A new Harmonium Part 2: Deconstruction

I bought a century-old, mute harmonium. Can I get it to make a sound? What is all that black dust? And what would Queen Victoria say?

blog.afandian.com/post/2026/02...

A new harmonium: Springs
blog.afandian.com/post/2026/01...

First proper blog post in a long while. The first step toward building a new instrument. Or fixing up an old one. Maybe even both...

Sometimes when you stare into the abyss of geologic time, the abyss stares back.

The Ordovician trilobite Calyptaulax from the OMNH collections. Like modern insects, trilobites had compound eyes with many lenses. The lenses are made of calcite, which also makes up the exoskeleton. #TrilobiteTuesday

For publication metadata nerds: viz of the generation of various metadata and their flow through the scholarly publishing system. The link goes to the online version that is fully animated, and has additional versions. Wonder if you think this is useful. docs.google.com/presentation...

I realise that saying "Atkinson was the author of HyperCard" is probably like saying "Torvalds is the author of Subsurface." But HyperCard changed the way I think, and I still miss it. #HyperCard

Bees and chickens at @oxfordcityfarm.bsky.social . No better way to spend a sunny lunch break.

How long is a DOI? Does UTF-8 make a difference? Is it important?

This year #DataCite made their public data file available, which means we can compare #DataCite and @crossref.bsky.social 's DOIs.

(It's about 18 - 25 characters)

pardalotus.tech/posts/2024-1...

#scholcomm #identifiers #doi

If you work with research outputs and metadata, DOIs are everywhere. For programmers working with scholarly metadata, there are a few things about DOIs to be aware of.

Here are some "Falsehoods Programmers believe about DOIs".

pardalotus.tech/posts/2024-1...

#scholcomm #openinfrastructure

Hello Bluesky. I'm also fosstodon.org/@joewass