While I’m in the beginnings of a new tech-oriented research project, I’m getting a lot from Ursula Franklin’s “Real World of Technology” lectures, which contain the following checklist for projects:

“… whether it:

(1) promotes justice;
(2) restores reciprocity;
(3) confers divisible or indivisible benefits;
(4) favours people over machines;
(5) whether its strategy maximizes gain or minimizes disaster;
(6) whether conservation is favoured over waste; and
(7), whether the reversible is favoured over the irreversible?”

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

A wiki page with instructions to install postmarketOS on different phones.

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

Aphorisms on failure, resilience and safety

Being a Short Treatise on the Nature of Failure; How Failure is Evaluated; How Failure is Attributed to Proximate Cause; and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety

Spanish website collecting many resources on the negative ecological effects of data centers.

• A Permacomputing Berlin Workshop *

15.12.2024 from 12-17:00h

kindly hosted by:
/rosa
Heidelberger Str. 28
12059 Berlin

Many of us have old phones or tablets sitting in a drawer at home. They might have a dead battery or broken screen that keep us from using them, but in theory they are still quite functional computers. Imagine if we could install a new operating system and make them useful for new purposes: a tiny web site, small home server, media player, sensor station or even stranger, more poetic things. Thanks to efforts like PostmarketOS this is possible, but it can be intimidating and confusing.

In this workshop, we will attempt to install the Linux-based PostmarketOS on "obsolete" Android devices and find convivial new uses for them.

With pairs of comically oversized exhaust pipes pointing towards the sky and enormous stacks of grey cooling aggregates flanking its sides, AMS09 resembles a child's drawing of an exaggerated, imaginary factory. Despite being painted in a variation of “Go Away Green”, a colour engineered by Disney to draw visitors’ gazes away from technical facilities across its amusement parks, the building miserably fails to blend in with its surroundings.

Solidarity Infrastructures is a translocal learning sandbox that brings together creative practitioners to investigate, strategize, upskill, and dream toward alternative socio-technological systems.
Beyond corporate data clouds and monopolistic service providers, the Solidarity Infrastructures ecosystem seeks to reframe technology from a grassroots perspective and in broader context of day-to-day societal and ecological concerns.

HTML energy is all around us and in this very website.
Building websites has become complex,
but the energy of HTML persists.
What makes HTML special is its simplicity.
HTML isn’t a vast language, yet you can do a lot with it.
Anyone who wants to publish on the web can write HTML.
This accessibility and ease of use is where its energy resides.
Who’s writing HTML today?

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

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.

Around 80 per cent of the carbon footprint of a smartphone occurs during the manufacturing process, with 16 per cent down to consumer use and 3 per cent accounted for by transport. And as demand for smartphones rises, the lifespan of devices shrinks.

The plastics industry has heralded a type of chemical recycling it claims could replace new shopping bags and candy wrappers with old ones — but not much is being recycled at all, and this method won’t curb the crisis.

Explore millions of photos, audio recordings, and videos of birds and other animals; powered by Macaulay Library and eBird. The Macaulay Library collects, archives, and distributes wildlife media for research, education, and conservation.

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

Billions of phones will be hoarded in drawers and cupboards or thrown away rather than recycled, studies suggest.

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.

A very funny and insightful discussion exploring why ecology and luxury shouldn't be seen as two opposing sides of the degrowth-vs-abundance-spectrum.