🧖 half man; half snowflake ❄️

21 Dec 2025 • 6 min read

midwinter in the fediversity

Symmetry is nice, and six-fold symmetry is even nicer, so let it snow…

🇪🇸 spanish tortilla on crispbread with burger sauce and wallies 🥒

4 Dec 2025 • 2 min read

🐓 warning, contains eggs 🥚

spanish tortilla on crispbread with wallies (pickled gherkins) and burger sauce, inspired by an episode of easy spanish.

if the wallies are sweet you could skip the sauce, as this recipe would still meet max's six rules of sandwich: hot, cold, sweet, sour, crunchy, soft.

🤖 fibre in the ground 🐎

14 Nov 2025 • 12 min read

could the word/pixel guessing bubble leave a productive residue?

Abridged excerpt from a Q&A with Cory Doctorow, in which he investigates potential uses for language/vision models if hyperscaling is over, hyperlocal optimised models are widespread, and GPUs are cheap:

Enshittification With Whitney Betran and Ed Zitron at the Seattle Public Library

Our story begins around 35 minutes in…

🔑 assign-uprn 🆔

08 Nov 2025 • 2 min read

an address-to-uprn matching client

The long-tail of ideas coming from the geoplace conference in May continues! This time I finally got round to open-sourcing and packaging up a python module that links datasets by household:

https://joeldn.srht.site/assign-uprn

It's a trio of functions which interact with the ASSIGN HTTP API: validating single or multiple freetext addresses into their definitive one-line form plus unique reference.

🚏 when-ze-bus 🚌

14 Sep 2025 • 1 min read

a TfL stopcode app

At some point around 2023 TfL changed it's countdown API causing the household a certain amount of inconvenience. We'd been heavy users of a long forgotten app that went like the clappers (unlike the buses, thankfully) and offered a no-frills highly usable experience when getting around town on four wheels.

It was called when-ze-bus and no app before or since has given such clear assistance when trying to tame the streets of London.

Having briefly considered rebooting the android toolchain (it's very very very long), I simply decided to go again in web standards, so here we are ; I hope you find it useful.

https://joeldn.codeberg.page/when-ze-bus.html

🐸 frog porridge 🥣

22 Jul 2025 • 1 min read

a 🫐 recipe

There are no frogs in this porridge, but chia seeds give it a froggy consistency.

Quantities of ingredients are per person - when i say "two hands" this is based on a cook once telling me that a stomach is about the size of two hands. Cook for around three minutes, stirring occasionally with a fork to stop the chia seeds sticking to each other.

🎋 jungle mit strudel 🫔

20 Jul 2025 • 1 min read

🌊 some musical cycles 🌀

reaquainting myself with strudel ahead of AlgoRhythms and it's been fun. it started out on nudel.cc from where i borrowed a synth on friday evening, and then added some drums, percussion, and bass in strudel for a more compositional approach.

the style is influenced by some of the split tempo (170/85) music coming from Berlin, especially the Samurai podcasts by Donato Dozzy and Reeko.

take it easy with the room reverb function, it uses a lot of energy.

🗳️ local government political party finder

14 Jul 2025 • 3 min read

find local politics by map

Curious about local politics around the world? Press a location on the map to query wikidata! NOTE: This doesn't always return results, and when it does they can be slow to arrive, plus their temporal/spatial accuracy can be out of date/place due to old data or spatial oddities, since the match is inferred by proximity to a local admin headquarters, which could be in a another area entirely, yet still closer than the actual one… Still, do give it a spin, wikidata is amazing after all. TIP: Zoom to a locality first.

📍 mnemonic-place-encoder

29 May 2025 • 12 min read

like w3w for UPRN

geoplace conference was great. the keynote included this pearl of wisdom:

It is hard to compare addresses
It is easy to compare UPRNs

A UPRN (unique property reference number) is a permanent 12-digit standard location identifier for addressable places in Britain. This machine-readable identifier can be linked ad hoc (with help from human-readable lookups) or post-hoc (matching algorithms). UPRN is a human-computer data bridge for places.

🕊️ fosdem 2025 and 🌐 gen_site

16 Mar 2025 • 7 min read

💾 gen_site–the software introduced here–has the strapline "extremely simple static site generator" and you are now reading a gen_site blog!

🕊️ since 2019 i’ve been going to fosdem, it’s become the part of the year where foss utopia holds a big celebration.