edward

47,541 karma · joined February 22, 2007

Hello, I'm Edward.

I'm running the Geospatial devroom at FOSDEM.

I build web apps, web scrapers, databases, and search engines. I reverse engineer legacy systems and data formats.

Over the years, I've had the privilege to collaborate with internet luminaries like Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Ted Nelson, Jason Scott, and John Gilmore.

My contributions span a diverse array of projects, including Wikipedia, Open Library, Wikimedia Commons, Debian, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, the Linux kernel, and BusyBox.

I'm on mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@edward

edwardon Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

Tragedy of the commons. Waze could let people pay drivers to not use their road. The price can be determined by the market. Start at $0.50, only valid once per day in each direction.

edwardon TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

You can do the same thing with git-annex: https://git-annex.branchable.com/tips/metadata_driven_views/

edwardon Taskwarrior – intelligent TODO list

And on Android: https://bitbucket.org/kvorobyev/taskwarriorandroid

edwardon Weather in your terminal, with ANSI colors and Unicode symbols

It is available in Debian unstable.

  apt install ansiweather

edwardon The Internet Archive truck has been stolen

A scanning center attached to the main building and known as the reading room caught fire in November 2013.

https://blog.archive.org/2013/11/06/scanning-center-fire-ple...

edwardon Many railway lines in Britain that were closed in the 1960s are re-opening

"East West Rail Link is a planned railway route linking the Great Western Main Line, Oxford, Bicester, Milton Keynes, Bedford, Cambridge, Ipswich and Norwich in England using part of the former Varsity Line. The western section from Oxford to Bedford was approved by the Government in November 2011, with completion expected in 2019."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_West_Rail_Link

edwardon Skylake's Linux power management is dreadful you shouldn't buy until it's fixed

The title of the post is actually "Skylake's power management under Linux is dreadful and you shouldn't buy one until it's fixed".

I had to rewrite it to get it under 80 characters.

edwardon Do GPU-optimized databases threaten Oracle, Splunk and Hadoop?

"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

http://enwp.org/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

edwardon Aria2: CLI downloader for HTTP, FTP, torrents, metalinks

git-annex uses aria2 for torrent downloads

edwardon Where's my petabyte disk drive?

You can buy a 8TB HDD for $219.99, that's $27.50 per TB.

I made a page that shows hard drives and SSDs sorted by price per TB: https://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/

edwardon First Open Banking API Sandbox in the UK

Are you using polling to discover new transactions, or do they send a notification to the mobile app?

edwardon Unlocking my Lenovo laptop battery

Part 3: http://www.zmatt.net/unlocking-my-lenovo-laptop-part-3/

edwardon Records: Python library for making raw SQL queries to Postgres databases

v0.2.0: https://github.com/kennethreitz/records/commit/27ed8d0292529...

edwardon 20 Years Since John Perry Barlow Declared Cyberspace Independence

Sorry, you're right. My mistake.

edwardon 20 Years Since John Perry Barlow Declared Cyberspace Independence

John Perry Barlow is recovering from a stroke.

Here is at San Francisco's Ocean Beach: https://twitter.com/JPBarlow/status/692198084265254914

edwardon Curiosity Self-Portrait at Martian Sand Dune

Book recommendation — Red Rover: Inside the Story of Robotic Space Exploration, from Genesis to the Mars Rover Curiosity by Roger Wiens.

The author describes building scientific instruments for Curiosity. There is certainly a lot of bureaucracy involved.

edwardon Time for a Guaranteed Basic Income?

See also: Silicon Valley's Basic Income Bromance by Lauren Smiley https://medium.com/backchannel/silicon-valley-s-basic-income...

edwardon Cities look at subsidized housing to stem teacher shortages

Teachers in San Francisco should demand to be paid more instead of receiving subsidized housing.

edwardon The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

He is hiring: http://comma.ai/hiring.html

edwardon 12 Coders Get Naked for a Good Cause

The Economist argues that it makes sense to tax charitable donations: http://www.economist.com/node/21556570

edwardon German court rules in favor of the Wikimedia Foundation

Nice demo. You could optimize it down to a single link:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q="said+smith%2C+18..75"

edwardon One Year of Airbnb

Posted 9 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10634015

edwardon Why Old Sports Photos Often Have a Blue Haze

Why can't we have the same effect as an instagram filter?

edwardon Pirated Courses on Udemy

You are wrong. Read the Open Source Definition:

https://opensource.org/osd

edwardon Ca-certificates: removal of SPI CA

When I was at Debconf 15 I tried looking at the schedule on my phone. It was confusing to have my Android phone complain about the debconf.org certificate, while my Debian laptop was fine with it.

edwardon Bitcoin Surges Past $400

The price is now $500.

edwardon Bitcoin Surges Past $400

What does RID mean?

PayPal T&C says virtual currency isn't allowed.

edwardon Our Logo Looks Like Underpants: A Case Study in Internationalization

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6521138

edwardon NetSurf: Small, fast, free web browser

NetSurf includes multiple framebuffer front ends, including: the Linux framebuffer, SDL, X and VNC.

The VNC server surface uses the libvncserver library to provide a straightforward unsecured VNC server. Multiple clients may connect.

edwardon Behind the Failure of Leap Transit’s Gentrified Buses in San Francisco

"Hint, a subtly flavored brand of bottled water that seems to flow as freely in San Francisco as the tears of the people who were evicted to make room for the incoming software engineers"