I’m not an Arch user, but the Arch Wiki has become the best place to figure out how to do some random thing in Linux. Nice work Arch people — thank you.
I saw a toot (from a stranger, hence the subtoot) that argued that permacomputing was about redeeming computers. Maybe some permacomputing proponents feel that way, but that’s not the attitude I’m bringing to this endeavor at all. The questions I’m interested in are things like:
• We have all these computers around, how do we make them last as long as possible?
• If or when we reach a point where we stop mass-producing new chips, how can we eke out the most use of extant digital devices?
• Is it possible to build something that counts as a “computer” in a genuinely sustainable way?
• At the root of all of this: what purpose does computation serve for humanity that is even worth carrying on in a more humane society?
If you have an old plastic device with a coating that once made it feel slightly rubberized, but has since become uncomfortably sticky, I’m finding that isopropyl and a bit of elbow grease takes that coating off, leaving the smooth hard plastic beneath.
Does anyone know if there’s a better way to do this? I just reclaimed an old gaming mouse, and I’d like to attack an even older Alienware laptop next. Laptops should not be sticky.
Over on the Permacomputing mailing list, I just learned about this super cool project by @thentrythis:
> Last year I ran a workshop for disadvantaged families in Cornwall in the UK (a historic mining area) where we smashed rocks, collected crystals from mine waste, built semiconductors out of them, plugged them into cardboard circuit boards and made synthesisers: https://thentrythis.org/notes/2023/11/17/organised-atoms-at-flamm-festival-redruth/
Bookworm is Debian’s oldest still-supported LTS release and apparently ships with #Python 3.7.3. If you wanted a Python script to work out of the box on as many computers as possible, is there a compelling reason to target an older version than that?
Always grateful for @jonny's posts about academia on my timeline; whenever I start to wonder, “did I make a mistake by leaving...”, “did I give up too quickly...” a new toot drops, reminding me that I would be entirely too miserable working in that environment full-time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that they and folks like them are fighting the good fight — higher education is too important for us to abandon — but my circumstances preclude me from that one.
In light of the corporation’s legal attack on the NLRB, have any of the workers (or unions representing workers) at Trader Joe’s asked for a boycott yet?
When I was a kid, my favorite types of museums were the science-y ones, followed by the natural history-ish places, and finally the art museums. These days, I still enjoy museums quite a bit, but my preferences are flipped.
I still have a bona fide Linksys WRT54GL that I’m not using for anything. I thought it would be cool to set up a solar-powered captive portal ebook library to share public domain reading with my neighbors...
...but the secret anarchist agenda would be to host a forum that I could stand up in order to help my block coordinate supplies and such in case of an emergency.
Is there a turnkey solution for this usecase? If anyone has done this they're probably on Fedi, right?
Voyager 1 has been in space for 16,900 days and is still getting software updates 24 billion kilometers away, but Google stopped supporting my phone less than 3.5 years after they started selling them (and just 2 years after they stopped selling them).
@mycorrhiza Thank goodness you don’t have to use a Voyager I probe as a smartphone, or that your smartphone wasn’t sent on a one-way interstellar mission then!
Huh. So there is a widely distributed “alternatives to 911” list for the town in which I last lived, but none for my current location. Are these less common than I realized?
As a nerd who does a lot of data visualization for my day job and is putting much of my (scant) hobby time into permacomputing, it’s hard to keep @visnut and @viznut straight.
Academia will never fix itself, because every single hand on a lever of power is committed to it continuing to exist more or less as it does now. It’s a hierarchical institution lifted straight out of pre-modern Europe, with wealthy patrons and exploited apprentices, only updated to improve its compatibility with neoliberalism.