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.

Forth is perhaps the tiniest possible useful interactive programming language.
It is a language that makes complexity painful, but which reveals that a surprising amount can be accomplished without introducing any. Forth is the opposite of “bloat”. If you've ever been like “Oh my God this Electron-based chat app is taking up 10% of my CPU at idle, what the HELL is it DOING, modern computing has gone MAD”, Forth is there to tell you that computing went mad decades ago, and that programs could be doing SO MUCH MORE with SO MUCH LESS.

• 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.

Networks of high-quality ground-based GNSS stations provide maps of ionospheric total electron content to correct these errors, but large spatiotemporal gaps in data from these stations mean that these maps may contain errors. Here we demonstrate that a distributed network of noisy sensors—in the form of millions of Android phones—can fill in many of these gaps and double the measurement coverage, providing an accurate picture of the ionosphere in areas of the world underserved by conventional infrastructure. […] This work demonstrates the potential of using a large distributed network of smartphones as a powerful scientific instrument for monitoring Earth.

demo working finally! soft sculptures with phones hidden in them sending orientation sensor data to touchdesigner, which is driving the lights

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.

PlantStudio Botanical Illustration Software is a tool for creating 3D plant models and 2D illustrations. PlantStudio simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure.

A blog post by https://kopiti.am/@nondescryptid detailing how they set up postmarketOS on their own phone:

I’ve got a Samsung Galaxy S II (i9100) lying around, and decided to try seeing if I can repurpose it and get it to host a blog. I was inspired by compost.party – a very cool server running off a Xiaomi Poco F1 using postmarketOS and a solar panel for charging.
The physical nature of computing is usually not a concern, as things are sufficiently abstracted for me to not have to care too much about it. But trying to revive this phone from 2011 was a reminder that when we talk about compute, we are ultimately dealing with physical resources – tiny towns with blocks of silicon, lithium, etc etc.

A smol web server by https://indieweb.social/@nonnullish running on a 2.4 gram micro controller

This handbook provides a brief overview of environmental harm driven by software, and how the Blue Angel ecolabel—the official environmental label of the German government—provides a benchmark for sustainable software design.

A work-in-progress to explore the principles of mycelial networks applied in socio-technical systems.

We are humans and might as well get used to it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross profits obscure actual loss. In response to this dilemma and to these losses a realm of intimate, community power is developing—power of communities to conduct their own education, find their own inspiration, shape their own environment, and share their knowledge with others. Practices that aid this process are sought and promoted by the DAMAGED EARTH CATALOG.

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.

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.

It’s always safe to assume JavaScript will not be available, so here’s a quick list of very realistic reasons it won’t be.

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.

This talk is called An Approach to Computing and Sustainability Inspired From Permaculture. Sustainability is an awful word, that doesn't really mean much anymore. What I mean by this is being able to do something for a sustained amount of time. Permaculture is also an equally vague concept, when I say this, I mean that it is something that has a strengthening effect on the ecosystem.
I'm interested in computers as a way to do more than consume, as a tool of creation. For that reason I won't consider services, or apps. This talk is about open specs and on building knowledge to write your own software.
I'm going to present technologies, but I won't give you their names, because my goal is that you will develop your own systems. I'm not selling you on any one technology.

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.

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.

The Whole Earth Catalog was an American counterculture magazine and product catalog published by Stewart Brand several times a year between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. The magazine featured essays and articles, but was primarily focused on product reviews. The editorial focus was on self-sufficiency, ecology, alternative education, “do it yourself,” and holism, featuring the slogan “access to tools.”

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.

Aiming for a 10 year life-cycle for smartphones

This guide explains everything you need to know to build stand-alone photovoltaic systems that can power almost anything you want.

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.

A naturally intelligent network programmed by the sun.

Sun Thinking is a group exhibition that brings together artists, writers, and researchers to explore the qualities and logics of solar power and solar powered computing networks. It presents a collection of network-based artworks, games, texts, and interviews and is the first exhibition project to be hosted on the Solar Protocol network.

A game jam that focuses on creating energy-efficient games

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.

Permacomputing is both a concept and a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in computer and network technology inspired by permaculture.

In a time where computing epitomizes industrial waste, permacomputing encourages the maximizing of hardware lifespans, minimizing energy use and focusing on the use of already available computational resources.

On the need for low-carbon and sustainable computing and the path towards zero-carbon computing.

Wim Vanderbauwhede takes a look at the environmental cost of computing and argues that it must change radically if we don't want it to further fuel the climate crisis.

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.