Greetings from the wintery mix that is central Ohio. The local school district called off school yesterday afternoon in preparation for what came today. Also yesterday: Ohio's own "Buckeye Chuck" predicted an early spring. Let's be grateful for snow days (and teenagers who shovel snow) and for predictions of early …

On a whim, last Thursday I put out a poll with the announcement of last week's issue. Out of the three threads, controlled digital lending, gamers and NFTs, and cats, the winner was cats. The sample size was small—five votes—so I'm not ready to …

I was introduced to structured logs at work, and this ol' hacker thinks that is a darn good idea. For a new program I'm writing, I wanted to put that into use. The program uses AWS Lambdas, and the log entries for the Lambdas end up in CloudWatch Logs. Unfortunately …

Wednesday night with a cat on the lap, composing the next day's Thursday Threads. How could life get any better?

Hey...I'm not above using cat pictures to satisfy readers. In fact, I'm going to do it one more time before this newsletter is finished. (Oh, and …

Welcome to issue 80 of Thursday Threads. I'm so happy many of you chose to stick around and greetings to all of the new subscribers. To those that received my email last Thursday giving you a heads-up that a new issue would be coming to your inbox but then didn't …

Late last year, I had my AT&T Uverse residential gateway replaced. For reasons that truly baffle me, AT&T has decided that they are going to run unsupported equipment on their residential customer network. When the replacement was swapped in, my family noticed that video conference calls—Zoom and …

Welcome to the re-inaugural issue of DLTJ Thursday Threads. Counting backward, there were 78 previous issues (all by the most recent still need to be converted from the old WordPress style of formatting) with—all told—several hundred references and commentary. Here at the start of 2022, I'm making a …

Success! Four parts plus a half (or a "re-do"" of part 2):

1. Ramp up automation for adding reading sources to Obsidian
2. Refactor the process of building this static website on AWS
   • Fix the webmentions cache, an unanticipated diversion
3. Recreate the ability for readers to get updates by email
4. Turn the …

So it has been quiet here for a couple of days. Rest assured: the quietness comes from heads-down work, not from giving up. Here are the refactor-DLTJ activities so far:

• Ramp up automation for adding reading sources to Obsidian
• Refactor the process of building this static website on AWS
  • Fix …

Okay, a half-step backward to fix something I broke yesterday. As I described earlier this year, this static website blog uses the Webmention protocol to notify others when I link to their content and receive notifications from others. Behind the scenes, I'm using the Jekyll plugin called jekyll-webmention_io to integrate …

Look at that! Progress is being made down the list of to-dos for this blog in order to start the new year on a fresh footing. As you might recall from the last blog post, I set out to do some upgrades across the calendar year boundary:

• Ramp up automation …

As 2021 comes to a close, I've been thinking about this blog and my own "personal knowledge management" tools. It is time for some upgrades to both. The next few posts will be about the changes I'm making over this winter break. Right now I think the updating will look …

Last month, EDUCAUSE published its Top 10 IT Issues for 2022 with the subtitle "The Higher Education We Deserve". To reach the top 10, EDUCAUSE members were asked to prioritize 17 issues identified by the EDUCAUSE IT Issues Panel members. The members of the Issue Panel then broke up into …

Code4Lib Journal (C4LJ) editor here. Becky Yoose's Twitter thread has stirred up a great deal of attention to an article published yesterday. This post has my own thoughts on the issue...published on Twitter to match Becky's medium and here on my blog for posterity.

So yeah that Code4Lib Journal …

When I converted this blog from WordPress to a static site generated with Jekyll in 2018, I lost the ability for readers to make comments. At the time, I thought that one day I would set up an installation of Discourse for comments like Boing Boing did in 2013. But …

Bryan Brown's tweet led me to Ruth Kitchin Tillman's Repository Ouroboros post about the treadmill of software development/deployment. And wow do I have thoughts and feelings.

It 'tis the season for graduations, and this year my nephew is graduating from high school. My sister-in-law created a memory book—"a surprise Book of Advice as he moves to the next phase of his life." What an interesting opportunity to reflect! This is what I came up with …

Over the weekend, I posted an article here about pre-recording conference talks and sent a tweet about the idea on Monday. I hoped to generate discussion about recording talks to fill in gaps—positive and negative—about the concept, and I was not disappointed. I'm particularly thankful to Lisa Janicke …

The Code4Lib conference was last week. That meeting used all pre-recorded talks, and we saw the benefits of pre-recording for attendees, presenters, and conference organizers. Should all talks be pre-recorded, even when we are back face-to-face?

Note! After I posted a link to this article on Twitter, there was a …

Earlier this month, my Twitter timeline lit up with mentions of a half-day webinar called Cybersecurity Landscape - Protecting the Scholarly Infrastructure. What had riled up the people I follow on Twitter was the first presentation: "Security Collaboration for Library Resource Access" by Cory Roach, the chief information security officer at …