Simon Willison’s Weblog

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October 2019

58 posts: 5 entries, 15 links, 38 beats

Oct. 21, 2019

Setting up Datasette, step by step (via) Tobias describes how he runs Datasette on his own server/VPS, using nginx and systemd. I’m doing something similar for some projects and systemd really does feel like the solution to the “ensure a Python process keeps running” problem I’ve been fighting for over a decade. I really like how Tobias creates a dedicated Linux user for each of his deployed Python projects.

# 2:20 am / sysadmin, datasette

Thematic map—GIS Wiki. This is a really useful wiki full of GIS information, and the coverage of different types of thematic maps is particularly thorough.

# 2:25 am / geospatial, visualization, wiki

Weeknotes: The Squirrel Census, Genome SQL query

Visit Weeknotes: The Squirrel Census, Genome SQL query

This week was mostly about incremental improvements. And squirrels.

[... 911 words]

6:42 pm / genetics, projects, squirrels, weeknotes

Oct. 24, 2019

Proprietor Michael behind his desk, covered in Bigfoot paraphernalia
Museum Bigfoot Discovery Museum — 5497 Highway 9, Felton, CA 95018
24th Oct 2019, 4:32 am · museums
Mechanical circus at Musée Mécanique
Museum Musée Mécanique

Unique collection of antique coin-operated arcade games, orchestrions and other artefacts, some of them over 100 years old.

24th Oct 2019, 4:32 am · museums
The outside of the bookbinders museum.
Museum The American Bookbinders Museum — 355 Clementina Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
24th Oct 2019, 4:32 am · museums
Six antique Pez dispensers on display
Museum Burlingame Museum of PEZ Memorabilia — 214 California Drive, Burlingame, CA 94010
24th Oct 2019, 4:32 am · museums
Museum Santa Cruz Surfing Museum — 701 West Cliff Drive, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
24th Oct 2019, 4:32 am · museums
A nuclear missile inside the bunker
Museum Nike Missile Site SF-88 — Field Road, Sausalito, CA 94965
24th Oct 2019, 4:32 am · museums
Looking down the pier at the Eureka
Museum Hyde Street Pier

This historic ferry pier now hosts a collection of ships, including an 1886 square rigged sailing ship (the Balclutha), a 1907 steam tugboat (the Hercules) and Eureka, a side-wheel paddle steamboat built in 1890 which is now the largest existing wooden ship in the world.

24th Oct 2019, 4:32 am · museums
Museum Museum of Russian Culture — 2450 Sutter Street, San Francisco, California 94115
24th Oct 2019, 4:32 am · museums
Museum Jehning Lock Museum — 175 Castro Street, Mountain View, CA 94041
24th Oct 2019, 4:32 am · museums
A portion of the Bay Model
Museum The Bay Model — 2100 Bridgeway, Sausalito, CA 94965
24th Oct 2019, 4:32 am · museums
The architecture of the museum has an ancient Egyptian flavor
Museum Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum — 1660 Park Avenue, San Jose, CA 95126
24th Oct 2019, 4:32 am · museums

Oct. 25, 2019

kepler.gl. Uber built this open source geospatial analysis tool for large-scale data sets, and they offer it as a free hosted online tool—just click Get Started on the site. I uploaded two CSV files with 30,000+ latitude/longitude points in them just now and used Kepler to render them as images.

# 4:16 am / geospatial, visualization, uber

A lovely old timey train
Museum California State Railroad Museum — 111 I Street, Sacramento, CA 95814
25th Oct 2019, 5:23 am · museums
A weird alien bed
Museum The Gregangelo Museum — 225 San Leandro Way, San Francisco, CA 94127
25th Oct 2019, 7:23 pm · museums

Oct. 26, 2019

Azure Readiness Checklist (via) I love a good comprehensive checklist. This one is focused on large projects running on Azure but it’s still fun to browse through if you are hosting elsewhere, mainly as a reminder of quite how much still goes into deploying large web services into production.

# 8:32 pm / azure, checklists, deployment

Oct. 27, 2019

Calling C functions from BigQuery with web assembly (via) Google BigQuery lets you define custom SQL functions in JavaScript, and it turns out they expose the WebAssembly.instantiate family of APIs. Which means you can write your UDD in C or Rust, compile it to WebAssembly and run it as part of your query!

# 5:55 am / c, sql, rust, webassembly

Oct. 28, 2019

Shelves full of salt and pepper shakers
Museum The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum — 461 Brookside Village Way, Gatlinburg, TN 37738
28th Oct 2019, 4:01 am · museums
A plaque with an effervescent caption.
Museum International Art Museum of America — 1023 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
28th Oct 2019, 12:13 pm · museums
The microbreak holiday simulator.
Museum Novelty Automation — 1a Princeton Street, London, WC1R 4AX
28th Oct 2019, 4:54 pm · museums

Weeknotes: Niche Museums, Kepler, Trees and Streaks

Every now and then someone will ask “so when are you going to build Museums Near Me then?”, based on my obsession with niche museums and websites like www.owlsnearme.com.

[... 872 words]

10:42 pm / museums, productivity, projects, visualization, weeknotes, baked-data, streaks, duolingo

Oct. 29, 2019

Pirate paraphernalia.
Museum Pirates Museum — 103, Rue de Liège, Tsaralalàna, PRIORI travels, 4th floor, Boîte Post BP-273, Antananarivo, 101, Madagascar
29th Oct 2019, 3:51 pm · museums

Oct. 30, 2019

Release twitter-to-sqlite 0.13 — Save data from Twitter to a SQLite database
30th Oct 2019, 2:22 am
Release datasette 0.30 — An open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data
30th Oct 2019, 6:51 pm · datasette
A room full of maps.
Museum David Rumsey Map Center — Bing Wing, Green Library, 459 Lasuen Mall, Stanford, CA 94305
30th Oct 2019, 8:54 pm · museums

Oct. 31, 2019

It really does have a lot of skeletons.
Museum Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie comparée — 2 Rue Buffon, 75005 Paris, France
31st Oct 2019, 5:58 pm · museums

2019 » October

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