Nava announcements at Open Source Summit: OSCER/Strata
Today I am at Nava PBC's (I work for Nava) Open Source Summit in Washington, DC. Nava today announced our open source Strata platform, and OSCER (Open Source Community Engagement Reporting) tool.
OSCER
A comprehensive platform for managing Medicaid community engagement requirements: built to help states implement and administer work requirements and exemption processes in compliance with federal regulations.
OSCER is a new tool for government agencies that now must require reporting of work or community engagement by HR1. OSCER is a "sidecar" app that can be deployed alongside an agencies existing systems to enable beneficiaries to easily report work activities, and agency staff to review/validate/process that data. There are well-documented integration touchpoints that make it easy to initiate the workflows and processing the outputs.
OSCER is built on Strata:
Strata
Nava Strata is a modular, open-source platform that enables our government partners to rapidly and effectively modernize while avoiding vendor lock-in.
Strata is Nava's new platform for building government solutions more quickly, and provides pre-built workflow and interaction components for various common tasks in benefit systems.
Nava Strata currently includes:
Infrastructure templates: A set of templates for quickly setting up production-ready, cloud-native infrastructure
Application templates: A set of templates to quickly begin building user-facing and backend applications
Software Development Kit: A suite of composable software development tools for building human-centered digital services applications
Coming Soon: The Oil Wars
From Council State Media via Mastodon:
After many months contemplating war on Iran, and later Venezuela, the US president has set his sights on… Nigeria. In one of the strangest coincidences of recent times, all three countries just happen to be rich in oil. What are the chances?
Source: By a strange coincidence, all the countries Trump wants to bomb are rich in oil
Look forward 100 years and I can easily imagine a documentary about how #TheOilWars contributed to nation state decline and our eventual Solarpunk future.
Happy Birthday Godzilla
More than seven decades after producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, director Ishirō Honda, and special effects master Eiji Tsuburaya first unleashed Godzilla in Japanese theaters on November 3, 1954, the King of the Monsters remains a beloved symbol of imagination and cinematic innovation.
Source: How to Celebrate Godzilla Day 2025
Godzilla really goes through candles.
KYBERKLANG
Kyberklang is a minimal, high-polish audio player for local files engineered for Linux and macOS. Developed by revengeday, a music producer from Berlin. No clouds. No distractions. Just your library, with style.
Kyberklang // fall in love with your music again
In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information
In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information | Tom Burkert
Also, unlike algorithmic feeds, it allows me to pick what category of my interests I am in the mood for. If I’m in the mood for something lighter, I can just look into my “Fun” folder to check out new stuff from The Oatmeal or xkcd. If I feel like reading something more thoughtful, I’d dive into my “Reads” folder for The Marginalian or Sentiers.
Hashtag-No-Kings
Drove over to the local #nokings protest yesterday and waved our own signs. It was great seeing so many folks out and being very (and inflatably!) visible!
Django + the IndieWeb
Now that I'm back on the blogging horse, I spent a minute searching for Django (which runs this blog) implementations of Webmentions, because if I'm going to blog I wanna do it right, circa 2002.
So I'm now reading about django-indieweb:
django-indieweb provides IndieAuth, Micropub, Webmention, and h-card support for Django applications.
I am sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong
Syntax highlighting is a tool. It can help you read code faster. Find things quicker. Orient yourself in a large file.
Like any tool, it can be used correctly or incorrectly. Let’s see how to use syntax highlighting to help you work.
Niki Tonsky makes some good points.
I'm currently listening to Innuendo by Queen from Innuendo.
Pre-Storm Clouds
Hurricane Priscilla sent a week of rain to the Southwest, which is generally great, but also brought a lot of flooding.
It also brought some lovely clouds! Here's a couple of shots I took on Monday as we came out of a movie (Tron: Ares, pretty but fairly dumb), just 10-15m after these were taken the clouds had darkened significantly and the rain started.
Why We Need "Shortwave 2.0"
On RADIOWWORLD, Kim Andrew Elliott guest writes about an old technology that could come back to help us route around the coming billionaire-and-fascist-censored internet:
Radio is the ultimate internet circumvention tool because it is not the internet. And it can’t be tracked.
This brings us to “Shortwave 2.0.”
Shortwave 2.0 won’t reach the audience of millions as in the heyday of shortwave decades ago. It will reach those who seek comprehensive, reliable, credible information. This audience will be technically inclined: radio amateurs, hobbyist shortwave listeners, scholars, technology enthusiasts and government and military personnel with access to receivers. They will pass on the information they have received to the larger audience.
Then comes this kicker:
An important feature of Shortwave 2.0 is that it is not limited to audio.
Starting about 2010 I was introduced to the digital modes of amateur radio. I was amazed that such a weak signal, in noisy conditions, could produce text. At that same time, VOA, RFE/RL and RFA were starting to feel the effects of internet blocking, especially in China and Iran. These two developments, combined, pointed to radio as a possible solution.
Starting in 2013, I was able to test the concept in “VOA Radiogram,” an experimental weekly program on the Voice of America. Instead of voice and music, we transmitted, on a conventional amplitude-modulated double sideband transmitter at Greenville, N.C., the warbles of the amateur radio digital modes.
The big advantage of text via shortwave is that it can be received successfully in poor reception conditions, in which voice broadcasts are difficult to comprehend. Text can be read and re-read, and passed on to others through personal media.
Florida has officially banned chemtrails. Sort of.
While curiously checking https://nasstatus.faa.gov/ for airport closures (with the shutdown and risks from a lack of available flight controllers) I saw the above warning for Palm Beach International airport.
Closed TO AIRCRAFT EQUIPPED WITH WEATHER MODIFICATION OR GEOENGINEERING EQUIPMENT
I blinked and thought "I do not believe we actually have weather modification capabilities, do we?". Then I thought... wait a minute, this is Florida. Sure enough, a bit of searching and I found this lovely gem:
Florida has officially banned chemtrails. Sort of.
On Friday, June 20, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a controversial bill banning "geoengineering and weather modification activities" to curb projected efforts to fight climate change and suspected efforts which some conspiracy theorists have claimed are used by individuals or government agencies to spread toxic chemicals on an unsuspecting populace through the white trails in the sky left by airplanes.
Source: Florida bans 'chemtrails' with new geoengineering and weather modification law - Wed Oct 08 2025
Public Service Broadcasting (band)
Daneel tuned me onto a new band recently, and I've become enamored.
Public Service Broadcasting is a rock group from the UK that creates instrumental music that trends a bit electronic and includes samples of... public broadcast radio from the UK. It's great music that warms my NPR and New Deal-loving heart.
Public Service Broadcasting (band) - Wikipedia
You can find them on Bandcamp, and in Apple Music (the two places I can access them).
The "The War Room" EP is not available on Apple Music, so go give them money (I gave them £10, the asking price is £4 I think) for a great EP.
Atuin, kinda like Jupyter notebooks for your shell
Atuin is an open source runbook app that is kind of like Jupyter Notebooks, but for your shell. Combine instructions and shell scripts into a readable and runnable document. Neat #shellscript #programming #sysops #software
I have not written online very often about the hellscape we are living in, but I had a small bright thought the other day that I'm trying to cling to:
I don't write much because I realize I have little new to say; there are so many intelligent, nuanced, and authoritative voices doing so.
But I can amplify those voices, and agree with them, and do everything I can to normalize their arguments. It's a small thing, but I'm trying.
cf. that last blog entry: I do want to learn more about passkeys, thankfully Ricky helpfully provides a list of resources in their post.
