20 random bookmarks

post-growth, sustainability, computing & kin.

2025-11-13

63.

Ursula Franklin’s tech project checklist – Alex McLean

slab.org/2022/02/11/ursula-franklins-tech-project-checklist

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?”

2025-11-04

61.

Solar powered website

solar.stfn.pl

This website lives on a Raspberry Pi placed in a garden shed and powered using a solar panel and batteries.

2025-08-02

55.

How to help someone use a computer

pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/how-to-help.html

Computer people are fine human beings, but they do a lot of harm in the ways they "help" other people with their computer problems. Now that we're trying to get everyone online, I thought it might be helpful to write down everything I've been taught about helping people use computers.

2025-05-24

51.

Repairing Our Way out of Commodity Fetishism

wether.smol.pub/repairing-our-way-out-of-commodity-fetishism

2025-05-15

47.

smallweb

smallweb.cc?sort=random

a manually curated collection of neat indie websites :)

2025-04-11

45.

How Complex Systems Fail

how.complexsystems.fail

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

2025-03-26

42.

EU seals 'historic' pact on Serbia's lithium deposits

www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw4yg09rl8lo

The EU hails a deal with Serbia on lithium mining as a “historic day for Serbia, as well as Europe”. […]
Mr Scholz was keen to ensure his country’s auto industry was at the front of the queue for supplies.
Carmakers will need ever more lithium for batteries, as the transition to zero-emission vehicles accelerates – and Rio Tinto’s Jadar project could provide as much as nine-tenths of Europe’s current lithium needs.

2024-11-25

38.

Hallucinating Data Factories - Papertrail

papertrail.world/blog/hallucinatingfactories

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.

2024-11-20

36.

heatdeath (@heatdeath@autonomous.zone)

autonomous.zone/@heatdeath/113496299351672815

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

2024-10-29

33.

Kurtz-Fernhout Software: PlantStudio

www.kurtz-fernhout.com/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.

2024-09-14

31.

nika: "here’s my web server inspired by compost.party (@…" - Indieweb.Social

indieweb.social/@nonnullish/113136959490155095

2024-08-15

28.

Damaged Earth Catalog

damaged.bleu255.com

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.

2024-07-02

19.

Rek Bell — image optimization

kokorobot.ca/site/image_optimization.html

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.

2024-06-16

15.

Media Search - Macaulay Library and eBird

search.macaulaylibrary.org/catalog

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.

2024-06-09

14.

postmarketOS // real Linux distribution for phones

postmarketos.org

Aiming for a 10 year life-cycle for smartphones

13.

How to Build a Small Solar Power System

solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/12/how-to-build-a-small-solar-power-system

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

12.

About the Solar Powered Website

solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website

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

2024-06-07

11.

E-waste: Five billion phones to be thrown away in 2022

www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63245150

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

2024-04-19

7.

Watt-Wise Game Jam

wattwise.games

A game jam that focuses on creating energy-efficient games

2024-04-11

5.

Oil in the Cloud

www.greenpeace.org/usa/reports/oil-in-the-cloud

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.