doubleloop

2023-11-15

Fun, busy Repair Cafe tonight.
- I saw three things – didn’t actually fix anything, but did some good diagnosis on them.
- CD player. Turns out the whole model had a problem that Sony offered to fix for free – until 2021.
- Laptop. Asus Vivobook with red power light and blue processing light stuck on permanently, but no signs of life otherwise.
- Android Phone (trying to pair to Windows laptop). Coming up with Couldn’t Connect message on the phone. But my phone could pair to the laptop. Their phone could pair to my laptop. Phone paired successfully on Linux booted from USB. So not a hardware problem – something wrong on Windows 10. Ran out of time, but they’ll try to upgrade to Windows 11 and see what happens.
Listened: WCV S2: We’ve run with it like a dog with a burst ball
- Great interview. Touches on how local community organising can be the way to get working class communities involved in climate related issues. Where the intersection is people, planet and pocket.

Enjoying the This Machine Kills podcast.
- All the episodes I’ve listened to have been excellent discussions on socialism and digital technologies so far.
Having another attempt at getting RSS feed publishing working for commonplace. This time without trying to use a tempdir, caused too many problems last time.
Listened: Kill the Ecomodernist in Your Head
Listened: No King But Ludd (ft. Brian Merchant)
- Blood in the Machine definitely sounds worth a read.
org-roam on the mobile with Termux is going well. Using it regularly.
Going to start posting my daily journal/log in the stream as well. So it’s a bit more discoverable/subscribeable.
Been reading through Doughnut Economics again. Appreciating the chapter on systems thinking.
Hugo Blanco passed away.
Watching Captain Fantastic. A lot of fun. Points out the problems of American (Western) society. Is what they have in the woods any better though?

Listened: The Mythology of Cybersyn (ft. Evgeny Morozov)
- Really fascinating discussion on Cybersyn and its relevance today.
- The idea of it being relevant as a leftist ‘myth’ (in the good sense) is really interesting.

It’s quiet in the Agora right now. But I’m sure peeps will be back.
I basically never write code anymore for work purposes. I guess I’m OK with that right now. But I feel one day soon the pendulum will swing back from lead to coder again.
I’m perhaps less interested in code for code’s sake these days, and more interested in the design of systems.

Finished The Internet Con.
- Need to copy over the notes. Lots of good thoughts from Doctorow in there.
- On things like interoperability, monopoly, anti-trust, DRM, Big Tech, etc.
- Maybe not quite as actionable a programme for change as the incendiary opening made me excited for. But I’ll definitely reaffirm comcom as a process for change in reclaim the stacks work.