In many ways this article is a primer on the concept of the commons, both historical and present-day, aimed at an audience of scientists and engineers who may not have been exposed to the related history and theory before.

Someone's trash is another person's web server.

An essay on AI, programming, and anarchist theory

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?”

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.

farphone is a website running on a repurposed smartphone

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.

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

Spanish website collecting many resources on the negative ecological effects of data centers.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

A game jam that focuses on creating energy-efficient games

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.