An essay on AI, programming, and anarchist theory

“It’s kind of quirky,” said one person — in an age of hype around how endlessly bigger and faster and smarter tech can be, they thought this event felt surprisingly quaint and charming. We were talking about tech, sure, and it was a group of people who were interested in tech, in general, but we were there intentionally to look through the lens of a technology and medium that can feel almost retro.

A beginner's guide to making a hand-crafted personal or hobby website.

A wiki page with instructions to install postmarketOS on different phones.

A curated list of awesome small web publishing tools and frameworks.

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

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

A game jam that focuses on creating energy-efficient games

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.

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.