Cultural practices of collective ownership over natural resources have been around for quite some time. Do these ways of working have a digital counterpart? It may seem simple at first. To translate cultural practices of collective ownership into the digital realm, just use a Creative Commons license to allow others to make use of your work, share further modifications, and contribute to the wealth of the digital commons. That’s it.

Some stories are just too good to be true.

contains all sorts of useful information to help you get started creating and publishing a website, tools to use to avoid big tech, and links to critical tech collectives and initiatives

Well, that civilization thing was interesting, now wasn’t it? I mean, it certainly seemed worth a shot. We got a lot out of it: telescopes, wheelchairs, wikipedia. But we also just about took out the natural world. Science, agriculture, and specialization have done a lot for expanding cultural ideas and communication, but they’ve done even more for genocide and ecocide.

So it’s time we gave up the noble, failed experiment altogether and moved on to something new.

A beginner's guide to making a hand-crafted personal or hobby website.

farphone is a website running on a repurposed smartphone

The homebrewserver.club is a monthly gathering for those who (wish to) host their own online services from home, rather than using commercial and privacy unfriendly alternatives. Together we config and work on our homebrew server setups. These are low-cost, low-power, low-maintenance, high-fun computers through which we can host all of our online necessities and keep them out of the cloud. The club meetings are open for anyone, from more experienced users to interested beginners. During the homebrewserver.club meetings we exchange tips or look into particular topics together. As we gain more knowledge about a topic, we write and publish guides for others to share.

This community catalogs and experiments with malleable software and systems that reset the balance of power via several essential principles:

1. Software must be as easy to change as it is to use it
2. All layers, from the user interface through functionality to the data within, must support arbitrary recombination and reuse in new environments
3. Tools should strive to be easy to begin working with but still have lots of open-ended potential
4. People of all experience levels must be able to retain ownership and control
5. Recombined workflows and experiences must be freely sharable with others
6. Modifying a system should happen in the context of use, rather than through some separate development toolchain and skill set
7. Computing should be a thoughtfully crafted, fun, and empowering experience

Kari Love, David Rios, Shuang Cai, and Becky Stern will go over practical steps required to repurpose disposable vape batteries, as well as the economic and political history responsible for the proliferation of these “disposable” devices. Then we will share one example project, an electronic wind instrument Vape Synth, inspired by both the salvaged parts and the form of a discarded vape.

Video from the 2024 Open Hardware Summit, held in Montreal on May 3rd. More information about the Summit is available at https://2024.oshwa.org/

Hello, my name is Virgil Dupras, author of Collapse OS and Dusk OS and I'm starting a series of articles that aims to hand-hold my former self, a regular web developer, into the rabbit hole leading to the wonderful world of low level programming. Hopefully, I can hand-hold you too.

To the casual observer, the data industry can seem incorporeal, its products conjured out of weightless bits. But as I stand beside the busy construction site for DataBank’s ATL4, what impresses me most is the gargantuan amount of material—mostly concrete—that gives shape to the goliath that will house, secure, power, and cool the hardware of AI. Big data is big concrete.

This aesthetic screenshot of an old windows app has been in my inspiration space for ~5 years. Until recently, I assumed that it was just a nostalgia bait concept.
The calm, serene life associated with gardening pairs suspiciously well with rose-tinted wistfulness for a simpler time in computing. I’m happy to be wrong though, because software doesn’t get more real than PlantStudio.

This page is being served from a from an EMF 2022 TiDAL badge. The badge contains an ESP32 microcontroller and runs MicroPython.

I always loved the visual aesthetic of dithering but never knew how it’s done. So I did some research. This article may contain traces of nostalgia and none of Lena.

A 14kB page can load much faster than a 15kB page — maybe 612ms faster — while the difference between a 15kB and a 16kB page is trivial.

This is because of the TCP slow start algorithm. This article will cover what that is, how it works, and why you should care. But first we'll quickly go over some of the basics.

The use of images increases the size of a web page which considerably lowers the load speed of the page. To improve the speed of your website it is important to consider compressing or resizing images.

This website is solar-powered and self-hosted. It has been designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content.

When designing computer systems, one is often faced with a choice between using a more or less powerful language for publishing information, for expressing constraints, or for solving some problem. This finding explores tradeoffs relating the choice of language to reusability of information. The "Rule of Least Power" suggests choosing the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.

How Tech Companies are Helping Big Oil Profit from Climate Destruction

The world's biggest cloud providers and the world's biggest oil and gas companies are deeply interwoven, and machine learning algorithms and computational resources are accelerating extractivist capitalism.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.