The COVID-19 confinement in Paris and France at large lasted from March 17th to May 11th, with comparatively strict measures on when you could leave your house, where you could go and for how long & when you could be outside. As a result a lot of folks, including me were forced to drastically change their daily routines, shifting to a home office approach.

Geotagging photos in Adobe Lightroom . After semi-accidentally ending up at SantaCon in San Francisco last weekend, I was wondering how I could geo-tag my photos more easily. If you’re only taking pictures with your smartphone, that’s not much of an issue as the internal GPS applies the metadata automatically. But lots of modern cameras still don’t come with an internal GPS or require some ridiculous add-ons.

What the output of a personal API can look like. Open Humans has been expanding thanks to lots of new data sources that have gone live in the last couple of months. Thanks to our Outreachy interns we already have added support for sharing your Google Location History and your Spotify Listening History.

Participating in the Mozilla Global Sprint is somewhat of an annual ritual for me. This year’s installment took place on May 10/11. As Open Humans hadn’t ever participated in a Sprint before, I spent some time in getting up a clean list of ways to contribute on a small micro-site.

“ Algorithm ” is a word that has become more and more meaningless in our day and age – given how it is thrown around everywhere. If you bring it up with people who didn’t undergo some form of tech initiation – be that formal education or self-learning - it’s easy for them to conjure a picture like the one above: A colourful mess of things, too complex to understand if you don’t have some advanced degree in computer science.

A bit of navel gazing for this post. Since moving the blog to wordpress.com in the summer, it recently accrued 5000 views. Time to analyse what people are reading… The most popular post on the blog (by a long way) is “Strange Things“, a post about the eLife impact factor (2824 views). The next most popular is a post about a Twitter H-index, with 498 views.