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Rohit Farmer, Ph.D.
@rohitfarmer@fosstodon.org
mastodon 4.7.3Computational Biologist. Passionate about self‑hosted services, free software, ham radio, and outdoor adventures. Indian expat in the United States, married, father of two, Christian.
Rohit (pronunciation) = Row Hit
Keyoxide: https://keyoxide.org/aspe:keyoxide.org:LYZNNNWNTWKBSQEDI46BBOEU3E
406 Followers
353 Following
38 Posts
Joined November 13, 2025
Personal Website:
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Woop, woop, my website reached 50 blog posts today.
#blogging #blogpost #selfhosting #writing #personalwebsite #quarto #indieweb
It's so hypocritical that people who oppose #AI because it doesn't compensate or credit original creators are asking people to download pirated copies of the new Harry Potter movies because they oppose J.K. Rowling.
If piracy is wrong, then it should be wrong everywhere. You can't promote piracy in #movies, #music, and #books and oppose #LLMs.
Let's popularize the Quotes pages. Let people know which #words have inspired you the most or what you turn to for reminders on how you conduct your life. Let me know if you build a quotes page on your website, and I will list them on my page.
#indieweb #smallweb #smolweb #quotes #thoughts #philosophy #life #inspiring
Worked a little bit more on my #crowdsourced book-writing project website. It looks cleaner and more informative. I also designed the #logo using #Inkscape, the old-fashioned way. It reminded me of my #PhD days when I generated all my thesis figures using Inkscape.
Open Handbook Commons
Open Practical Knowledge for Everyone
Happy International Women's Day
I created the first release of the Digital Literacy #crowdsourced book, with the first two parts complete. #GitHub releases will also be archived on #Zenodo and assigned a DOI. Please feel free to comment or contribute.
Here is the repo for the first book we plan to launch as part of the Open Handbook Commons. Right now, it just has an outline. People are invited to comment or contribute.
#freebooks #opensource #crowdsource #digitalliteracy #communitydriven
Open Handbook: Digital Literacy
A Practical Guide to Using Technology Wisely
https://github.com/openhandbookcommons/ohc-001-digital-literacy
Replying to
Every year, I focus on one or two outdoor activities. Last year, it was all about #paddling. This year, it will be #biking and #overlanding.
However, I have also planned two family car camping trips and one rafting trip. So much to do in so little time. Can we have a longer summer this year?
For my Open Handbook Commons #crowdsourced book writing project. I now have a public Matrix space that people can join.
"#open-handbook:matrix.org"
#freebooks #OpenSource #public #CreativeCommons #books #matrix #quarto
We spent the afternoon at Swains Lock next to the Potomac River. Just hammocking and building some fire. It felt great to spend some time outside in the sun after the brutal cold of the past few weeks.
Updated my now page today
#Indieweb #NowPage #SmallWeb #quarto #personalwebsite #staticsite
Why your files are slowly dying
Interesting article by @wojtekpow@mastodon.social.
https://behindtheviewfinder.com/why-your-files-are-slowly-dying/
Resumed gym today after 2 and a half weeks of break. It feels good.
Now we have an FAQ page on the Open Handbook Commons website.
#freebooks #collaboration #opensource #creativecommons #writing #books
I am excited about the Harry Potter remake and the new Lord of the Rings movies. I am sure with the current tech, they can do a better job with CGI and all. These movies had a great impact on me when they were released. Now I hope I can watch them with my kids in their new format.
Added this page to the online services section of my documentation website. It's a list of free (also ad-free) and mostly temporary file-sharing websites run by volunteers or small teams (it seems). Let me know if there are others that I should include in my list.
I have such a disconnect between my mind and body right now. My mind is in late spring to summer, and my body is in winter. I can't take this fluctuating Maryland weather anymore. Choose either winter or spring, Mother Nature.
Why is OSMand+ so confusing? I want to use it more regularly, but the whole interface is so non-intuitive.
I am trying Organic Maps now.
I went for a hike after quite a few weeks, but these downed trees blocked my path. The weather was nice, so I continued finding alternative trails. It didn't go as planned, but I managed not to let it spoil my day completely.
Turkey Run Trail, Virginia
#ChatGPT is excellent at summarizing #research papers or converting them to simplified English. It's especially helpful for preparing for a journal club presentation, which is just a burden in academic life that you can't escape. When I leave science, I will cite torturing journal clubs as the primary reason.
Whoever came up with journal clubs must be a real-life #loser.
I am reading this paper for my journal club next week. It's interesting, but I hate giving journal clubs.
#science #bioinformatics #immunology #machineLearning #deeplearning #statistics
Machine learning enables efficient and effective affinity maturation of nanobodies
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.11.698911v1
The chapter outline is ready for the #crowdsourced book on Digital Literacy. Please feel free to contribute or comment.
#freebooks #OpenSource #digitalliteracy
#openknowledge #commons
People oppose the use of #AI and #LLM because they don't credit or compensate creators. What are your views about the #pirated material distributed by sites like Anna's Archive, Sci Hub, etc? Piracy sites have been operating for decades, long before any AI, offering books, movies, music, software, and more illegally, harming creators. But I never saw anyone adding a "/piracy" page on their website denouncing the use of pirated material.
People oppose the use of pirated books for #LLM training, which makes sense, since these companies can buy a legit copy. But I also want to let everyone know that NO college student in #India has EVER EVER bought an ebook since I was in college. However, every book in the world is available on every engineering student's laptop.
Excluding me, of course, I was/am innocent. 😇
Replying to
@henry@dindon.one sorry for your loss. I am not surprised that people are using ChatGPT to write condolence messages. Before LLMs, people used to Google for appropriate words. Especially people like me who are not native English speakers. It's not because I am not sincere, I am just not confident and do not want to make a mistake and hurt someone who is already in distress.
I would say do not make too much out of how the messages were generated. Most people come from good hearts, especially in tragedy.
What's the advantage of using a TOML file over YAML files? I find TOML really confusing.
Porsche drivers suck.
I now have 110 repositories in my #GitHub account, so today I decided to clone all of them to my #doomsday #vault just in case GitHub goes away tomorrow without notice. I also set up a cron job to pull all the repositories every day at 4 am to keep them up to date. This is for backup. I will not use this location to work.
Here are the steps that I used:
https://docs.rohitfarmer.com/vcs/git-github/#clone-all-github-repositories-using-gh-cli
I am binge-watching Young Sherlock on Prime today.
Whoever has the power of #geoengineering, can you please stop playing with the temperature? It's #spring, with temperatures at -1 degrees Celsius. That's not funny, sir/madam.
Have people tried #Matrix Spaces here? I am considering using it for private invite-only channels for a project that I am about to start. I want something for long-term stability with modest feature requirements. Mainly #GitHub issue/discussions integration. I like that Matrix is decentralized and has apps for desktop, phone, and web.
Penimimal
“One should not only photograph things for what they are, but for what else they are.” — Minor White
https://om.co/2026/03/30/minimal-and-abstract-pen-photography/
I am now using #Zensical for my #documentation website, using the same code I used for Materials for #mkdocs. I converted the mkdocs.yml to zensical.toml using #chatgpt, and I didn't like the TOML format. It looks unnecessarily complicated. So I will continue using YAML until it becomes necessary.
Can someone help us make our website more search-engine-friendly? It's a work in progress, built by #Quarto, hosted on #GitHub Pages, and served via a #CloudFlare CDN.
Quarto has a bunch of features for adding metadata, etc. Here is the GitHub repo for the #website
Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates.
Some days are extra shitty