An actually usable voice assistant interface (by alaric)

Ok, this is going to sound a bit weird, but I had a dream last night and part of that dream as an actually usable voice assistant system (as in, Google Assistant / Alexa type of thing). I woke up all excited about this, so I need to write it up so that I can see if it's actually a good interface when I come back to it in few days, or just dream-hubris... Read more »

Pictures from Space (by alaric)

So the International Space Station (ISS) contains some equipment that's part of a project called ARISS, or Amateur Radio on the ISS.

One of the ARISS projects is occasional transmissions of images via SSTV, or Slow-scan television - basically colour faxes sent via radio.

Anyway, a few days ago, I saw that there was an SSTV transmission scheduled, and the ISS would be passing over England at times I would be able to try and pick it up, so I gave it a go... Read more »

A call to action: Installing a cluster of servers shouldn’t be hard (by alaric)

One of the reasons cloud servers (AWS EC2, Google's GCE, Azure, etc) are popular - despite their eye-watering costs once you get to any sort of nontrivial scale - is that they give you a web interface and API to provision resources, rather than needing to set up your own managed cluster.

This is crazy, as managing a cluster of servers is just a software problem, and not a particularly tricky one, so there really should be a decent open source solution for doing it. Read more »

Dreams that Were Dreamt (by sarah)

I have been having very vivid dreams and visions and even full blown hallucinations - initially with the fever back in March and then to a lesser extent since. But I have always lucid, realistic, sharply in focus hyper real dreams with storylines and great imagery - many of my stories have been based off of my dreams.

I am currently keep a dream diary which I hope to share bits of but am not ready yet - I wish I had started it sooner but I was simply too ill - I did write up in note forms some of the dreams from earlier in the sickness which I also hope to bring together with these later ones. But they are not the only dreams I wish to share so I thought I would share them as and when I see them pop up in the Facebook archive/memories or find them whilst hunting through tweets, old emails and diaries etc...

Here is one from the 10th of September 2017:

Last night I dreampt of crows with dark rainbow feathers - there were two kinds of crows one who drew shapes in the rocks and one who collected the stars in the sky and the glow of the sea at night - and I found six feathers that were left for me - they turned into a little girl with black shiny hair who collected bits of broken pot which was her archaeology museum she would show anyone wanted to see. I had to guard her from those who would destroy her prescious things.

Illuminated Fragments (by sarah)

Currently it is the Gloucester History Festival - happening very differently to previous year in the restrictions on numbers and the shift to more outside pre booked things and mostly online talks and interactive virtual tours. Even if I'd been well enough there is no way Cuddly Science/History could have done it's normal activities with sand pit digs and cloth puppets 0.o

I am seeing past events popping up on Facebook memories and they are awesome but do you know what? So is this year... there is a festival that had to completely start from scratch and reorganise some great stuff and they managed it and on their big year too! 10yrs of the Festival and 25yrs for the Heritage Open Days!

And it's not like I am completely devoid of involvement - back in the spring an art and archaeology project that I was very excited to be a part of obviously had to go on hold but now the exhibition is there for anyone who wanders over to see! They are asking people to pre book free tickets and wear face masks when in the building as well as doing track and trace.

It's at Llanthony Secunda Priory and called Illuminated Fragments. There were 15 of us lead by Jacqui Grange of Creative Solutions with access to the archaeological finds from the area thanks to Cotswold Archaeology, and tutorials on calligraphy as well as researching the history and stories of the area.

I really enjoyed the parts of it I managed to get to and the work produced is truly spectacular - it is only up until the 14th of Sept 2020. Including the Heritage Open Day.