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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.