Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

#Pixelblaze Heart pattern by @geekmomprojects on Fibonacci HDR Heart ❤️💚💙

After bombing several museums in the historic city of Odessa on Friday, Russia has now moved on to bombing The Transfiguration Orthodox Cathedral built in Odessa in 1794.

The cathedral was a protected UNESCO World Heritage site.

Why does Russia still have a seat in the United Nations, when ISIS and Al-Qaeda does not?

#ukraine

Richest people in UK ‘use more energy flying’ than poorest do overall

Don't let people tell you population is the problem!

https://www.carbonbrief.org/richest-people-in-uk-use-more-energy-flying-than-poorest-do-overall/

#Climate #ClimateCrisis #ClimateJustice

"European governments lost out on €34.2 billion in revenue last year due to very low levels of taxation in the aviation sector. This €34.2 billion could pay for 1,400 km of high-speed rail infrastructure – equivalent to the distance from Hamburg to Rome." https://www.transportenvironment.org/discover/every-hour-european-governments-lose-out-on-e4-million-in-aviation-taxes/ #noflying

It's time for Europeans to start writing to their MEPs about the Cyber Resilience Act. It has recently been modified in a way that will be very harmful to #OpenSource projects.

This article from Github does a good job explaining the issues. Those first two issues are the ones that have been recently and intentionally introduced. Your MEP probably doesn't know and still thinks open source has been excluded from the scope.

https://github.blog/2023-07-12-no-cyber-resilience-without-open-source-sustainability/

#FOSS #FLOSS #CRA #SoftwareFreedom

Facebook is where you realize, you don’t like the people you know.

Mastodon is where you start liking people, you have never met.

Twitter is falling apart. Reddit is falling apart. Facebook fell apart ages ago. Meta is a trashfire. Instagram is baloney. Google can't even search for anything you want anymore.

You know what website still miraculously works?

Wikipedia.

You should donate to keep it that way.

People keep acting surprised at the direction Reddit's taking, but it seemed inevitable. If you try to build community on a platform that's not owned by that community this will happen every time. You can protest, you can even attack the bottom line (which is the only thing that will get you anywhere), but at the end of the day you have no power and they'll just block you and re-add your deleted posts. Don't trade community ownership and power for convenience or you'll get burned every time.

Here are my slides "The Science of Growing Urban Bicycle Networks" from yesterday's workshop on sustainable mobility [pdf]: http://michael.szell.net/downloads/talk_szell2023sgu.pdf

On free transit fares, this piece is where I am: We need to focus on better service, maybe with income-sensitive discounts, not free fares for everyone. Exception: For smaller agencies where fare revenue was trivial, free fares may make sense for a while as they recover.
---
RT @bloom17_bloom
https://theconversation.com/low-cost-high-quality-public-transportation-will-serve-the-public-better-than-free-rides-202708
https://twitter.com/bloom17_bloom/status/1646885411405418497

Welp, I'm giving another talk on satellite pollution so I have to update the numbers in my slides.

*checks https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html and https://celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/table.php?GROUP=active&FORMAT=tle*

Oh crap, there are 150 more Starlinks than when I gave a talk on this topic 1 month ago.

3908 Starlink satellites out of 7545 total satellites.

52% of all sats now owned by one awful dude. Still with effectively no regulations. This is so bad.

I am completely overwhelmed by how to fit all my rage about for-profit satellites completely destroying the sky, the atmosphere, and low Earth orbit into a 15 minute Zoom talk and not just like...scream or sob into my computer. (I usually do an hour-long talk on this topic).

How do I present all this terrible stuff effectively to get other people to care about this problem without overwhelming them? (Truly an evergreen question for the 2020s)

@settinger designed and printed a comic sans typewriter ball so we're testing it on my IBM selectric this afternoon and it totally does work!

Crazy numbers from #Anthropocene Earth:

Weight of all wild mammals on land: 22 million tons

Weight of all wild mammals in ocean: 40 million tons

Weight of all humans: 390 million tons

Weight of all land animals domesticated by humans: 630 million tons

New Study in PNAS:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2204892120

Article in Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/18/a-wake-up-call-total-weight-of-wild-mammals-less-than-10-of-humanitys

After some time I’ve found a way to upcycle Chromebooks to run the latest version of Ubuntu and boot to an external USB drive while maintaining the ChromeOS. The WiFi chips in these models also can create their own wifi networks so they can be short range routers.
What does this actually mean? Instead of requiring new hardware like a raspberry pi, we can take old Chromebooks that schools get rid of in the thousands and actually reuse them to create portable micro servers. Pack them full of offline books, maps, wikis, etc.
There is a major upside compared to using an old Chromebook over a raspberry pi, mainly that it's actually cheaper and can be free depending on how you source your chromebooks. I got 10 at $30 each which is cheaper than a pi or a pi alternative.

The battery life is also insane. I used it for close to 12 hours and it didn't even hit 50% battery loss. They also take very little time to charge so I'm interested to see how much power they might take up while attached to the off grid solar array.

So the plan is to make the docs and work some more on making these into portable offgrid information stations and packing them with info. https://anarchosolarpunk.substack.com/p/offgridserveruses
#solarpunk #permacomputing

Here's George Monbiot, with a long and deeply researched report on "Environmental Change and Food Security: Existential Risks to the Global Food System."

What follows is a brief excerpt. The full report is here -- https://www.monbiot.com/2023/03/09/the-hunger-gap/
__________________________

By 2050, the human population of the planet will rise to between 9 and 10 billion. In principle, the world already produces enough food for between 10 and 14 billion. The problem is that an ever smaller proportion of this embarrassment of riches is feeding people directly.

While the human population growth rate has fallen to below 1% a year, the growth rate of the livestock population has risen to 2.4% a year. By 2050, to put it in brutal terms, the extra humans on the planet will weigh a little over 100 million tonnes, while, unless the current trend is disrupted, the extra farm animals will weigh 400 million tonnes. The real population crisis is not the growth in human numbers, but the growth in livestock numbers.

Since farming began, humans have concentrated in places with an average annual temperature of around 13°C, which tends to create the best natural conditions for growing crops and raising livestock. Vast numbers have made their homes in this temperature band. But it is about to shift, swiftly and catastrophically — in the next 50 years, this band will move further towards the poles than it has in the past 6,000 years.

#Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Environment #Inequality

In March 1873, the very first ‘Cook’s Continental Time Tables & Tourist’s Hand Book’ was published. 150 years on, the latest edition has just arrived. http://europeanrailtimetable.eu

If you thought the 24h clock was a recent innovation, they’ve been using it since December 1919…

In 2013, Thomas Cook planned to ditch the Timetable, but a buyout by its dedicated production team saved it and they’ve continued publishing it to this day. Many happy returns, @EuropeanRailTT!

No, there is no sense in which Meta joining ActivityPub is a good thing.

Companies like Meta aren't going to join the Fediverse and play nice, they are going to join with the mentality of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Sure, they'll play nice until they have 90% of the entire userbase, then they'll do whatever they like.

Don't want your posts indexed for search? Tough, they'll add it. So you'll Fediblock them? Fine, now you just cut yourself off from 90% the Fediverse, not the other way around.