Cultural practices of collective ownership over natural resources have been around for quite some time. Do these ways of working have a digital counterpart? It may seem simple at first. To translate cultural practices of collective ownership into the digital realm, just use a Creative Commons license to allow others to make use of your work, share further modifications, and contribute to the wealth of the digital commons. That’s it.

Some stories are just too good to be true.

contains all sorts of useful information to help you get started creating and publishing a website, tools to use to avoid big tech, and links to critical tech collectives and initiatives

We are investigating alternative hardware from locally sourced materials, so-called ethical hardware, to develop and speculate upon renewable practices for the benefit of both nature and humans.

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.

The homebrewserver.club is a monthly gathering for those who (wish to) host their own online services from home, rather than using commercial and privacy unfriendly alternatives. Together we config and work on our homebrew server setups. These are low-cost, low-power, low-maintenance, high-fun computers through which we can host all of our online necessities and keep them out of the cloud. The club meetings are open for anyone, from more experienced users to interested beginners. During the homebrewserver.club meetings we exchange tips or look into particular topics together. As we gain more knowledge about a topic, we write and publish guides for others to share.

The digital world we live in is full of excesses. We have come to expect fast speeds, 100% up-time, high resolution and always accessible digital media. The primary version of this website reluctlantly aims to meet those expectations, while highlighting some these issues.

The main version of this site is accessible at all times of the day, but is housed on a self-hosted server, made from recycled, consumer-grade computer parts, on a domestic internet connection, and domestic electricity connection.

The remote website is most precarious, relying on solar power and cellular network, the main version of the website is slightly less precarious.

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

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.

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

This page is being served from a from an EMF 2022 TiDAL badge. The badge contains an ESP32 microcontroller and runs MicroPython.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.