Welcome to my corner of the web! My name is Taha Ahmed and I’m the author of this site.

I like the idea of giving back to the community by building on/with free software and free knowledge in general, and as such I take every opportunity to promote open science, open data, and open source.1 All of which is made possible by the open web.2

I maintain many self-hosted services, here are some I would like to mention:

  • my linkblog where I share interesting tidbits I’ve encountered while browsing the web (sometimes with commentary). You can subscribe to it using its RSS feed.
  • my self-hosted Gitea instance.
  • my public Shiny server. If you work with UV-Vis spectroscopy of semiconductors, check out my Tauc fit evaluator. I have written a how-to install Shiny, but that post should really be updated…
  • a few RStudio Server instances (primarily for my own use). I have an old write-up on that setup (they are now run in LXC containers managed entirely via Ansible playbook, so the config described in that post is woefully out-dated…).
  • a JupyterHub instance for my own use, which I’ve setup with Python, Julia and R kernels.

The site header contains links to some of my web profiles (I try to use only libre services, but it’s a work in progress :-), and here are some more of them that did not make it into the header:

The source code of this blog (including that of the blog posts themselves) is hosted on codeberg.org.

I have chosen not to use a regular comment system for this blog. Instead I’d like to encourage you, dear reader, to use hypothes.is which effectively provides an annotation layer for the web. You’ll see a sidebar to the right — open it to annotate! Please note that I have no control over the content of these annotations, it’s up to you and other web users whether to enable this annotation layer or not. It’s possible to receive all annotations made on this blog by subscribing to this customised hypothes.is stream (Atom feed).

You may of course also send me comments via email or any of the channels listed above.

  1. See, for example: Alan Jacobs, Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future. The Hedgehog Review: Vol. 20 No. 1 (Spring 2018). ↩︎

  2. Interested in the subject? A couple of excellent essays, both by Parimal Satyal: Rediscovering the small web, and Against an increasingly user-hostile web. ↩︎