I thought it would be good to revisit my great 2020 plan from the start of the year and see the progress that I’ve made. I’d say I’ve made reasonable progress, but not as much as I’d have liked. I put this partially down to my shifting interests - notably getting more and more interested in the world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies.

Ethereum 2.0 node running on my Raspberry Pi - I've still yet to read the book, but I thought these together would make a good photo op After taking part in the Topaz testnet, I obviously had to take part in Ethereum 2.0’s “official” multi-client testnet 😊 - hopefully the final testnet before mainnet launches.

It’s been quite a long time since my last update. Things that I’ve done since May - I completed a short course at City, University of London - Introduction to Data Analytics and Machine Learning with Python Attended an online webinar hosted by IBM on quantum computing - Throwing the dice with a Quantum Computer Set up another Ethereum 2.

Things that I’ve done over the past couple of months. Wrote a tool that monitors changes to sitemaps. I needed something that would detect newly published webpages for archival capture. The Github repo is here. I started a short course at City, University of London - Introduction to Data Analytics and Machine Learning with Python.

Over the past year or so I’ve become increasingly interested in blockchains/cryptocurrencies, especially Ethereum - a blockchain famed for its executable smart contracts. The project is to undergo a major upgrade over the coming years, resulting in Ethereum 2.0 The upgrade aims to address scalability issues of Ethereum 1.0 via ‘sharding’ - which essentially means breaking up the blockchain into multiple blockchains.

I’m currently reading a book called The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation (Owens, T. 2018). While it doesn’t sound that exciting - I’m really enjoying it. I like how the author highlights some important things to consider using some really interesting examples. Alexei Shulgin’s Form Art - aesthetic considerations, how web browsers display HTML changes over time, how important is the browser rendering?

I’ve made a start on Brian Harvey’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs lectures - based on the book with the same name. I’m about 7 lectures in and I’m enjoying it so far. My only gripe is that the videos look like they were filmed in the 1980s - when they are actually from 2011.

It has been a steady couple of months, despite the world going into lockdown over COVID-19. I’ve mostly been occupied with web archiving and digital preservation stuff. I’ve been playing around with the Internet Archive’s brozzler crawler; using ExifTool to modify metadata; and I’ve been writing all sorts of scripts/tools to automate small tasks (I’m thinking of putting them together as a collection on GitHub).

A continuation of my WARCings. Writing WARCs with warcio The following code logs into a website and uses warcio to write logged-in pages to a WARC file. This would be especially useful for capturing basic webpages / media files. It will have to be improved in order to capture embedded resources - this is probably relatively straightforward though.

It has been a quite varied month. I attended two coding meetups: New Year’s Hyperledger @ PwC More London IBM Code London - Audio Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks @ Techspace Shoreditch I built a blockchain using Python, more on that here