – Global vars everywhere, lack of complex data structures, nested looping, blocks
  • Can we do better?
    • Found I was sometimes bypassing Ansible to work with the direct python. But hard for others to understand
  • Pyinfra
    • Inventories and deploys in python
    • Facts are loaded on demand
    • Requires a posix-ish shell at the other end
    • connectors are how we talk to a managed node ( ssh most common )
    • can run facts/operations from the command line
    • facts/operations are easily written/extended
  • Mode of Operation
    • “run” the inventory – single remote command ssh session
    • connects to hosts
  • On person project
    • Some others patching
    • Version 3 recently out
  • Demo

Lightning Talks

  • OER Collective
    • oercollective.caul.edu.au
    • Space to public Open Textbooks
    • Community, Grants, Professional development
    • Over 50 Open Books published. Creative Commons Licensed, Various formats besides just text
    • Have a talk to your librarian to find if OER Collective is the thing for you
  • Disabled Data Sovereignty
    • Just say “disabled” . Word is okay
    • Against “Data Harms”
    • Disability-justice Informed
    • Ability is a temporary privilege
  • Run a Conference
    • A brief history of the conference.
    • Wasn’t called Linux.conf.au at the start
    • Lots of changes. It evolves
    • Please run a conference, start small
  • tax-ato
    • Update since announced in 2023
    • A personal income tax library in Haskell for Australians
    • Lots of updated features
    • Bugs, feature requests and patches welcome
  • Quirkey Keyboard update
    • Hard to update everybody because they are all use different social media spaces
    • Use blogs, email cause searchable and open to everyone
  • Our purpose and make sure thats what the system does
  • OS solutions to protect daughter’s online browsing habits
    • Education
    • Content Filtering
    • Discussion and Verification
    • Only 7 so higher level of watching than older kids
    • Pi-hole filtering
    • Browser History
    • Browser policies
    • App pulls browsing history and sends to discourd every 5 minutes. Prometheus Metrics
  • How to Program Human Beings
    • I am course talking about Scottish Country Dancing
  • QMK Keyboard
    • Lots of magical macros
  • ipv6
    • No NAT, No DNAT
  • Quadlet – Running containers via systemd
    • included with podman
    • Does all sorts of cool stuff
    • Looks just like another systemd service
  • Blue Hackers
    • In recent years added neuro-diversity – ASD, ADHD, Bipolar 1 and II, etc
    • Also plugging Sunshine Coast Security Conference in mid-2025
  • A quick reminder about Gender
    • Not the same as Sex
    • Could mean several things
    • Lots of non-traditional genders
    • Can change
    • The GenderBread Person – www.genderbread.org
    • Lots of things only sorta connected
    • Gender question should be a text field

Conference Close

  • Thanks everybody
  • If you are keen to run your own conference ( eg EO 2026) contact the council
  • Pycon Au 2025 coming later this year
  • DrupalSouth Melbourne in March 2025
  • Kiwipycon in November 2025
  • DDD Melboune 2025 – 22 Feb – Dev conference
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Everything Open 2025 – Day 3 – Morning

You’ve been laid off. Now what? by Mike Jang

  • Author is older
    • Doesn’t advertise age
    • Limits Linkedin to more recent jobs
    • Sees reaction when potential employers see his age
  • Empathy for the Hiring Company
    • What do they want, what are they looking for?
  • 11 Steps after a layoff
    • Negotiate your layoff – eg in US extended medical insurance. From a different budget. The laptop
    • Applying for Unemployment
    • Regain Focus – Accept the job is going and focus on next step
      • Get over your anger. It shows up in Interviews
    • Setup a git repo with resume, stuff you are proud, samples, other professional stuff
      • Clone and customize repo per job potentially
      • Maybe a professional website
      • The git profile is not enough
      • Show you domain expertise – k8s, cicd – say what you have actually done
    • Don’t just ask for help
      • “Reaching out to my network”
      • Be credible – don’t say you “love the company that laid you off”
      • Add a headline with what your expertise do
      • Describe expertise and create posts about them
      • A good linkedin recommendations especially from company that laid you off is good
      • Craft recommendation for others to sign. Offer to write in return
      • Followup posts
      • Elevator pitch. Remind you contacts (cause contacts might only vaguely remember you)
      • Empathy for your contacts, they want to know what to say
      • Laid off groups: common ground
      • Chat groups. Slack, discord. Maybe don’t include those still with your ex-employer. Alumni groups ( job posts, referrals )
      • Social Media – Shares Solutions, Endorse others. Don’t abuse companies or people/groups.
    • Finding a Hiring Manger
      • Target a company. Check see any contacts on Linkedin that work there or 2nd level contacts that do.
    • Customize the Application
      • Match the job description
      • Customize your resume
      • Include a cover letter
      • 4-8 hours / company
      • If the company does open source then contribute to their OS
      • Don’t – No Generic Resumes
      • Link to portfilio and domain knowledge
    • Share your schedule
      • Set up a calendar (you can share a calendar, but block off some time for other other stuff and to show you are busy)
    • Show what you can do – When you should do extra
    • Prepare for the interview
      • Review all your stuff from above
      • Your stories, your portfilio
      • A closing statement, like an elevator pitch with stuff from the interview. Makes it easy for interviewer to prepare their report
      • Followup and thank
      • Help the Interviewer remember you. Followup and remind something postive from interview. But don’t nag after that
    • Negotiate an offer
  • Non-Traditional Searches
    • Specialty Groups – OWASP, Y-Combinator
  • Remember the Empathy
    • They want to solve problems. Show them you can solve those problems.
    • Like your elevator pitch.

Modularisation of Open-Hardware to Tackle the Digital Winter by Paul Gardner-Stephen

  • Mega65 Project
  • nlnet Foundation – Funded from the EU and in turn fund Open Source projects
  • Digital Winter
    • What happens when our ability to build open hardware systems is broken?
    • Supply Chain Disruption
    • Regulatory Capture
      • Especially in Radio frequency space
    • Conflict or social unrest
    • Technology Passes Complexity Event Horizon
      • Already at there for chips
        • Protocol complexity for something like a web-browser
  • If we want to make systems that can survive a digital winter
    • Needs to be simple enough to implement the software
    • Hardware needs to be at least simple enough to salvage parts for bad units
  • Software
    • Simply enough to maintain and have a smaller attack surface
    • But enough complexity to be useful
    • Cut out dependencies
    • Cut out complexity and uneeded feature
    • Graceful degradation if offline or with lower resources
    • If device is small enough ( eg 64 MB of RAM) there is less room for the malware to hide
    • Browser in 32KB ( could be smaller if was in assembler )
  • Previous Board was big
    • Took long time to iterate a new design. Lots to redo each cycle
  • Module System Design Criteria
    • Large PAD size
    • Unambiguous orientation and placement
    • No sharp protrusions so easy to stack boards togeather
    • Relatively small
  • Decisions
    • Half-round castellated Pins
    • Easy to attache and unattached boards from each other as you soldier.
    • Can add glitter to attached modules so tamper obvious
  • Next
    • Design and fabricate various modules
    • Assemble and test
    • Design and fabricate simple case
  • What you can do for your projects
    • Offline functionality
    • Segregate your subsystems
    • Energy and Comms sovereignty
    • Simple 80% alternatives / fall-back modes
    • Fell free to help with our project.
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Everything Open 2025 – Day 2 – Afternoon

I skipped a couple of talks to do Hallway track and other stuff

Koha – not your average library system by Aleisha Amohia

  • Name because software was made open source as a gift to the community
  • Started in 1999
  • First fully web-based opensource library system
  • Bugs and external patches soon after
  • Customizable and Configurable
  • Used in 18,000+ libraries
  • It is just a big database
    • Can be used as not just a library system
    • Can be used to catalog other stuff at organisations other than libraries like documents
  • Configurable via CSS, fonts, languages, CMS, feature toggles, etc
  • Customisable views for each branch are possible
  • Special Beyond the code
    • Offline circulation
    • Supports non-ascii characters
    • Translation capability
  • Is it harder to find people to work on stuff since it is writter in perl which is effectively a legacy language? – Has a good onboarding and support for devs and things still work
  • What are challengers with it being open source? –
    • People worry about quality of OSS. Fix: Good robust quality procedures
    • Think it is free – Have good support that is worth paying for
    • DB backend – MySQL and MariaDB

The circle of life: The Digital Skills GitBook project by Sara King

  • Working on project for last 5 years that is in the process of winding up
  • tinyurl.com/5539zzpx <- more information
  • Starting early 2019
  • 5 years later project is coming to the end of a natural cycle
  • Context
    • Group of 60 libraries looking for projects – CAUL Digital Librarians
    • Is there a book that teaches modern not-quite-technical computer skills?
  • With Pandemic lockdowns everybody started working from home
  • Why Gitbook?
    • “Book” is in the term helped
    • Similar project using github etc
    • CAUL eventually went Pressbooks, but not till later
    • Also qualified for free version
    • Learning git was a useful thing
  • Did the community really need this? – Wasn’t checked in detail, but seemed a cool idea
  • Happened at start of pandemic
    • Everyone online
    • Supportive community was good at start of pandemic
  • Took some courses in git and other tools
  • Did a prototype book on another subject to get the hang of the tech
  • “Gave ourselves permission to not know what we were doing”
  • Created chapters of the books to give outline
    • Each Chapter had 3 levels of knowledge in it. Novice, proficient, advanced
  • Went public in late-2021
  • Also did code of conduct, license, contributions guidelines
  • Told people about it via various methods
  • Worked to get people to contribute ad-hoc
  • But didn’t get the amount of contributions they were expecting
  • In 2023 University libraries having problems, budgets shrinking etc
    • People leaving or too busy
    • Some used experience on the project to get new more technical jobs
  • No new people joining to replace those leaving
  • 2025 reflecting on the project
  • Process and product are different
  • We equated enthusiastic about the idea and the process. But didn’t join in or wasn’t super into the product
  • Not shared a lot or got many hits
  • Goal of training people to create stuff was a big success
  • People gained lots of confidence with new tech
  • Support of CAUL was great, but no longer availbale
  • Next? – If people like the process maybe we should talk about that
  • Create a roadmap for other projects
  • Hand it over to somebody else? Doesn’t seem to be interest
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Everything Open 2025 – Day 2 – Morning

Skill Trees: Gamifying The Hard Things by Steph Piper

  • A list of skills
  • Each area has a series of skills that can be colored in.
  • Design
    • Hexagons are good
    • Can be done in any order, hard to connect meaningfully
    • Simple, flexable milestones
  • Reception
    • First on was 3d printing & modeling
    • Tested on makerspace student staff members. Good to identify gaps
  • Benefits
    • Reduce imposter syndrome or on the other size overconfidence
    • Target areas for improvement
  • Online on git – https://github.com/sjpiper145/MakerSkillTree
  • How to make a skill tree
    • Flexibility, not too cost restrictive, globally applicable
    • Peer reviewed
    • Final skill tree and translation
  • Book – The Learning Game by Ana Lorena Fabrega
  • Beta testing book of a collection of these skills.
    • Good published through “Make: Magazine”
    • 68 tiles per tree, 1020 skill tiles in the book
  • Tips for writing
    • Continue to evolve and improve
    • Do own illustrations was huge time saver from the publisher
    • Confidence in your work. The publisher will only do the final publishing
  • Looking to fill the gaps
  • Working on a kids version of the book

The Token Wars: Why not everything should be open by Kathy Reid

  • The Token Wars
    • A resource conflict fought through technical, social and legal means
  • What is a token?
    • An atomic unit of text taken from a larger collection called a corpus
    • text -> subwords tokens -> vectorization
    • Transformer architecture
    • Word embeddings capture semantic closeness of words
  • Scaling up to billions of tokens
    • Train the relationships between tokens based on all the text
  • The value of tokens and token economics and the actors in the token wars
    • Are the a public good?
    • No the are rivalrous either excludable or non-excludable
    • LLMs in 2024 were trained on 4 orders of magnitude data than 5 years ago.
    • Estimated 60-160 trillion tokens on the public web and some LLMs are trained on close to all of those
    • Synthetic Data especially low quality slop is polluting the Internet
    • Scrapers pick this up and train on it, concern about Model Collapse ( like a photocopy of a photocopy). Reduces the diversity of what it will produce.
  • Key actors in the token wars
  • Individual content creators
    • Included in corpus without permission
  • Platforms with user-generated content
    • Seeking to get paid for their content ( eg Reddit deal with OpenAI )
  • Archival Institutions
    • Australian National Film and Sound Archive: Maintain Trust, Transparancy, Create Public Value
  • Private Companies
    • Anthropic: Model Context Protocol
  • The AI Companies
    • Have used fair-use. Although some countries don’t have those
    • Companies blocking the common crawl
  • Governments
    • Having trouble balancing interests
  • Token Tactics – Protecting your token treasure
    • Data poisoning
    • Blocking bots and scrapers
  • Data Sovereignty
  • Futures
    • Hunt for more tokens
    • Better ways to block/prevent
    • Better understanding of the alateral damage of the resource conflicts
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