Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

In Oulu, #Finland, temperatures will be down to -20 C this week.

Yet 12% of all journeys in the city will be by bicycle.

How do they do it? Good wayfinding for starters, with symbols projected onto the snow...❄️ 🚲 🧵

If you're using Firefox, your first add-on should be uBlock Origin. At this point, it's not just blocking ads. It's basic Internet hygiene.

However, especially if you handle sensitive sites like bank/payment portals or one to several social accounts, your second add-on should be this little thing called Firefox Multi-Account Containers.

It's extremely useful. You can keep the defaults or wipe them all and make your own. So long as you don't sign in to things outside of containers, things opened in Firefox by default won't have access to your accounts. Sites you sign in to will only be signed in on that specific container. Links followed in Fun will not have access to your already signed-in sites on Bank. Links opened from your social account in Personal don't risk accidental interactions from a different social account under Professional.

Social containers are even more helpful for sites that don't support account switching. Even if they do, all you have to do is use a different account in each container and you can view both accounts side-by-side.

Oh, and it's published by Mozilla themselves within Firefox's add-on repository. You can trust it about as much as you trust Firefox.

Selective soldering 🔧🔬🔥

Thinking to myself this morning “Threads can’t be as bad as I recall…”

First post in my feed: Instagram influencer with a cup of coffee watching the sunrise from her balcony in a $1000/night hotel built with slave labor in a country where women can’t drive, telling me about how she has discovered that the secret to life is learning to savor the little things.

No, apparently the secret to life is to be born rich, white, and beautiful.

Anyway, that’s enough Threads for 2024.

An inspiring talk at #37c3 included this graphic. It shows how 500
developers each making 10 small optimisations of 1 cpu-second that happen 20 times a day for each of 1.5 million users, can save power equivalent to 30,000 two-person households.

Another form of that is, if you have 100 thousand users of your software,
and make a 1 cpu-second optimisation that will occur 50 times a day,
then you can save the power of a single two-person household.

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2023/hub/en/event/software_licensing_for_a_circular_economy/

A blog is a newsletter that you can run on your own server that you don’t have to share with nazis, and doesn’t have to have annoying JavaScript popups that interrupt people when they are reading things. Well worth looking into.

Measuring methane intensity is a key step on the path to net zero https://theconversation.com/measuring-methane-intensity-is-a-key-step-on-the-path-to-net-zero-218976?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #ClimateChange

Robs third attempt for a solar powered weather station finally survived Canadian winter. Intially he used a 18650 battery and now a 750 Farad lithium ion capacitor. https://github.com/roblatour/SolarWeatherStationIII

Peertube is an absolutely *excellent* self-hosted tool, not just as a public fedi thing. one-click import from youtube or WHEREVER using yt-dlp built in, transcoding, private links, playlists, collections... this is gonna completely replace how i've been self-archiving videos, and gonna work on moving some of my stuff into a plugin. what a delightful find. yunohost can install with no fuss.

How nice this new @Framasoft funding campaign is 😍
https://soutenir.framasoft.org/en/

Being hopeful about the future isn’t some vapid techno-optimism. Quite the opposite. It’s engaging with our *actual* reality—that we have the tech now to build more functional, resilient, sustainable, and equitable systems, but now we *all* need to do the social, economic, and political work to go in that direction.

Here’s my 2022 essay on the same theme: “Resilience, Abundance, Decentralization”:

https://tinyletter.com/metafoundry/letters/metafoundry-75-resilience-abundance-decentralization

The eruption has started north of Grindavík town. This is not a tourist friendly eruption.

https://icelandgeology.net/?p=12214

A giant task: the hefty 12th century Lambeth Bible has now been fully digitized. https://monumentoffame.org/2023/12/15/a-giant-task-digitising-the-lambeth-bible/

BREAKING: #internetarchive has appealed a lower court judgment that blocked all #libraries from offering #spyware free #ebook + preserving them against #censorship and erasure. #surveillance

Take action to support the archive now: https://www.battleforlibraries.com/

Time traveling back to 1991 to warn tim berners-lee that his cute little hypertext invention will eventually require me to click on pictures of nightmare broccoli in order to pay a parking ticket

Bezos and Musk have it deeply wrong.
The problem isn't that we need a trillion people to have more Einsteins or Mozarts.

The problem is we don't nurture and protect the ones we have.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops".

Brian Cox reads If I Must Die, by beloved Palestinian poet, teacher and martyr Refaat Alareer, for the Palestine Festival of Literature

Refaat was killed on December 7th by an Israeli airstrike.

This was the last poem he published

#Gaza #Poetry

2016 tablet (Galaxy Tab A), perfectly working and fast with /e/OS (and with a great 7000 mAh battery)

Let's make the world more sustainable!

(80% of devices energy impact during their lifetime is from building and selling the device!)

@e_mydata @murena

No matter whether they are lying or telling the truth this is darkly funny to the extreme.