Don't get me wrong, computers can absolutely help us regain our environmental efficiency. They just *aren't*.
Not as long as we're:
* constantly syncing everything to the cloud,
* expecting same-hour delivery,
* funding our clickbait via surveillance advertising,
* buying a new phone every year,
* using AIs because they're cool rather than useful,
* running bloated software & webpages,
* buying into "big data"
* etc
Computing is environmentally cheap, but it rapidly adds up!
This weekend my daughter went to continue reading an ebook she has available to her from her public elementary school on the Epic Reading Platform https://www.getepic.com/sign-in
She got an error message saying that the book was only available on school days and to read on the weekend she would need to subscribe for $9.99/month.
Geothermal heating co-op shares warmth among Montreal neighbours
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/what-on-earth-geothermal-heating-montreal-1.6321878
Aaron Espe - Back to the Beginning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTlz8GGqASw
Everything we see online is decided by platforms' algorithms.
These algorithms promote extreme and fringe views (antivax, conspiracy, hate) in a quest for clicks.
We want to #FixTheDSA & give users a right to a timeline without #AlgorithmicManipulation.
Okay there's something really cool I've just learned. If you are continuously recording air pressure e.g. as part of your home automation setup or a weather station then you should really check the data of the last 24h.
You should be able to spot the pressure wave from the volcanic explosion in Tonga earlier today.
It reached my setup in Kaiserslautern at about 20:30.
Just found out about beestat.io for #ecobee thermostats. FOSS (GPLv3) and seems to give more useful stats than ecobee's official (unfortunate) interfaces.
To bump this thread: The Swiss state has been taxing the carbon in fossil fuels since 2008 ⛽
The tax started very low, and increases every year. It is currently 120 CHF (~130 USD) per tonne CO2 💰
2/3 goes to each citizen, evenly divided, as a reduction of their health insurance! 🏥 1/3 of the tax goes into green spending.
Every country can do this, without losing economic 'competitiveness' if a tariff is applied 🗺️
#Nitter is an AGPLv3 licensed #Twitter frontend with all the features of the default site -- but more importantly -- it returns all of the freedom that Twitter's nonfree JavaScript takes away from you. Try it out! https://nitter.net
Please make sure to read this carefully before ordering a #PinePhonePro:
The #PinePhone Pro is still very much in development, and thus just won't be your daily driver smartphone upon receiving the device.
Read https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/PINE64_PinePhone_Pro_(pine64-pinephonepro) to get an idea.
I don't want to hamper your excitement, but I also don't want to see you start a rant YouTube channel because you're upset due to not reading this properly. The PPP is really cool, but it's not your new "privacy smartphone" at this point.
@ScottMortimer There is also this excellent blog post in response: https://staltz.com/some-people-want-to-run-their-own-servers.html :)
TIL that a chromebook I bought a couple of years ago (intending to install Debian on, but got shelved until an immediate need for kids in online learning) has been officially abandoned for security updates by Google. I didn't realize how short the interval was before Google forced a choice between using an insecure browser or creating a massive amount of ewaste.
Luckily I should still be able to liberate this one (thanks Debian!) but most people won't. What a sad state of affairs.
Seems that Honda infotainment units are having date issues as of 2022-01-01 where the date gets rolled back to 2002 and stuck. This appears to be another instance of the (unfortunately named) "Y2K22" bug, similar to those hitting Microsoft Exchange servers at the same time.
Storing dates & times as "YYMMDDHHMM" in an int should have been seen as a bad idea. Sounds as though it may be August (!) before a fix is available.