More videos at the original post, but I would like to highlight these videos:

• How do vaccines work? Kelwalin Dhanasarnsombut, Ted-Ed (2015) Good general introduction.
• How fast can a vaccine be made? Dan Kwartler, Ted-Ed (Jun 2020)
• mRNA vaccines A slightly technical but nonetheless approachable explainer of how mRNA vaccines work (the basis of both Pfizer-BioNTech's and Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine).

And not to forget, Wikipedia has an excellent article on the current state of our COVID-19 vaccines.

A very visual demonstration of how cheap lighting is today (well, since electricity), and how expensive it used to be.

Related: consider the impact of nanostructures on improvements to modern LEDs.

Free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. Windows, Mac or Linux.

I heard about it just recently, and in short order stumbled on a number of interesting ideas:

• The OBS Screen Timer Zoom Trick, CogDog
• OBS Livestreaming vs Zoom for Dynamic A/Synchronous Teaching, anth101
• Hosting Studio20 using OBS with Zoom, EdTechFactotum
• Recorded livestream on how to set the foundation for your OBS Studio setup, stream starts at 3:18, starts talking about OBS studio at 6:25. Eric Nantz shares best practices and tips for showcasing R analyses. Via R Weekly 2021-W28.

Podcast (Hanselminutes) with OBS project lead Hugh Bailey (July 2020)

Plugins

https://obs.ninja

Ok, so this video is a few years old, but it does not have anywhere near the views it deserves. It's never too late to do reproducible science! (Video 1m 44s)

Reproducible science not only reduce errors, but speeds up the process of re-running your analysis and auto-generate updated documents with the results.

• https://fontawesome.com
• https://forkaweso.me NO LONGER MAINTAINED
• https://jpswalsh.github.io/academicons
• Heroicons, SVG icons, MIT license. Via mediakollen.
• Noun Project: Free Icons & Stock Photos for Everything, free tier at 1 MP resolution with CC BY-NC-ND license.

I like to think of this as the whole sky always being "there", but the Earth blocks about half of it ALL THE TIME! Alternately, if we look straight "up", we're always pointed towards a different part of same sky. I made these reprocessed spherical timelapses to hopefully communicate these perspectives. I think it's pretty incredible how the sky acts like an ever-changing window on our universe.

Screen capture is useful to create short instruction videos and the like. GIF is the most common output format. But GIF is an awful format. Consider first creating a normal video first, then using something like gifski to encode to GIF without losing too much quality.

• Peek, animated GIF recorder. Linux, FOSS (repo).
• Gifine, record from a directory of frames, or select a region of your desktop. Linux, FOSS (repo).
• SilentCast, silent mkv screencast and animated GIFs. Linux, FOSS (repo).
• Byzanz, part of GNOME. Linux, FOSS.
• ScreenToGif, screen, webcam and sketchboard recorder. Windows only, FOSS (repo, ghacks article)
• Cropper, screen capture utility. Windows only, FOSS.
• GifCam. Windows only. ghacks article.
• GiftedMotion (Java JAR, very old software, ghacks article)
• LICEcap. Windows, OSX and WINE. Github repo.
• On Mac OS X, there's a built-in QuickTime screen recorder.
• OS X screencast to animated GIF using only free tools, instructions here.
• GIF Brewery. MacOS, Mac App Store.
• Kazam, project seems a bit outdated. Recently suggested by Darren Goossens.

Similar lists by others

• https://www.nextofwindows.com/5-free-tools-to-screen-capture-to-gif-on-windows
• https://itsfoss.com/best-gif-recorder-linux/

To me, buying an app is serving me a fish dinner; giving me a script I can modify is a lesson in fishing. I’d rather fish. You?

That's a nice analogy by CogDog. I'll have to remember it.

Independent app stores (with their own repository of apps)

• F-Droid. The gold standard of FOSS app stores.
• UpToDown, mostly Google Play's apps it seems, but also accepts submissions from developers. Run by Spanish company, not FOSS, but can be used without user registration.

Alternative front-end clients to F-Droid

• G-Droid

Simply front-ends to the Google Play store

• Aurora, FOSS client. Available from F-Droid
• Yalp, FOSS client. Available from F-Droid

We estimate COVID risk in units of microCOVIDs, where 1 microCOVID = a one-in-a-million chance of getting COVID.

Compare with the concept of micromort.

Via FlowingData

"Econometrics and Free Software" by Bruno Rodrigues.

Dr. Iman Abuzeid is the co-founder and CEO of Incredible Health, a digital platform that helps streamline the hiring process for nurses and recruiting hospitals. After seeing an increased demand for nurses in April, and a shift to hiring digitally, the platform has now been able to expedite the hiring process to 15 days or less, compared to an industry standard of 90 days.

• Space-group symmetry
• Magnetic Symmetry and Applications
• Group-Subgroup Relations of Space Groups
• Representations and Applications
• Solid State Theory Applications
• Structure Utilities
• Topological Quantum Chemistry
• Subperiodic Groups: Layer, Rod and Frieze Groups
• Structure Databases
• Raman and Hyper-Raman scattering
• Point-group symmetry
• Plane-group symmetry
• Double point and space groups

How to cite the BCS. Related papers are tagged "Bilbao Crystallographic Server" in Zotero.

This directory provides an index of 1506 books published across 79 Pressbooks networks. Search and filter books by keyword, subject matter, license, and more.

Via Edtech Factotum

Sorry about the mangled toot earlier!

I just figured out how to send any note I make in my Shaarli instance to my Mastodon and Twitter feeds. Awesome! Now I can keep my content on my own site, but still share it with silos like Twitter.
https://shaarli.chepec.se/shaare/YSJ_Cg

Trying to apply the idea of POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) to my own posting. Here I'll summarise my results.

Automatically tweet public links I add to Shaarli (this would be a very convenient solution). But did not work because Twitter now requires you to jump through hoops to get access to the Twitter API from within your own Twitter account! Most egregiously, there is no way to complete their application procedure without handing over and verifying your phone number. Not doing that, Twitter can forget about it.

I still liked the idea of using Shaarli as my canonical source, so to speak, so let's look into Shaarli -> Mastodon instead. Alright, that's awesome and works great (well, unfortunately my Mastodon instance does not render Markdown, but that's not shaarli2mastodon's fault - I'll just have to avoid using Markdown in Shaarli notes posted to Mastodon).

With Shaarli -> Mastodon working, let's explore whether Lond's Mastodon <-> Twitter cross-poster can tweet our toots.

And yes, indeed, that worked right away. All I had to do was authorize the app on both my Mastodon and Twitter accounts. It needs lot of permissions, but hey, at least its source code is public, and it's even possible to self-host it.

That's positively awesome! I can now select to post any Shaarli note to Mastodon, and doing so will automatically
cross-post the same to Twitter too. Well done, POSSE!

• micro.blog is perhaps a nice alternative to self-hosting, and allows cross-posting to Twitter, Mastodon, et al.
• github.com/AmauryCarrade/MastodonToTwitter is another software project, but may be broken (last commit over a year ago, with an open issue that looks worrying)
• https://github.com/renatolond/mastodon-twitter-poster
• https://github.com/bitkeks/mastodon-to-twitter
• https://github.com/yogthos/mastodon-bot
• https://p.xuv.be/how-to-transition-from-twitter-to-mastodon
• https://tantek.com/2023/296/t1/posse-syndicate-link-reply
• https://tantek.com/2024/173/t1/years-posse-microformats-adoption

Seems there is a new kid on the block: moa.