20 items tagged “museums”
2024
Niche Museums: The Vincent and Ethel Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection. DjangoCon was in Durham, North Carolina this year and thanks to Atlas Obscura I found out about the fabulous Vincent and Ethel Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection. We got together a group of five for a visit and had a wonderful time being shown around the collection by curator Vincent Simonetti. This is my first update to Niche Museums in quite a while, it's nice to get that project rolling again.
The Radio Squirrels of Point Reyes (via) Beautiful photo essay by Ann Hermes about the band of volunteer “radio squirrels” keeping maritime morse code radio transmissions alive in the Point Reyes National Seashore.
2023
Weeknotes: Citus Con, PyCon and three new niche museums
I’ve had a busy week in terms of speaking: on Tuesday I gave an online keynote at Citus Con, “Big Opportunities in Small Data”. I then flew to Salt Lake City for PyCon that evening and gave a three hour workshop on Wednesday, “Data analysis with SQLite and Python”.
[... 225 words]2022
Every remaining website using the .museum TLD (via) Jonty did a survey of every one of the 1,134 domains using the .museum TLD, which dates back to 2001 and is managed by The Museum Domain Management Association.
2021
A museum bot (via) Shawn Graham built a Twitter bot, using R, which tweets out random items from the collection at the Canadian Science and Technology Museum—using a Datasette instance that he’s running based on a CSV export of their collections data.
If you measure things by foot traffic we [the SFO Museum] are one of the busiest museums in the world. If that is the case we are also one of the busiest museums in the world that no one knows about. Nothing in modern life really prepares you for the idea that a museum should be part of an airport. San Francisco, as I've mentioned, is funny that way.
2020
Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud and zero downtime deployments
Yesterday’s piece on Tracking FARA by deploying a data API using GitHub Actions and Cloud Run was originally intended to be my weeknotes, but ended up getting a bit too involved.
[... 1,431 words]Ray Bandar’s Bone Palace (via) The hundredth museum I’ve posted to Niche Museums, and this one is my absolute favourite. Ray Bandar spent sixty years collecting over 7,000 animal skulls and putting them on display in his house and basement. Natalie managed to score us a tour a few weeks before the entire collection was donated to the California Academy of Sciences. It was the most amazing room I’ve ever been in.
Building a sitemap.xml with a one-off Datasette plugin
One of the fun things about launching a new website is re-learning what it takes to promote a website from scratch on the modern web. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying using Niche Museums as an excuse to explore 2020-era SEO.
[... 1,078 words]2019
sqlite-utils 2.0: real upserts
I just released version 2.0 of my sqlite-utils library/CLI tool to PyPI.
[... 1,140 words]Monarch Bear Grove on Niche Museums (via) Monarch Bear Grove is my favourite hidden corner of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. It has stone circles formed from pieces of a Spanish monastery that was exported to the USA by press baron William Randolph Hearst. And there are druids. You should read the whole thing. (I added paragraph breaks for this using datasette-render-markdown—Niche Museums is basically a full-blown blog now.)
London Silver Vaults on Niche Museums. I’m keeping up my streak of posting a new museum I’ve visited to niche-museums.com daily—today’s entry is the London Silver Vaults, which I think are one of London’s best kept secrets: 30 specialist silver merchants in a network of vaults five storeys below Chancery Lane.
niche-museums.com, powered by Datasette
I just released a major upgrade to my www.niche-museums.com website (launched last month).
[... 1,154 words]Weeknotes: Python 3.7 on Glitch, datasette-render-markdown
Streaks is really working well for me. I’m at 12 days of commits to Datasette, 16 posting a daily Niche Museum, 19 of actually reviewing my email inbox and 14 of guitar practice. I rewarded myself for that last one by purchasing an actual classical (as opposed to acoustic) guitar.
[... 1,141 words]Weeknotes: Niche Museums, Kepler, Trees and Streaks
Every now and then someone will ask “so when are you going to build Museums Near Me then?”, based on my obsession with niche museums and websites like www.owlsnearme.com.
[... 872 words]2018
Datasette: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (via) The Metropolitan Museum of Art publish a CSV file on GitHub with details of 464,360 items from their collection. I turned it into a searchable Datasette instance.
2017
First King Tut went to the British Museum in 1972, where over 1.7 million people went to see him. Then in June 1974, with the threat of Watergate and impeachment hanging over him, Richard Nixon signed a bilateral trade agreement that Henry Kissinger had negotiated with President Sadat of Egypt. One of its terms: that King Tut would come to America. Two years later, with Nixon gone under the darkest of clouds, he did.
2012
What are the few must-do things in London before one leaves this place for good?
In terms of museums, it really is worth checking out the big four: the British Museum, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum and the V&A. They’re all exceptional (and free to enter). Here are some highlights...
[... 673 words]2010
Follow a Museum day. It’s follow a museum on Twitter day. Useful directory of museum Twitter accounts around the world, organised by country.