If you need some quick commands to paste to check if your docker volume mounting is working correctly here you go! Commands below!
2020 Year Review
Another year is up, and what a year it has been. I finally open sourced wbstack, I complained about fake news, looked at Minecraft mods and took a look at how COVID-19 was affecting Wikipedia page views. I make this post mainly for me to be able to look back at each year in a…
Google outage article by The Express ‘This could be 9/11 of hacks’
I’m here after a certain Google outage lead to at least 1 sensational headline misleading some people that contact me asking for an opinion. I was aware of the outage at the time as I was trying to use Google products. The article headline that I dive into below just made me laugh at the…
Auto reloading pi kiosk script from Github
While at Newspeak House in 2020 I found myself wanting to change how the screens dotted around the place worked. A little bit of context is needed here. These screens were dotted around the communal areas, each attached to as raspberry pi, and each running a kiosk script to load a browser and website when…
Open Sourcing WBStack
Open Sourcing the code and config for WBStack has always been part of the plan, although functionality came first throughout the first year or so. Finally there is a github organization for wbstack containing 16 public repositories that make up the entire deployment for wbstack.com. This effort took a few weeks trying to split sensible…
Creating a new replica after purging binlogs with bitnami mariadb docker images
I have been using the bitnami mariadb docker images and helmfiles for just over a year now in a personal project (wbstack). I have 1 master and 1 replica setup in a cluster serving all of my SQL needs. As the project grew disk space became pressing and from an early time I has to…
2020 Election, Registered voters misinformation #voterfraud?
On November 4th 2020 I managed to get an overview of exactly how misinformation and “fake news” can start so accidently, and spread so rapidly. While scrolling through Twitter during the 2020 US Presidential election, I spotted some tweets saying that more people had voted in Wisconsin than were originally registered in the state. You…
Faster munging for the Wikidata Query Service using Hadoop
The Wikidata query service is a public SPARQL endpoint for querying all of the data contained within Wikidata. In a previous blog post I walked through how to set up a complete copy of this query service. One of the steps in this process is the munge step. This performs some pre-processing on the RDF…
How can I get data on all the dams in the world? Use Wikidata
During my first week at Newspeak house while explaining Wikidata and Wikibase to some folks on the terrace the topic of Dams came up while discussing an old project that someone had worked on. Back in the day collecting information about Dams would have been quite an effort, compiling a bunch of different data from…
Creating new Wikidata items with OpenRefine and Quickstatements
Following on from my blog post using OpenRefine for the first time, I continued my journey to fill Wikidata with all of the Tors on Dartmoor. This post assumes you already have some knowledge of Wikidata, Quickstatements, and have OpenRefine setup. Note: If you are having problems with the reconciliation service it might be worth…