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?”

Becoming Hypertext is a workshop on poetic and experimental ways of creating and reading the site, browser, and the desktop.

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.

farphone is a website running on a repurposed smartphone

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.

a manually curated collection of neat indie websites :)

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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 smol web server by https://indieweb.social/@nonnullish running on a 2.4 gram micro controller

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

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.

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

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.

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.