Protip:
When designing a user interface, imagine some old woman using it, say Margaret Hamilton, and she's clicking your app's buttons and saying to you, as old people do,
"Young whippersnapper, when I was your age, I sent 24 people to the ACTUAL MOON with my software in 4K of RAM and here I am clicking your button and it takes ten seconds to load a 50 megabyte video ad and then it crashes
I'm not even ANGRY with you, I'm just disappointed."
I built this tool a year ago but I feel like Mastodon folks would like it
The "Weird Old Book Finder"
Type in a search query, and it'll find one randomly-chosen public-domain book that matches the query -- and present it for immediate reading: https://weird-old-book-finder.glitch.me
Why only one book? To prevent the paradox of choice! Just *start readin'*
Can't promise every book will be weird, but most are
A longer essay on how/why I developed it: https://debugger.medium.com/a-search-engine-that-finds-you-weird-old-books-3a74fbb5f3d4
This was a search for "mastodon"
@cyclingjudy turned out they did, but it took a rather frantic hunt to discover this
@SaraSoueidan there's also https://branch.climateaction.tech/ which switches to low bandwidth images when the power grid runs on fossile fuels and high bandwidth images when there are more renewables in the mix
This website runs on a solar powered server and will go offline during longer periods of bad weather: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html
The background is a battery meter & always display the relationship of the energy powering the website and the visitor traffic consuming it.
Brilliant☀️
@cyclingjudy at least you could take it back. That gave me horrible flashbacks to the time I went on holiday and took the server room key to Iceland
If your morning isn't going the way you were hoping, take a moment and enjoy this photos of sleeping #squirrels. I promise it will help.
@nikki theoretically yes, in practice I'd imagine your bum would freeze shut as soon as you hung it out of the spacesuit to try
This is rather lovely: "For two years, volunteers in a small Scottish town have been growing the threatened twinflower in their gardens. The plants, with their two little bell-shaped flowers, are now ready to be transplanted into secret locations in a bid to save the species from extinction."
https://www.heraldscotland.com/.../23102641.town-helping.../
Heard about it through the also rather excellent https://www.inkcapjournal.co.uk/
It's great to see so many familiar faces on here, hopefully Mastodon works for soil biodiversity SciComm now that Twitter has sadly razed itself to the ground. Here, start off your Sunday morning with a photo of a blue oat mite showing off its unique dorsal anus... you're welcome!
#SoilBiodiversity #SciComm #TwitterExodus #Mite #SoilFauna #Macrophotography #Mesofauna #Soil
once you have defeated gender you may wear its strictures as you please, not as trappings but as trophies
First things first, mastodons were a giant animal related to present-day elephants and woolly mammoths. The name literally translates as "breast tooth" because anatomist Georges Cuvier thought its molars looked like they had nipples.
Image credit: Mary Gagnon
In important climate change related news:
There are more fossil #fuel lobbyists at the #COP27 event than delegates from the ten countries most impacted by #climate change, including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Mozambique. Campaigners say they want industry representatives to be banned from all future climate summits.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-63571610
@WilliamNB this is something I love about Mastodon too, no algorithm tailoring your feed => you see a lot more different languages here. I'm also trying to learn German, and Welsh, and posts on here are definitely helpful!
Born at 341 ppm (https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/carbon-footprint-calculator/carbon-by-birth-year/)
Apparently a collection of hastags in a trenchcoat. #Botany #Entomology #Ecology #Weeds #PavementPlants #Permaculture #Sustainability #Composting #NoDig #Hiking #Cycling #RightToRoam #SlowTravel #FlightFree #CarFree #Bushcraft #Foraging #WildFood #PlantBased #AncestralSkills #Cordage #FibreCraft #Knitting #OpenSource #OpenAccess #SolarPunk #coops #unions #RightToRepair