smolweb.org promotes simple unbloated web. It provides resources to actors who want to participate.

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/

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

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 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.

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.

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 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.”

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

A naturally intelligent network programmed by the sun.

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.