Oooooo, I'm gonna try this!

I like the idea of having a Homepage note that links out to things. I'm currently setting up my vault and figuring out what I want to track and HOW to track it, and I'm making use of Bookmarks a lot (and bases). But a Homepage/dashboard/whatever makes sense, too...

INTERTAPES is an updating collection of found cassette tapes from different locations. The audio fragments include: voice memos, field recordings, mixtapes, bootlegs and more.

Opal Irene Whiteley (December 11, 1897 – February 16, 1992) was an American nature writer and diarist who gained international fame for the publication of her childhood diary, which featured meditations and observations of nature and wildlife. Raised in logging camps in rural Oregon, Whiteley was considered by some a child prodigy, and expressed intense interest in both writing and science in her youth.

Sally Carrighar (1898–1985)[1] was born Dorothy Wagner before adopting her grandmother's name.[2] An American naturalist and writer, she is known for her series of nature books chronicling the lives of wild animals. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, and partially disfigured at birth with nerve damage by the use of high forceps that also broke her mother's coccyx, she had a difficult childhood.[3] During a time of convalescence for heart disease and depression, she "developed a remarkable communication with birds that came to feed at her windowsill and a mouse living in her radio, and in a flash she realized that she could write about birds and animals".

Rachel Ruysch (3 June 1664 – 12 October 1750)[1] was a Dutch still-life painter from the Dutch Republic. She specialized in flowers, inventing her own style and achieving international fame in her lifetime. Due to a long and successful career that spanned over six decades, she became the best documented female painter of the Dutch Golden Age.[2]

Simone Cousteau (née Melchior; 19 January 1919 – 1 December 1990) was a French explorer. She was the first woman scuba diver and aquanaut, and wife and business partner of undersea explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau.[1]

Although never visible in the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau series, Simone played a key role in the operation at sea. Acting as mother, healer, nurse and psychiatrist to the all-male crew for 40 years, her nickname was "La Bergère", the Shepherdess. She led Jacques to the men and money who would build his scuba invention, she helped buy their beloved ship Calypso, saved the ship during a storm, and made sure each exploration achieved its objective.

Guide to using markdown to write stuff! A good reference to look back on.

The issues and harms surrounding emerging technologies are especially concerning given the lack of regulation in the tech industry generally, and the tendency of productivity-increasing technology to further concentrate power in the hands of the few. This reading group will explore these risks and engage with how they work in the hopes of better organizing to protect the rights of workers and individuals. The goal is to have a better understanding of the costs (data, carbon, human labor) and risks (misinformation, unpredictability, bias) of making these machines, as well as limitations in what they can learn about the world primarily through data scraped from the internet.

Excellent book list if you're interested in the topic(s).

This is a small app I created to track the books I’ve read, inspired by similar book trackers made by other people.

I really like this design! It's easy to look through and has good info, and links to a separate book page with a review/notes. Source code is here: https://github.com/alexwlchan/books.alexwlchan.net

Meshtastic® is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source!

Very cool!

As France (and Europe) slowly got its act together in the late Middle Ages, cities reemerged as places to trade and thrive. Abbeys gradually lost their relevance in a brave new humanist world.

The French Revolution finally closed the book on monastic life, as the public rebelled against Church corruption. While many French abbeys were destroyed, others survive — and continue to inspire thoughtful visitors. Here are the top ones for travelers

What follows is more like the B side of that record. It is based on interviews with people who knew Watson for decades, on Cold Spring Harbor’s oral history, and on Watson’s many public statements and writings.

Together, they shed light on the puzzle of Watson’s later years: a public and unrepentant racism and sexism that made him a pariah in life and poisoned his legacy in death.

Really well-written and deservedly scathing.

Talk by Moxie Marlinspike at the 36th Chaos Communication Congress.

Considerations for distributed and decentralized technologies from the perspective of a product that many would like to see decentralize.

From 2019 so a little old now in tech terms.

Put together by SFF author China Mieville; 12 female authors and one of them is Ayn Rand, so take it with a grain of salt.

Throughout history, there have been design movements and design practices that have been anticapitalist, antagonizing the capitalist system, or noncapitalist, operating outside the basic logics of capitalism. These “alternative designs” have created ongoing tensions and dialogue with capitalist forms of design. There are also historical and contemporary precedents that demonstrate some elements of postcapitalist design.

An interesting collection of anti-capitalist design stuff.

I want to emphasise here that I am replanting a) articles that I originally wrote and published; and b) only in cases where the original article has either disappeared from the web or is currently in a neglected state on the original site. This is about saving heritage web pages. It's also about reclaiming something that is important to me, but clearly is not important to the current operator of my old site.

This is a cute idea! Wordpress has some plugins that shows old posts based on date; I have "On This Day (by Room 34)" installed but I haven't had the blog for a year yet so there's nothing to replant, ha.

Fediverse servers work like this: servers only really notice accounts from other servers if someone on your server follows or interacts with them.

The reason servers work like this because of resources. If servers had to keep a copy of every post from millions of users on thousands of Fediverse servers in the world, server running costs would become prohibitively expensive (and most of those posts would probably never be read by anyone on your server anyway).

I'd always wondered this-- the instance I use is fairly small, so most of the time accounts look blank to me when I first viewed them!

Tracking the use of generative AI by fascists and adjacent forces - CONTENT WARNING: distressing imagery in many flavours: violent, offensive, racist, supremacist, etc

Sooner or later, most of us need to put our sourdough baking on hold. Maybe we're going on vacation; perhaps the schedule is just too crowded at the moment for the ritual feeding/discarding/feeding/baking process. Whatever the reason, there comes a time when we need to put our sourdough starter to bed for awhile. So what's the best way to keep your starter happy, healthy, and vibrant, when you know you won't be using it for an extended period?

Refrigerate it and hope? Freeze it and forget it?

Neither of the above. The best way to preserve your starter – for a couple of weeks, a month, or even years – is to dry it.