In 2023, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) started to develop efforts towards defining open source AI. In October 2024, OSI presented version 1 of their proposed Open Source AI Definition, but it was immediately controversial. This post records two pivotal moments I observed in the OSI discussion forums surrounding this controversy.
Remarkable promises “integration” with popular cloud storage services but offers only the most clunky implementation possible, where you need to copy files manually one by one. This is not integration, it is the mud run approach to user interface design. A surprising miss given the company’s stated mission to use a human-centric approach to technology.
Following on from my post about setting up a Raspberry Pi 400 as my kids’ first personal computer, here I share how I’ve made the system easy to manage remotely and imposed some light parental controls, all while keeping the system open to tinkering. It will be a matter of time until they discover how to break out of it — indeed that is pretty much part of the journey of discovery that I hope they’ll take on.
Our kids (6 and 9) wanted to learn to type, and I think it’s useful for them to become computer literate sooner rather than later, so I spent some time figuring out options. I settled for a Raspberry Pi 400 and they love it.
Readers of this blog will know that I’m an avid user of Zotero and of the reMarkable paper tablet. Zotero is a supreme reference manager and reMarkable is simply the best when it comes to reading and note-taking. In this post I share some tips and tricks for making them work better together.
Randomly clicking around in the ASIO4ALL 2.15 settings in Ableton Live, as one does, I changed something and promptly got the error “live does not support 8000 as a sample rate”. Skip this post unless you’re one of the lost souls looking for a solution.
With the first excitement of ChatGPT dying down, people are catching up on the risk of relying on closed and proprietary models that may stop being supported overnight or may change in undocumented ways. Good news: we’ve tracked developments in this field and there are now over 20 alternatives with varying degrees of openness, most of them more transparent than ChatGPT.
For better or worse, APA is one of the most widely used citation styles in the cognitive sciences. One aspect…
Almost 13 years ago, in 2007, this blog started as a sub-site on my personal web page. It soon took…
Linguists will know John Benjamins as one of the nicer academic publishing houses, not quite so terrible as Elsevier or…
One of the key tasks scientists need to master is how to manage bibliographic information: collecting relevant literature, building a digital library, and handling citations and bibliographies during writing. This tutorial introduces Zotero (www.zotero.org), an easy to use reference management tool made by scholars for scholars. The tutorial covers the basics of using Zotero for collecting, organizing, citing and sharing research. Zotero automates the tasks of managing bibliographic data, storing and renaming PDFs, and formatting references. It also integrates with widely used text processors, and can synchronize your library across devices. There is no more need to search through disorganized file folders full of inscrutably named PDF files, to copy and paste references across documents, or to manually deal with pointless differences in citation styles. Ultimately, the point of using a reference manager is to free more time for real research.
Academia.edu takes your academic work and puts it behind a privacy-defying signup form, laces it with ads, botches the metadata, and tries to appease you by offering stats and social ranking that promote constant comparison. What’s not to like?
Today, Nature published a news feature by Cat Ferguson, Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky (Retraction Watch) in which I am…
One of the most common word-processing related task for academics is to generate PDF versions of documents — for sharing…
ELAN (lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan) is a widely used tool for the transcription, annotation, and analysis of audio and video data. This posting…
Duplicate detection is one of the things any serious reference manager should offer. Zotero users have been clamouring for it…
This long overdue instalment of Ideophones around the web features ideophones in the names of snappy new mobile apps from…
Here’s a quick tip for Zotero users who like to do their browsing in Chrome or Safari: you can install…
A new version of ELAN, the widely used tool for time-aligned annotation of linguistic data, was released today by the…
I keep forgetting the kind of simple edits that are so trivial to make in CSL styles. Here I catalogue…