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Jack Farley, Computer Engineer

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  • 12/25/2020, 12:13:48 AM

    A new Litter Survey

    softwarelitterlitter-survey

    In a culmination of litter surveys and litter picks, linked data() and data exploration, and remoteStorage and ActivityPub, I have created a web-based litter pick/survey app that I hope will allow federated citizen science.

    The Background

    Being in the UK for the last few years, I have become ever more aware of the impact of humans on the world. It seems nearly impossible in the UK to go somewhere there isn't a piece of litter. Centres like Cardiff and London are horrendous, even with the council cleaners that I have an admiration for.

    While in Cardiff, I bought a litter picker and a bag holder so that I could hopefully make people think twice about the litter. I have also done litter cleanups and surveys for both Thames21 and the Marine Conservation Society.

    One thing I have noticed, in the realm of litter and other conservation organisations is there is a lot of data of all types being collected and no great ways of exploring the data or finding it in first place. This, along with looking into decentralised alternatives to social platforms, has led me down the path of looking at technologies such as linked data, ActivityStreams, ActivityPub, JSON-LD, JSON Schema, remoteStorage and IndieAuth and wondering if there is a better way.

    The Idea

    My pie-in-the-sky idea was to have the tools for a Mastodon of the organisation science world including:

    • formalised schemas for observations
    • libraries for letting organisations and citizen scientists publish and subscribe to new observations
    • customisable apps for collecting and exploring data.

    Organisations and people would be able to subscribe to subjects such as species or survey types. They would be able to create and share their own observations, storing them on their own storage and/or submitting them to other central data repositories. Those subscribed would receive notifications about the new data.

    Verification of the data or the organisation or person would be needed to make the data useable for research. This could be done numerous ways depending on the type of observation.

    The Initial Litter App

    The app itself is written using Preact (a lightweight WebApp library) and Leaflet (a mapping library) and uses modern browser APIs for the camera, geolocation, storage and caching.

    My aim is make the app as generic and flexible as possible, so that organisations can style and customise what is available to their own needs and it can be used by all in all environments.

    The app allows you to record individual bits of litter or collections of litter collected during a litter survey. Each piece of litter is currently categorised using the categories from the Marine Conservation Society beach clean survey form, which is very similar to the European Environment Agency Marine Litterwatch category list. It is able to take photos of litter and record the position of the litter as well as a track during a litter survey. You are able to look through previously picked litter and surveys.

    My ideas for future functionality:

    • live trash counts from other people on the same survey as you
    • different survey types
    • specifying the brands of pieces of litter
    • automatic recognition of litter through the use of image object recognition
    • offline use

    The app is currently up at https://litter.gfon.org (note that it doesn't yet submit your data or allow you to store your data remotely - that's still on the TODO). The code, as always, is available on gitlab.

    Close
  • 12/13/2020, 6:00:00 PM

    Hoe Stream Trash

    litterpi-trash-camlitter-pick

    My latest litter pick target was Hoe Stream and the White Rose Lane Local Nature Reserve. Here's how it went.

  • 11/24/2020, 6:00:00 PM

    Release the Beast

    softwaregitlabcirelease

    I just created a Gitlab CI job to create a release with information from a CHANGELOG.md file for some of my projects. Here's how I did it.

  • 9/30/2020, 9:00:00 PM

    Gitlab CI Caching

    gitlabcontinuous integration

    I noticed something strange happening during build process during a multi-tasking bug fix. Turns out I was using Gitlab CI's caching incorrectly. I should have been using artifacts. Here's what I saw.

  • 9/21/2020, 6:00:00 PM

    Birthday Trash

    litterpi-trash-cam

    As a birthday treat, I took the day off work to try out my electronerised litter picker. Here's how it went.

  • 9/13/2020, 12:12:13 AM

    Pi Trash Cam

    raspberry pielectronicslitterpi-trash-cam

    In preparation for a day of litter picking, I finally got round to a project idea - attaching a camera to a litter picker to record it all. Here's what I did.

  • 8/25/2020, 9:29:58 PM

    yarn add --dev webdriverio

    first-draftsoftwaretestinggitlab

    I finally started implementing UI testing on first-draft using WebdriverIO. While writing tests was easy, getting the tests running was a little more difficult. Here is how I did it.

  • 8/16/2020, 7:04:44 PM

    Hooray! My new blog is live! Based on Sapper, using MongoDB and eventually ActivityPub and ActivityStreams, it will be my federated posting hub to the world.

    softwareblog
  • 8/9/2020, 5:40:49 PM

    Removing EXIF Data from Photos

    exifphotos

    Creating this new blog, I wanted to make sure there was no metadata data leaking personal information. Here's how I removed all the metadata tags except the ones I wanted from my photos.

  • 8/9/2020, 10:21:41 AM

    tmux List and Reattach

    tmuxbashsoftware

    Using tmux for your terminal multiplexer but want an easy to reattach to a session? Here's a small bash script to do it.

  • 8/8/2020, 2:58:48 PM

    Selectable Shell Examples

    markdownsyntaxcss

    Here's how to help your readers save time by making your post's shell commands easy to select and copy - with a simple CSS property.

  • 8/5/2020, 6:48:38 PM

    Be Dates You

    mongodbdocker

    Making my new blog, I didn't initially set the published dates to be native dates in the database. Here what I did to change them ...and do all the upgrades I needed.

  • 7/8/2020, 4:00:00 PM

    Testing vue components

    softwarevuetestingjavascript

    I recently needed to test that some Vue components were creating the correct HTML. To do this, I decided to create snapshots of Object representations of the rendered HTML.

  • 2/20/2019, 12:00:00 AM

    No More Numbers

    javascripthtml5software

    HTML5 number inputs aren't useful, but tel inputs, have all the power

  • 12/21/2018, 12:00:00 AM

    A Hacker "Hacked" Me

    securityemailgrep

    I decided to look into the extortion emails I have been getting and wrote a small script to extract the bitcoin addresses that have been used.

  • 12/7/2018, 12:00:00 AM

    Mouse Surgery

    pledge to not upgradeelectronics

    As part of my pledge not to upgrade, I decided to repair two of my failing mice instead of replacing them with a brand new model (as tempting as it was). Here's what I did.

  • 10/29/2018, 7:00:00 PM

    Danger Danger, Highly Reactive

    vuereactivegraphingdata
  • 9/11/2018, 7:00:00 AM

    Switching to SSR

    reactssrreact-loader
  • 8/10/2018, 4:00:00 PM

    Clean Docker Registry

    nodedockerconsolejavascript
  • 2/1/2018, 12:00:00 AM

    Testing on the Filesystem

    testingjavascript
  • 1/26/2018, 12:00:00 AM

    Tag You Are

    javascripttags
  • 1/25/2018, 9:00:00 PM

    NaN Got Me

    rubber duck savejavascriptnodejsjson
  • 4/28/2017, 10:25:34 AM

    All our app's tabs are belong to us

    angularjavascriptlocalstoragerxjssessionstorage
  • 2/20/2016, 2:33:19 AM

    Developing NPM modules

    nodejsnpm
  • 2/20/2016, 1:48:13 AM

    Nfa + Nfb or N(f+fa+fb)

    arrayfunctionjavascriptjsperf
  • 10/31/2015, 3:36:29 PM

    Photo Layout

    arrangercssgallery hierarchyhtmljavascriptphotostinymcewordpresssoftware
  • 10/31/2015, 2:33:49 PM

    Browning Pass HideAway Web Site

    cssgallery hierarchyhtmlwordpress
  • 10/17/2015, 4:04:57 PM

    Think Mobile

    mobileweb
  • 10/13/2015, 9:30:59 AM

    Pledge to Refuse and Not Buy Bottled Water

    environmentpledges
  • 2/25/2015, 7:42:33 AM

    Run PHP run!

    maximum execution timephptrial and error
  • 11/26/2014, 6:35:32 AM

    Gallery Hierarchy

    galleryhierarchyphotos
  • 10/3/2014, 7:22:04 AM

    Vim and functions

    functionnavigationtagsvim
  • 9/26/2014, 3:18:53 AM

    I'm making hierarchies

    hierarchical datahierarchyphp
  • 9/4/2014, 1:45:18 PM

    Google Sheets fun

    googlegoogle scriptgoogle sheetsjavascriptsheets
  • 8/13/2014, 3:14:22 AM

    Travel Photos

    photo managementphotostravel photos
  • 8/13/2014, 3:02:22 AM

    Image managment scripts

    photo managementphotos
  • 7/31/2014, 3:43:45 PM

    MeldCE logo

    csshtml5javascriptsvg
  • 4/26/2014, 6:34:09 AM

    MoltenDB

    databasemoltendbmongodbnodejs
  • 10/29/2013, 12:09:07 AM

    The Expensive Side

    house
  • 9/22/2013, 7:00:08 PM

    abcde

    music
  • 7/16/2013, 8:26:10 PM

    Energizer Power Plus Rechargeable Batteries

    gadgets
  • 3/4/2013, 6:27:40 PM

    USAR FOGTeX

    fogtex
  • 2/21/2013, 9:09:54 PM

    Personal Gear Bag

    rescuegear
  • 2/18/2013, 11:10:34 PM

    Geocaching Stamp

    stampgeocaching
  • 4/2/2007, 3:50:02 PM

    Call Record Presenter

    parserpythonsqliteweb
  • 9/25/2004, 9:48:10 AM

    Kimi Ora School

    csshtml
  • 6/25/2004, 8:53:53 AM

    All About Catering Web Site

    csshtml
  • 7/26/2003, 7:52:11 AM

    Quantum Accounting Web Site

    csshtml
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