By @edent · money Open Data Open Source OpenBenches · 7 comments · 500 words · read ~530 times.
My wife and I run a side project called OpenBenches.org - it is a fun little crowd-sourced memorial bench site. It's mostly fun, except when the bills come due! Most hobby sites and side projects don't cost a lot to run. Lots of services have generous free tiers to (ab)use, and they can pay well […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Open Data solar · 1 comment · 500 words · read ~215 times.
After 3 full years of having solar panels on our London roof, they've generated 11,950kWh of electricity. Nice! Here's how those three years look, according to our smart meter. kWh Solar Generation 11,950 Solar Export 7,346 Grid Import 7,521 Quick maths! The difference between the generation and the export is our solar consumption: 4,604kWh over […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Open Data sharing is caring · 1 comment · 450 words · read ~139 times.
Many years ago, I was involved in student politics. It was a great way to understand the fundamental disconnect between the ways different people see the world. I remember having a blazing row high-spirited discussion with someone about the way I thought about society. In a fit of rage an attempt to provide clarity, I […]
Continue reading →By @edent · gender IWD2022 Open Data · 2 comments · 400 words · read ~189 times.
About a million years ago, the then Coalition Government in the UK announced a slew of Open Data projects. They wanted - in their words - to "mobilise an army of Armchair Auditors". That is, ordinary people would be able to look through the data and find interesting errors. I'm a civil servant (this is […]
Continue reading →By @edent · map Open Data tfl tube · 4 comments · 300 words · read ~6,451 times.
Force Directed Graphs of the London Underground have been done many times before - but I think I'm the first person to add the new Elizabeth Line (CrossRail). I've also created a JSON graph of all of London's rail services - including DLR, Trams, C2C, ThamesLink etc. Demo Play with it yourself Grab the code […]
Continue reading →By @edent · NaBloPoMo Open Data privacy · 2 comments · 700 words · read ~214 times.
I'm an advocate for open data - both in my professional role and in a personal capacity. One of the hard things is succinctly explaining that "open data" means "non-personally identifiable data at a sufficient granularity to be useful without proving a risk to any individual's (or group's) reasonable expectations of privacy while still being […]
Continue reading →By @edent · gender Open Data python · 1 comment · 550 words · read ~319 times.
It's quite popular to see high street shops names "Somesuch and Sons". Indeed, my grandparents ran "Eden & Sons" for many year. Much rarer is seeing "... & daughters". But, of course, the plural of anecdote is not data! The UK register of businesses - Companies House - has a pretty good search engine. Doing […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Open Data solar · 6 comments · 200 words · read ~472 times.
Back in 2014, I released a year's worth of solar generation data. I was enormously proud to recently discover that the data were cited in a couple of academic papers: Colantuono, Giuseppe & Kor, Ah-Lian & Pattinson, Colin & Gorse, Christopher PV with multiple storage as function of geolocation (2018) page: 217-232. Elsevier BV. Solar […]
Continue reading →By @edent · data Open Data Smart Home tado · 550 words · read ~886 times.
I have a Tado smart thermostat - part of my smarthome project. As well as letting me set the temperature from my phone, it records environmental data, and provides a handy API for me to retrieve it. This blog post will show you why I've gathered the data, let you download the full dataset, and […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Open Data scotland · 550 words · read ~228 times.
Glasgow City Council has released a treasure-trove of open data. Nearly one-hundred datasets ranging from Live Traffic Information - to historic climate data. A fantastic boon for researches and open government enthusiasts. But there's a sting in the tail. The majority of the datasets are under the Open Government Licence (OGL). That's basically Creative Commons […]
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