Paul Mackay

Awesome Net Zero

2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been a long-time fan of Sindre Sorhus’s awesome lists as a very useful starting point for learning about a topic. Some time back he posted an issue asking for lists on other topics outside the scope of software development (most lists are broadly related to this).

Lockdown has presented a useful opportunity to create a list about another great crisis of our time, climate breakdown and how we can solve it by achieving net zero. So I’ve started Awesome Net Zero as a list to collate references that are specific to this or closely related to reducing climate change impacts generally.

Do consider adding new entries or contact me to suggest ideas!

Working with Wikidata CLI

2017-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

Wikidata is an amazing open data project. I sporadically work on a variety of edit tasks, either adding items or cleaning up class and instance hierarchies. Recently I’ve been experimenting with the excellent wikidata-cli and wikidata-taxonomy tools as a quicker way to browse and edit content.

I’ve been looking at the sharing economy recently (part of background research related to Metroflows):

> wd search sharing economy
Q2277143   sharing economy economic and social systems that enable shared access to goods, services, data and talent

A summary can be retrieved:

> wd summary Q2277143
Label sharing economy
Description economic and social systems that enable shared access to goods, services, data and talent
instance of (P31): economic system (Q273005)

And a set of claims:

> wd claims Q2277143
instance of (P31):            economic system (Q273005)

part of (P361):               circular economy (Q497743)

topic's main category (P910): Category:Sharing economy (Q22712119)

BnF ID (P268):                           16940993p

Freebase ID (P646):                      /m/0vzt9zc

Quora topic ID (P3417):                  Shareconomy-1

JSTOR topic ID (P3827):                  sharing-economy

Listing the taxonomy raises some questions:

sharing economy (Q2277143) •29
├──crowd funding (Q348303) •45 ×2 ↑
├──carpool (Q749649) •30
├──car sharing system (Q847201) •29 ×4 ↑
├──bicycle-sharing system (Q1358919) •29 ×86 ↑↑↑
│  ├──bicycle-sharing system (Q17332642) •1
│  └──dockless bicycle sharing system (Q42556547) ×5
├──Flight sharing (Q18207130) •3
└──Rideshare (Q19698372) •3

I’m not convinced that systems like car sharing or crowdfunding are subclasses of the sharing economy, more that each could be considered a “part of” or “example of” it, so there is probably some room for improvement in this structure. And of course many other types of systems exist that contribute to a sharing economy. I’ve not yet found an ideal way to capture loose associations such as this.

Sometimes item labels start with capital letters, which for general classes should be lowercase, so that can be adjusted thus (replacing <wd-id> with a proper ID):

wd set-label <wd-id> en "$(wd label <wd-id> | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')"

There are lots more possibilities, I will update this post with more tips in future.

Many thanks to maxlath and nichtich for all their great work on this tools.

Building this blog

2017-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

To start this blog, here’s a quick summary of how I built this blog:

Created a fork of Poole, which appealed as a simple and clean framework. The Lanyon subtheme was very close but rather than use that directly I cherry picked a few simple elements.
Followed this setup guide to get Jekyll updated and setup with GitHub Pages, using my default
Initially I tried to get LiveReload working using this excellent post, Setting up LiveReload with Jekyll, but found it problematic to actually get the livereloading working. While digging around to solve that I found hawkins, which is simpler and just seems to work.
Registered and setup a custom domain. I chose a www subdomain as it has a few additional benefits.

I’ve worked with Jekyll before, notably on experimenting with styleguides, so am keen to use it also for blogging :-)