Olano.dev: Reclaiming the Web with a Personal Reader by Facundo Olano – his path to developing his own feed reader (also see Hacker News comment thread)

Tim Kellogg: Birb + Fossil: An RSS Revival? – Discusses some recent Mastodon tools for feeds and timelines

DSPGuide.com: The Scientist and Engineer’s Guide to Digital Signal Processing (has links to full content of the book)

DSPRelated.com: All About Digital Signal Processing (books, tutorials, articles)

SageMath: SageMath is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It builds on top of many existing open-source packages: NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Maxima, GAP, FLINT, R and many more. Mission: Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab.

ddrake: Choose tools that can’t be taken away from you: a manifesto – it’s risky to rely on tools that can be taken away from you – linked from a Mastodon post on looking for Evernote alternatives

Tools and activism

Ken Smith posted some quotes from Pete Seeger recently, where Seeger states that working within one’s home community is the most important work we have to do right now (Ken’s post title is “Essential Local Politics”). I feel that there is a great amount of information available online to help/assist/train individuals how to do work/activism within their communities. I have a list of resources available here, but I think the Community Tool Box from the University of Kansas is an excellent place to find frameworks for identifying an issue or issues to get involved with, and to identify concrete next steps.

In an earlier post, Ken Smith appears to express the opinion that he would like to see tools that help people get together to do work, to create content, to organize activities, and to have identity to allow them to affiliate with others and have a stronger voice. In a similar way to my first paragraph, I think there are many available online tools to help people with this work. Stephen Downes has created a massive resource called “Creating an Online Community, Class or Conference – Quick Tech Guide”. I think the tools identified here could satisfy a lot of what Ken is looking for supporting activism. I welcome Ken’s input on this.

Owning your content

With all the hoopla about the Threads app from Instagram/Facebook, I was reminded of a post from Tantek Celik (Own Your Notes), bringing out these points (see this comic for context):

I am once again asking you to own your notes, rather than tweeting them into Big Chad’s garage.

Maybe you left the big garage and now toot in your neighborhood Chad’s garage. It’s still someone else’s garage.

I have also written about owning your content (here, here and here). Of course, posting this on my Old School blog goes against this (although I have an OPML backup that I could render somehow), which is why I am also posting this on my main blog (WordPress self-hosted). People may feel that what they post on services like Threads, Twitter, Mastodon, et al, is more like conversations that do not need to be “owned”. However, if there is a way to pipe your conversation into a flow where you still own the content (like MyStatusTool), why not do it?

Why I won’t be on Bluesky, Threads et al any time soon

I already have accounts on Twitter, Mastodon, and Micro.blog – that’s enough social networks for me. I have a Drummer Old School blog, my main WordPress blog, and now my minimal blogging tool MyStatusTool (here is my instance) – that’s enough blogging tools for me. Someday I will get my Federated Wiki instance working again (hopefully soon), meanwhile I have my OPML Zettlekasten file to file things. I think that’s enough!

NetLogo is a multi-agent programmable modeling environment. It is used by many hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, and researchers worldwide.