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!

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.

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.

Might be fun to use for icons later!

Appends udm=14 to the Google search URL to instruct Google to only return the Web results. There is even an extension and website built specifically for this use case. This is suitable for user who would like to have a clean search results without the clutter from Knowledge Graph, Local Results, Related Questions and etc. Now, there are others udm=x than just 14. I have been doing some searching and compile all of them here.

Save this to a custom search string in Firefox/whatever browser and you can automatically use it to search for things in Google without the AI nonsense coming up.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.