@simon_heitin I was last involved with this 20+ years ago, in the relational space. Toad and Rational Rose were our tools back then.
Still love these kinds of tools, and am writing an adjacent one at the moment. Replying mostly to hear what others say, if that's OK!?

Funders "should mandate change in science publishing" #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78691 In case we had forgotten, the authors of , The Drain of Scientific Publishing (12 page PDF) remind us that " academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it" as well as to the wider community that funded it.

Paris Marx's 'Getting off US tech' guide has good recommendations, but I think it misses something crucial: understanding how people actually change.

Turns out, handing someone a 50-item menu doesn't work. People switch when there's a defined crisis, when others around them are moving, when it feels like responding to news rather than choosing to be weird.

So I've written a companion piece exploring the psychology (and the reality) of tech migration:

https://blog.dougbelshaw.com/getting-off-us-tech/

@aliceferox Lovely glow. Did that require some post, or is that how it landed?

@qtarantino @tennyson is a writer and does things to and with scripts and screenplays.

Happy birthday to #mathematician & #astronomer Nicole-Reine Lepaute (1723-1788)! My #linocut celebrates her calculated path of the solar eclipse of 1764. She also worked with Alexis Clairaut & Jérôme Lalande to precisely calculate the date of return of Halley’s Comet, solving the notorious 3-body by hand (including the gravitational pull of Jupiter & Saturn on orbit). They worked in parallel, calculating for 6 months straight, barely stopping to eat!🧵

#printmaking #womeninSTEM #histsci #sciart

Driving to the shops this morning I caught the presenter on South Africa's national radio station reading out the list of US illegal interventions since WW2, she then played an excerpt of Nelson Mandela stating, ""If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world it is the United States of America".

#venezuela #southafrica

@hikingdude
A lovely image.
"a massive difference between taking photos on a hike, and going to a place to take photos"
Yes. For wildlife, for people, for so many things. Grounded perhaps in "being present"?

Google is accessing your private emails. Because nothing it offers is truly private. Nasty thing Google turned out to be, eh? If you use Gmail you'll want to read this.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opt-out-gmail-ai-training-goog_l_69405837e4b0fa125e7f49a7

#Google #Gmail #Privacy #AI

RE: https://mindly.social/@floofpaldi/115838162251358096

To piggyback on this, being bored is an essential part of being creative in my opinion. It’s so easy to always be taking in some sort of media these days. Doing chores or walking around the city for errands without earbuds is when I often come up with good ideas, for example.

#writerscoffeeclub #writingcommunity

Therapy dogs waiting to be let inside hospital rooms to comfort sick children . We don’t deserve dogs !

What's the point of spending months writing a spline editor if you can't draw interesting graphs?

The blog post related to the latest release of the #GraphEditor

#Python #softwareDevelopment #Qt #PySide6

https://isijingi.co.za/wp/2026/01/04/qtpygraphedit-v0-1-0-now-with-multipoint-lines/

Shamelessly reposted from reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/hmmm/comments/1p5i0ge/hmmm/

@fesshole Making things more accessible tends to help everyone. As a teacher, the techniques for assisting those with special needs really boil down to good teaching practise. We all win.

#SilentSunday
Although it looks cold, it was a pleasantly warm day - just a lot of moisture coming in from the sea.

This is the other side of the Kogelberg, where the previous picture was taken.

#BettysBay #SouthAfrica

#Photography

The original:
https://www.deviantart.com/africanobserver/art/1283031628

#Silentsunday

Related to the previous post, this was looking left, toward the Kogelberg mountains. The southern Atlantic ocean is about 20km behind the mountains, the source of the moisture, which evaporates as the air drops down the valley and warms up.

#SouthAfrica #Photography

#Photography
The original:
https://www.deviantart.com/africanobserver/art/1283033440

#Silentsunday

From Clarence Drive, on the far side of False Bay, #CapeTown, #SouthAfrica

It is 30km of truly beautiful views.

#Photography

The original.
https://www.deviantart.com/africanobserver/art/1283034549

there are three kinds of programming tutorials:

• “look man we both know you don’t wanna learn this shit so just install 30 GB of random frameworks and here’s the code to copy-paste if you wanna make a basic game and feel like you accomplished something. I’m not gonna explain how any of this works because nobody cares as long as your little guy jumps when you press spacebar”
• “an endofunctor is a type of monoid which is a subcategory of monad that is variadic over the set of all impure lambdas - therefore all possible expressions in this language can be modeled after- wait where are you going?”
• “this is called a variable! a variable is a little friend that can hold onto something called a value! variables love grabbing values and they can even carry them into functions! say hi, variable!”

My absolute favourite photography subject - Rainbow Bee-eaters diving into the water to cool off on a hot day #birds #birdphotography

After about 4 months of sporadic work, and a good focus now in the summer holiday, I have a new pre-release of a #GUI editor for nodes and edges #Graph s, which support multi-point edges, both rectilinear and curved, as well as managing metadata on the nodes.
A blog post will follow.

#Python #Pyside #Qt

https://github.com/ghillebrand/qtPyGraphEdit