Bastian Greshake Tzovaras is an open/citizen science activist and researcher with a background in biology and bioinformatics. He worked as a senior researcher at The Alan Turing Institute and Inserm. In 2011, he founded openSNP. He was awarded a PhD in Bioinformatics in 2018. In 2017 he joined the Open Humans Foundation as the Director of Research.
This is a slightly shortened cross-post of a blog post which I co-authored with Otto Richter and William Zijl for the Codeberg blog. While some of the specifics of that post might mostly be relevant to Codeberg in particular, the ‘meat’ of the argument felt general enough to warrant being preserved and archived via this blog.
Last week, I had the pleasure of helping a bit with the delivery of a workshop on “open tools for the production and use of cartographic data” in Venado Tuerto , that Silvina Meritano organised as part of her role as community ambassador for the UN Mappers. The workshop was supported and co-organised by the local municipal government, the Instituto Católico de Enseñanza Superior , the local branch…
tl;dr: With panoramax.libre.net.ar we have set up the first (public) Panoramax instance in the Americas. It allows the collection of street-level imagery in the Argentine territory. Una versión en español es disponible en OpenStreetMap Panoramax is an open-source system for creating a commons of street-level imagery, thus creating an openly licensed alternative to Google StreetView etc. And unlike…
Despite it being a good two years since I’ve made vim my only text editor again , I hadn’t really gotten deeper into using more terminal (or text-base ) user interface (TUI) for a while. With Gemini I started reading gemtext, but that was mostly it. But then the tooi -client for Mastodon really became a game changer, both because of how well-made tooi is and due to how easy it makes it to quickly…
On March 24, memorial events and marches took place across the country
My dislike strong opposition to engaging with “AI” generated things, be that texts, images, code or anything else is well - documented . But avoiding the mindless slop is still getting harder, as it seems that more and more developers, writers – and of course SEO-scum trying to make quick buck – can’t avoid the siren song of ‘removing friction’ , all negative consequences be damned. 1 Technical…
During our trip down in Patagonia last week, we passed by many road signs, barriers at viewpoints, trash cans etc. that were sticker bombed by the many visitors that pass by. Typically, it’s an eclectic mix: People put stickers of their favorite soccer club, there will be large numbers of variants of the “Not Bad” / “Nett hier” Baden-Württemberg stickers , and some advertise shit like bitcoin etc.…
Glaciers & mountains down south in Argentine Patagonia
The 2026 Carnaval celebrations in Agua de Oro and Villa Ani Mi
This post is an adapted/expanded version of an abstract that I have submitted for a track on Open, collaborative and participatory science: rethinking knowledge legitimacy, policy and science futures at the EU-SPRI Annual Conference Over the past decades, the open science movement – as well as the many wider, nonacademic, open knowledge movements – have left their marks by building large, open…
tl;dr: You can now serve map files for CoMaps from your own servers, including local ones. I made a small and simple command-line tool to help you download the maps to your computer and serve them in a local network . CoMaps is a mobile app for Android & iOS that provides offline maps and turn-by-turn navigation – based on data from OpenStreetMap data – that forked from the Organic Maps project in…
A couple of days ago - in light of Mozilla (once again) doubling down in poor decision making - I was saying how it’s a good idea to donate to alternative projects instead , every time Mozilla fails us. But all joking aside, given the state of the world , it’s indeed a good time to support our best shots at maintaining independent software stacks. Servo as an alternative browser engine clearly…
A couple of days ago, I stumbled over a Mastodon post by @johl , in which he shared vimwiki as his approach for taking notes in vim . Which immediately piqued my interest, as I have so far been just taking my notes in plain vim without a way of linking them. While I’m not someone that really uses (or feels any benefits from) second brain note-taking 1 , I do take enough project-related notes that…
For the first half of November, I’ve been in Peru to do some hikes close to Cusco with friends: First, we did a 5 day trek to the Inca site of Choquequirao and back. After a day and a half of rest back in Cusco, we then did the 4-day Inca trail to Machu Picchu as well. Of course, I wanted to use those opportunities to do some surveying and mapping for OpenStreetMap (OSM) along the way as well. But…
tl;dr: People’s motivations to engage with online citizen science are complex and change over time Apparently, last week iNaturalist released a blog post, demoing their mock-up of how they envision using LLMs to process user-contributed wildlife observation data. Back in June, when they (or rather their funder Google) announced this project, it led to substantial backlash among their community ,…
This morning I woke up to the notice that my Garmin watch had now collected enough data to provide me with a Health Status insight - a new beta feature I hadn’t heard about before. Curious, I opened it to see how Garmin approaches making health status predictions – and was greeted with a familiar view. As Apple ’s Vitals screen for their watch, Garmin looks at some physiological parameters (heart…
Reading RSS/Atom feeds as a way to aggregate and keep track of updated news, blogs etc. has been something that has accompanied me for around 20 years by now. Beyond following blogs and news websites, I use feeds to keep track of when pages I watch on Wikipedia (and other Wikis ) are updated, get an aggregated list of commonly shared link from my Mastodon feed , figure out when someone made edits…
Last weekend was the 21st birthday of OpenStreetMap (OSM), and with some friends we celebrated the occasion with a little mapping party. Our plan was to combine flying drones to collect aerial imagery and collecting street-level imagery with more traditional field mapping. Due to high winds, we mostly ended up with street-level imagery and doing field mapping though, using a variety of tools. On…
tl;dr: I made a Mastodon Bot that posts updated statistics for the Panoramax federation alongside randomly selected images once a day. Since posting about Panoramax about a year ago , I’ve been an active contributor, uploading around 530,969 360° images taken during trips in Europe and here in Argentina. So, when @mfuhrmann asked in one of the Panoramax chats whether there was any Mastodon bot…
In some ways, there has been little news in the iNaturalist ‘GenAI’ story : Beyond some vague posturing towards “going to work on improving ways to get feedback from the community” , saying (but not demonstrating) that they are ‘listening’, and somehow doing some ‘webinar’ at some point in the future, there’s been very little commitment from any iNaturalist staff or leaders. Of particular note to…
A couple of days ago, iNaturalist – a citizen science project/platform for observations of living beings in the natural world – announced that they were going to be part of a grant/program of Google to implement generative ‘AI’ (or “GenAI” 1 ) into their tooling. Since then, many users of iNaturalist, including many power-users, have been making their dissatisfaction about this heard, on social…
tl;dr: Inspired by this conversation started by Ethan Marcotte , I’ve gone ahead and added a small link blog to this website too . Instead of having links of interest disappear into the stream of time that is my Mastodon timeline, I thought it would be nice to collect them also here, in a more findable way. It’s based on small yaml files that just collect the date, the link, title and maybe some…
A small Django/Python app to convert popular mastodon links to an RSS feed
Create a single JSON endpoint that delivers data about yourself
tl;dr: It’s been around 6 weeks using an ergonomic split keyboard. Inspired by Peter’s blog post about his experiences in changing to a split keyboard (and alternative keyboard layouts), I wanted to share bit of my own journey of using an ergonomic split keyboard: As part of the “elder millennials” , I grew up around early DOS computers and their command-line, followed by an early internet that…
In one form or another, this website has had the little widget to display some information about myself at the bottom of the page since 2018. The data is delivered through a small Django web app that regularly aggregates data from a variety of sources, picks the bits of info worth displaying, and then offers a simple JSON endpoint to access it. In the first iteration , it included accessing my…
tl;dr: A long list of what I used to replace iOS apps when I switched to GrapheneOS. In the last year or so I’ve been working on taking back control over my means of computation , starting with my main computer, but also where I host my code and how I host some of the things I use . On the mobile side of things, I kept using my ageing iPhone as it was working well enough, but the shackles that…
tl;dr: Here’s a small addition to how you can also scramble images so that “AI” scrapers will end up with a poisoned data set Earlier this year, I’ve written about how I setup this static website to not only serve human-readable data, but also “poisoned data” to mess with the scrapers that are used to collect the training data sets for generative “AI”. As static website deployments via Codeberg…
As this blog post is being published, we are sending out emails to all openSNP users with some news: OpenSNP will be turned off – and with that also delete all the data stored on it – on April 30, 2025 . Given that the project has been part of my life for so many years and shaped how I view (data) commons and open & free culture, it seemed just right to take a bit of space for a retrospective -…
tl;dr: I made a small contribution to MapComplete that allows adding/editing wayside shrines to OpenStreetMap . Argentina is full of little way-side shrines, to saints recognized by the Catholic church such as San Expedito but also to folk saints that are not recognized by the church, like Difunta Correa and Gauchito Gil . For a while now, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with them, due to their…
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on migrating the website of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) from being run based on a self-hosted Wordpress blog to Hugo . I thought it would be nice to share a bit of background on the requirements and the how & why the migration was done. While Bioinformatics in some forms is even older, the OBF itself has been around the block for quite a…
Just a small public service announcement: If you’re using the Gemini protocol, my webste (well, in particular the blog posts), are now also accessible via Gemini at gemini://tilde.club/~gedankenstuecke/. You can also find a web-proxied version here.
In mid-2024, I’ve moved back to using vim as my main text editor , both for code and prose like this blog post. Something like 15 years ago I had dabbled a bit with vim, but never much more than being able to perform simple edits and get the hang of the hjkl navigation. Good enough to quickly make minor edits from any shell, but not a whole lot more. This time around, I’ve already gotten a lot…
tl;dr: Blog posts here can now have a little button at the bottom that can pull in “comments” that are made by replying to a post on the Fediverse (i.e. Mastodon et al.). Some days ago, I saw the nifty little “comment” integration that FOSS Academic Robert W. Gehl has on his blog, which in turn were inspired by some other integrations. I particularly liked Robert’s implementation though, as it…
Science that’s not just made by and for white men is under more-than-usual attack these days, thanks to the new administration in the USA under the leadership of Trump/Musk, which made a directive to remove all mentions and funding for initiatives relating to diversity, equity & inclusion (DEI) on January 22, 2025. Of course, it’s somewhat unsurprising that federal agencies would comply with this,…
March in Rosario, Argentina on February 1st, 2025
tl;dr: Here’s a how-to for adding some “AI”-poison to your static site that’s hosted on Codeberg Pages (or GitHub Pages ). I’d appreciate some feedback on if this is useful/how it could be improved. If you’re running any type of website in 2025, you’ll likely be suffering from the impact of generative “AI”. Be that “AI”-generated spam posted to your site , crawlers bringing your server(s) down or…
A small map-extract of Venado Tuerto over four time points in 2024, showing the addition of buildings and POI. tl;dr: One can now create >2 frames in the OSM comparison GIF. And the MyBinder version can download OSM history files , no local up/downloads needed. Just click here to launch it . In the last post I wrote about working on making it easier to create before/after maps for OpenStreetMap,…
If you pick dates close to each other, they also make for a great “find the differences”-puzzle.
Ever since a certain someone bought Twitter, I’ve been quite invested into using the Fediverse as my main social web efforts. My Mastodon timeline does a good job for short-form text updates. And Pixelfed is a great nascent Instagram-replacement. One thing I particularly enjoy about both of them is the fact that they bring back the simple, chronological timeline. Having an actual timeline (to me)…