OpenBenches · 1 comment · 100 words
I was delighted to be interviewed by the Volunteer Technologist podcast about our OpenBenches project. Huge thanks to Gene Liverman for having me on. It is available, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts. …
Continue reading →OpenBenches · 1 comment · 600 words
Way back in July 2017, Liz and I started OpenBenches.org. It was designed to be a fun way to record all the lovely memorial benches we saw on our walks. A few weeks ago, Stuart Orford added the thirty-thousandth entry! Here's what all that collective human effort looks like when plotted on a very exciting graph. Using a proprietary mix of AI and BIG DATA, I can confidentially predict that there is a slight uplift in entries when the weather is nice. And, by the end of the decade, every…
Continue reading →money Open Data Open Source OpenBenches · 7 comments · 500 words · read ~536 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 in "exposure". But OpenBenches is reaching a tipping point where it is slowly overwhelming us. We've now got nearly 300GB of photos - which means our storage and bandwidth costs are on the high side. …
Continue reading →meme OpenBenches poem · 2 comments · 500 words
A few weeks ago, someone uploaded this memorial bench to our site: Photo CC BY-SA from Lewis MacKenzie. It is a perfectly pleasant little memorial poem. I wondered about its origins. A quick search shows that the opening couplet was used on war graves from 1916. But are its origins any earlier than that? One of the problems of trying to search old records - especially newspapers - is that text recognition isn't particularly effective. But the British Newspaper Archive has these examples…
Continue reading →OpenBenches php Symfony · 2 comments · 350 words
I once described my ideal coding environment to a colleague as "telneting directly into prod and damn the consequences!" I jest. But only a little. When I build for myself I treat best practices and coding styles as harmful. Chaotic evil but, hey, it's only myself I'm hurting. Anyway, my wife and I run a hobby site - OpenBenches.org - which was coded in a long alcopop fueled weekend. It's fair to say that it has exceeded our expectations in terms of people getting involved. But is…
Continue reading →GeoMob GeoMobLON OpenBenches · 150 words
Last week, Liz and I had the great pleasure of speaking at GeoMob London - a meet-up for digital geography nerds. We gave a talk about OpenBenches and how far it has come since launch. It blows our minds that we've have over TWENTY-SIX THOUSAND unique benches added to the site. And it is a little daunting to host nearly a quarter of a terabyte of photos from around the world. We got lots of great feedback (and free beer). Yes, it was weird to be in a crowded lecture theatre again. And…
Continue reading →Auth0 OpenBenches Social Media · 7 comments · 800 words · read ~414 times.
The inimitable Simon Willison has a brilliant presentation all about managing side projects: It is all good advice. But I gently disagree with the slide which says: Avoid side projects with user accounts If it has user accounts it’s not a side-project, it’s an unpaid job I get the sentiment. Storing passwords securely is hard. Dealing with users changing their names is hard. Updating avatars is hard. GDPR is hard. It's just a lot of pain and suffering. But I still have user accounts on…
Continue reading →AI art OpenBenches · 8 comments · 700 words · read ~14,365 times.
We forced an AI to look at thousands of photos of memorial benches. Just because. Here are the results. #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 100%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */ …
Continue reading →mysql NaBloPoMo OpenBenches · 2 comments · 550 words · read ~267 times.
Our community website - OpenBenches - has over seventeen thousand crowd-sourced entries. The nature of user-generated content is that there are bound to be duplicates. Especially around popular walking routes. Here's how I culled around 200 duplicates using the awesome power of SOUNDEX! Soundex is a clever algorithm for reducing a string of characters into a string which roughly represents its pronunciation. The "roughly" is key here. We could just search the database for identical entries,…
Continue reading →OpenBenches · 600 words
Our community project - OpenBenches is going really well. At the time of writing, we have 33,211 photos, taking up over 100GB. Cameras and phones all have different ways of naming the photos they save. Some files are named with a datestamp - 2019-12-25_01.jpg. Others are sequential - photo_0001.jpg. Or they might have a system generated name - 7bba245908_k.jpg. Storing all those photos in a single directory gives us a problem. What if two photos have the same name? Even if we split…
Continue reading →github money OpenBenches Trade Union · 3 comments · 850 words · read ~444 times.
We're delighted to announce that our OpenBenches.org project has been awarded a $250 microgrant from Icculus! Ryan C. Gordon@icculusGoogle gave me an award for my contributions to Linux gaming and open source, and while I’m honored to be acknowledged, I can’t accept money from a company that is actively engaging in union busting.❤️ 3,186💬 0♻️ 54202:20 - Wed 25 December 2019Ryan C. Gordon@icculusReplying to @icculusWhen I agreed to the award, I hadn’t heard about @eiais’s firing, or any of the o…
Continue reading →NaBloPoMo ODcamp Open Data OpenBenches · 4 comments · 500 words · read ~345 times.
For the last year-and-a-bit, Liz and I have been running OpenBenches.org. An open data website dedicated to memorial benches. Here are some rough and ready numbers about how it has gone so far. 9,870 Benches At the time of writing, we're a little shy of 10,000 benches. As you can see, we have photos from all around the world. 9,000 UK Benches The majority of our benches are in the UK. Memorial benches seems like a peculiarly Anglosphere habit. I've spoken to people from all sorts of…
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