iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 25/10/2026

Bought myself a new button badge yesterday. Because everyone should be nice to pigeons.

Photo shows a "Be Nice to Pigeons" pin badge featuring an illustrated green pigeon inside a scalloped frame with a pink border.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 24/10/2026

Pancake breakfast! Feel a bit sick now, not gonna lie - but no regrets!

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 19/10/2026

If anyone sees this in their local Starbucks…. 🙏 I have been in three so far, with no luck.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 18/10/2026

Last day today - flying home this evening. Almost time to leave all this behind. 😔

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 16/10/2026

Sunset at the beach last night. How’s that for a picture-perfect postcard view?

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 13/10/2026

Got the bartender to make me a new cocktail we’re calling the Sweet Caroline. Rum, amaretto, cream, nutmeg, and cinnamon, with banana and a cherry to garnish.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 12/10/2026

False advertising, the food was pretty good. And the rum punch was *hic* excellent!

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 10/10/2026

Ad on Instagram. I thought it was a colourful Death Star at first as I scrolled past…

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 09/10/2026

Yesterday was a ‘pinch me’ bucket-list type moment - cocktails in a swim-up bar right on a dock overlooking the sea. Which is incredible - the colours!

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 07/10/2026

Tiny little crab! Straight out of a Pixar short.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 06/10/2026

Currently vacant - I could quite happily live here!

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 05/10/2026

We nicked these cute little airplane salt and pepper shakes from the plane - they have ‘pinched from Virgin Atlantic’ printed on the feet, so we felt practically obliged to.

Two small chrome salt and pepper shakers shaped like cartoon aeroplanes, standing side by side on a white paper napkin. Each has stubby wings, a rounded propeller nose, and a little loop on top. The left one has a perforated, multi-holed nose; the right one has a single small hole.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 05/10/2026

And a rainbow, just for me on our first day… 🌈 🏝️

A faint rainbow over Port St Charles marina, Barbados, with moored yachts, palm trees and peach waterfront buildings beneath a stormy sky.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 05/10/2026

How’s that for a view from your kitchen window?

Marina canal at Port St Charles in Barbados seen through open white shutters, with a moored sailing yacht in the foreground and ochre waterside houses, palm trees and bougainvillea beyond, under a cloudy sky.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 01/10/2026

Early morning over the airport. Rise and shine!

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 30/09/2026

Homeward bound! Linz, you’ve been great.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 30/09/2026

Currently deciding on breakfast. The Austrians definitely know how to do pastries!

A bakery display counter filled with Austrian pastries, with black price tags in German. On the left are glazed twisted pastries, sugar-dusted buns, and flaky almond-topped pieces. In the middle sit long, nut-filled twists and rows of jam-filled pastry slices. On the right, spelt cinnamon rolls topped with cream, a tray of crumble-topped apple cake, and a golden yellow cake. Visible tags read "Nusskinderl mit gerösteten Haselnüssen, 3,30 €", "Polsterzipf 5 + 1 gratis, 0,95 €", "Dinkel-Zimtschnecke, 3,25 €" and "Dinkel-Apfel-Kuchen mit Streusel, 3,50 €".

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 28/09/2026

I think I possibly accidentally (honestly!) had dessert for breakfast. Oops?

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 27/09/2026

Tonight’s dinner locale with Tom from @ojcollective.bsky.social and Toby from @thoth-metadata.eurosky.social - just doing a test-drive before Tuesday’s #CopimCorner!

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 18/09/2026

My mother has been sharing baby pictures* with me for some reason. Wasn’t I angelic? Apparently she turned down child modelling offers for me - I could have had a whole other life, fame from baby commercials, riches, who knows!

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 13/09/2026

Three of my favourite descriptions of what it’s like inside an ADHD brain, from the comments on a HuffPost article about ADHD. Personally I tend to say it’s like a pinball machine with about 17 balls, at least one broken flipper, and a sticky spring launcher. But I do like the squirrels…

Facebook comment from user Meryl Oliver: “It's like every word in every thought is a clickable link that takes me in another direction.”

Facebook comment from user Sonia Ponzo: “Someone I know described it as an airport: there are 20 shops open, each with their own music; there's constant chatter, noises and announcements; flights are often delayed and there's the occasional crash.”

Facebook comment from user Stephen Barnes: “I describe mine as an army of 30 highly caffeinated squirrels in my head, most are privates but some have specific functions. One of them is Welfare Squirrel, whom I'll come back to.

The problem with my ADHD brain is that I don't have a Sergeant-Major to keep the men in check, so they all run around doing their own thing and because they're doped up on caffeine, they're shouting and being really excited. When one finds something of interest he'll shout about it and try to be heard over all the others also shouting about things they've found.

My problem is that Welfare Squirrel, who looks after my body functions, is very meek and mild. He can't shout unless its an absolute emergency. That's why one minute I don't need the loo at all, then 2 minutes later l've got a double emergency to deal with urgently, or why I suddenly feel really hungry when I realised I haven't eaten for 2 days.”

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 09/09/2026

Dammit Jim! Out of stock already. I would have bought it for the pun alone. www.lecreuset.co.uk/en_GB/p/star...

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 02/09/2026

girlwithseriousproblems speaks truth. 👇 Girls with serious problems usually do, to be fair.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 30/08/2026

Anyone got a spare £369 or so lying around needing to be used up? www.kurtgeiger.com/women/shoes/...

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 25/08/2026

This was definitely my experience, and was ultimately what led me to getting diagnosed with ADHD. But it also made it much harder to return to work onsite, especially when my previous employer started to roll back flexibility and require people onsite more. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A screenshot of text from the journal article “Jobwise, it's honestly the best thing that has ever happened to me”: COVID-19 pandemic and academic librarians with non-apparent disabilities, published in the Journal of Academic Librarianship. The first two sentences are highlighted in yellow for emphasis.
The text reads: Most notably, participants described their working conditions improving because of pandemic-related remote work. Working from home allowed participants the flexibility to more easily self-accommodate their illnesses and/or disabilities, which led to reduced symptoms, required less time off, and made it easier to do their jobs. Though participants were returning to working on campus in different ways at the time of the interviews, they consistently recommended making the flexibility they enjoyed during the pandemic permanent throughout academic library culture. In sum, these interviews demonstrate that when academic libraries forefront flexibility, they can create more inclusive and accessible workplaces for library workers with illness and/or disabilities.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 20/08/2026

For those affected by the recent Channel 4 documentary on ADHD, there is an Ofcom complaint form you can fill in. I just did, and I thought I'd share what I wrote here as well.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 15/08/2026

Starbucks made me in drink form! Limited edition, one weekend only, unicorn Frappuccino. 🦄

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 13/08/2026

Unexpected wisdom from Tumblr on a Thursday morning.

Screenshot of a Twitter/X conversation. User @fwcodex‘ asks: ‘can a 29 year old start all over again?’ ‘User ‘legallybrunettedotcom’ quotes the post and responds: ‘Until death, all defeat is psychological.’ The post shows 248 comments, 17.2K retweets, 116K likes, and 2.6M views.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 13/08/2026

I am not a fan of e-scooters, but this? This is awesome. Scooter attachments for wheelchairs! Why aren’t they all made like this? shieldinnovations.com/ezride/

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 07/08/2026

Meet Ezri! So named because she was (and continues to be) nervous and talkative and neurotic.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 07/08/2026

I have no idea what mine means, other than perhaps I'm shouty and predictable?

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 06/08/2026

George Eliot knew what she was talking about...

Quote from George Eliot's Middlemarch - "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 29/07/2026

New t-shirt! Because, well, I don't really need to explain, do I? Vote @countbinface.bsky.social!

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 29/07/2026

Overall data for the UK, by institutional spend. Eye-opening!

A treemap in which each rectangle's area is proportional to article processing charge expenditure by that organisation. UCL is the largest at €17,578,248, with the Wellcome Trust close behind at €15,336,686. The next tier comprises the University of Oxford (€10,886,254), the University of Cambridge (€10,013,672) and Imperial College London (€7,643,943). Below these: Manchester (€6,476,187), Edinburgh (€5,142,167), King's College London (€4,797,509), Birmingham (€4,367,730), Cardiff (€3,657,998), Newcastle (€3,151,448), Sheffield (€2,423,077), Bristol (€1,993,773) and Exeter (€1,952,221). The remainder resolves into well over a hundred progressively smaller rectangles, most too small to label - the spend concentrated heavily in a handful of large, research-intensive institutions.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 29/07/2026

It's fascinating exploring the institutional data published via the OpenAPC.net site. Obviously it's only as comprehensive as the number of institutions that chose to volunteer their annual spend (and boo, hiss to those who don't!), but even so... 2025's cost data by publisher, for example.

A treemap in which each rectangle's area is proportional to article processing charge expenditure with that publisher. Springer Nature occupies roughly a third of the chart at €6,630,036. The next tier comprises MDPI AG (€1,346,800), Elsevier BV (€1,234,251) and Frontiers Media SA (€1,101,100). Below these: Wiley-Blackwell (€652,092), Oxford University Press (€650,523), Public Library of Science (€486,230), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (€347,198), the American Physical Society (€346,445), Informa UK Limited (€325,055) and BMJ (€273,533). The remainder of the chart dissolves into several hundred increasingly small rectangles representing society and smaller commercial publishers, most too small to label - a visual illustration of how concentrated the spend is at the top.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 26/07/2026

My mother unearthed this picture of baby Me when I first learned to ski! 😂

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 23/07/2026

But I wasn’t terrible! I was surprised how much came back to me - muscle memory, after all these years.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 13/07/2026

"Wikipedia not currently deemed a Category 1 service under the Online Safety Act." Good news, but the law is still incredibly flawed - Wikipedia should never have been included within its scope in the first place. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

We're pleased to announce that on 10 July 2026, the Wikimedia Foundation was notified by the UK's communications and post regulator, Office of Communications (Ofcom), that, based on a novel reading of the law, Wikipedia is not currently deemed a Category 1 service under the Online Safety Act (OSA). However, as part of that announcement, Ofcom informed the Foundation that Wikipedia must remain on a "watch list" of platforms that do not currently qualify as Category 1 services, but that could become Category 1 at any point in the future. Any future Category 1 designation remains an existential threat to Wikipedia, open knowledge, and the privacy and safety of the community of contributors. The Foundation will continue to advocate for safeguarding public-interest spaces like Wikipedia, pushing for a more formal and permanent exemption of these spaces under the OSA.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 06/07/2026

Nothing like sitting in the audience for the opening of a conference and having your giant headshot flash up on the screen… Hi, everyone? 😬

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 02/07/2026

One of these plants is not like the other. I thought I was growing tomatoes but this seems to be some form of catcus? Do you think it needs watering?

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 01/07/2026

It wasn't this hard getting Take That tickets. This is like Glastonbury for history nerds.

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Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · 16/06/2026

Amazing weekend for a wedding, with the best concentration of librarians you’ll find in the known universe…

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