Mind the Gap
#london
“50,000 Nos Cans Can’t Be Wrong” by Acid Cannibals
Kicking off 2019 with some noisy bearded Glaswegian punk rock’n’roll. Works for me!
#4876
“On this evening in the City of Light, a hundred million connected devices sing through the wires and the aether. Of the waves that ripple through the urban fabric, at whatever scale, very few escape being captured by them, and represented in bursts of binary data. Enciphered within are billions of discrete choices, millions of lives in motion, the cycling of the entire economy, and, at the very edge of perception, the signs and traces of empire’s slow unwinding.”
Radical Technologies has a cracking first chapter.
Saw Sorry to Bother You. Laugh out loud funny at times. Pro-worker, anti-capitalist, touches on race and slavery. Moral of the story – don’t sell out for money. Definitely worth a watch!
Doug WebbOne of the core 'demands' of #ExtinctionRebellion is to set up a #CitizensAssembly. This is not a new concept: #sortition has been around since Athens. I find a lot of people worried about trusting 'normal people' to make big decisions. I would love to have a CA as one of the major political bodies....
I am all for the idea of more direct civic participation in society and the removal of an elite governing class. I can see why not having ‘expert’ knowledge would be a thorny issue tho. I wouldn’t see it as not trusting normal people, just a recognition that a lot of issues require in-depth knowledge. I presently wouldn’t trust myself to make a suitably informed decision on many complex issues outside my area of knowledge.
That said, it works for juries, and if there was a strong civil service and adequate time for researching important decisions, I’m sure it could work.
I don’t know much about the details of sortition – would love to hear more of your views.
Posting via micropub from inside emacs with mp.el (https://github.com/dg01d/mp.el) !
Love finding tracks from netlabels on archive.org.
Pinklogik – Heavenly Orchid (Marshmello Mix by theAudiologist)
Ambient, cinematic, chilled. Uncertain future.
Comrade Slasher from Nigeria joins Breht to talk about the life, politics, and legacy of Marxist revolutionary and Pan-African leader of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara.
I don’t know the full history but Thomas Sankara sounds like he was a genuinely radical and revolutionary leader. Anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, feminist. Public education and health policies. Assassinated.
https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/sankara-the-che-of-africa
#4863
Engels & Pizza Express
#manchester
Homes for people, not for profit
No more deaths on our streets
No property, no poverty, lets do this properly
iPhone X R
About halfway through, and I’m enjoying Consider Phlebas so far. It’s my book I’m reading at night at the moment, and it’s ticking the boxes for that (nicely written and not too taxing). It’s not a really strong plot, but kind of a series of gripping set pieces and cinematic imagery. Slightly overly masculine in viewpoint I think.
One part of it was a bit bloody grim.
zypper rm bourgeoisie --force@tobi it's can't replace the ability to interact with and post content, but can replace Facebook etc as a content feed from all your preferred sources. I've got mine setup with subscriptions to news, blogs, YouTube, this day in history etc. All without having to log in, see ads(there are some in You...
The Indieweb approach and social readers[1] such as Monocle[2], Together[3], and Indigenous on mobile[4] combine posting and social interactions with feed reading. It’s super cool!
[1] https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet
[2] https://indieweb.org/Monocle
[3] https://indieweb.org/Together
[4] https://indigenous.abode.pub/android/
The Bits and Baums conference looks like it was really good. A coming together of leftist techies and environmentalists to find common ground and common demands and strategies.
“Civil society and a critical scientific community have the skills and the strength to help shape digitization in the long term. We cannot merely leave digitization to business and politics.”
A good wide breadth of areas of tech covered in their demands too. Looks promising. Would like to go if there is one next year.
A Conference for Digitalization and Sustainability? Reflections on Bits & Bäume
#4835
A circuit made from lemons, copper coins and galvanised nails. Lighting up a low-current LED.
The copper and zinc are electrodes, amd the lemon juice is an electrolyte. The acid in the lemon juice reacts chemically with the zinc and liberates electrons. These flow to the copper. Three of these electrochemical batteries in series is enough to light a low-current LED.
I mean this stuff is like woahhh. Absolutely fascinating!
Merry Christmas!
I have a strong like for Microformats. Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. http://microformats.org Which means you write for humans just like you always do, and as well as wrapping HTML a...
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Also known seems to expect e-content rather than p-content on replies?
Hmm, noticed a couple of things to sort out indieweb-wise:
– replies/likes via micropub don’t seem to send webmentions?
– replies/likes via micropub are created as WordPress link posts, not asides, so I need to do the same thing as I did with asides to fix the problem with too much content being sent through
SomaFM Drone Zone is my music of choice for learning basic electronics, in case you were wondering.
Measured the potential difference of all the components in a circuit and it adds up to the voltage of the battery. Dropped the resistance in the potentiometer, and the PD in the resistor in the circuit jumped up. Everything still adds up to voltage of battery. I assume it means the resistor is then doing more work? Super cool!
From the USA to Spain and beyond, the last decade has seen a surge in municipalist and local democracy citizens’ movements. Many have been influenced by the ideas of American writer and thinker Murray Bookchin (1921-2006), which envisaged a new left politics based on popular assemblies and grassro...
vossHoliday is on, and apart from relaxing with the family, I aim to look into a bunch of stuff before I'm back at the factory in January. My Indieweb life is coming on well, thanks to Known, and the #indieweb community in London. I attended my first couple of Homebrew Website Club meetups in town in 20...
Sounds like a plan to me – I do that sometimes – just spin up a $5/month VPS with Digital Ocean, play around with something, then tear it down again if it doesn’t work out (or keep it if it does!)
Good luck with the projects — look forward to hearing how they go. 🙂
#4815
A 9V battery, some test leads and croc clips, a resistor and an LED. I am way more excited about this LED lighting up than perhaps I would have expected to be. This is loads of fun.
I’m even enjoying measuring the resistance of resistors with the multimeter and cross-checking against the reading from the coloured bands.
vossHoliday is on, and apart from relaxing with the family, I aim to look into a bunch of stuff before I'm back at the factory in January. My Indieweb life is coming on well, thanks to Known, and the #indieweb community in London. I attended my first couple of Homebrew Website Club meetups in town in 20...
Having loads of fun with Make:Electronics so far. Have measured the resistance of my tongue, dunked my multimeter probes in a glass of water, and shorted a (1.5v) battery. Good stuff.
A year of staggering revelations is a reminder of how much Facebook has corrupted life online, with the effect of making the internet seem a little less bearable and a little less human
I’m going to set up a FreedomBox. I have an old Raspberry Pi B+ knocking around. FreedomBox works on it apparently (https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Hardware/RaspberryPi) but I’m wondering if it’s going to be a bit low-spec to do much with it. Anyone know? My main uses to begin will probably be syncthing, Quassel, Radicale, and OpenVPN.
#freedombox
Bob Mottram@neil A statebook would be the worst of all worlds. What's needed are decentralized systems which are run by users, not by corporations or the state. Like guifinet.
To break down capitalism, coops should focus on shared protocols, not platform coops that replicate platform capitalist systems.
Interesting argument that we should view protocols as the digital means of production, more so than platforms. And that ‘protocol cooperatives’ will do more to break down capitalism than platform coops will. I think the main argument being that platform coops are inherently centralised, and that as far as challenging capital goes, we should be striving for decentralised architectures. I think the argument being we should have coops that interoperate on top of a shared protocol; not one coop that dominates an entire market with a platform.
Relates somewhat to the Statebook article, which argued that the state would serve us better if it focused on building and promoting shared protocols, not on building a Facebook alternative.