Strategies for sustainable phones
On the Tinkerphones mailing list, Paul Boddie expressed some interesting thoughs about (lack of) sustainability of modern mobile phones. Things got worse lately, it seems.It's a longer text, but we are on Diaspora, not Twitter. Our attention span is not limited to 280 characters. So here is the complete text.
Hello again,Recently, having found myself needing to buy a fairly cheap Android smartphone
to keep communicating with the rest of the world, I found myself reviewing
what the options really were for buying something that would be (amongst other
things)...
- Viable for a reasonable amount of time: the featurephone I retired lasted
15 years but was wearing out and obviously couldn't do smartphone things.- Designed not to become obsolete purely because of cynical corporate
decisions: for example, having a removable battery instead of something
sealed in that may either spontaneously decide that it wants to burst out
of the phone or that will eventually fail to hold a decent amount of
charge, making the whole device useless.- Running Free Software under my control as an end-user.
Obviously, the phone I ended up getting doesn't fully satisfy (3) even though
the manufacturer does provide something claiming to be the source code. It
does satisfy (2), being something of a rarity now. Time will tell how
successful it will satisfy (1).Being aware of various initiatives, it was therefore interesting to read the
following review of Fairphone 3:"Fairphone 3 review: the most ethical and repairable phone you can buy"
theguardian.com/technology/201…I dislike the tone of technology reviews, especially when they talk of "last
year's" technology. They start to sound like fashion industry gossip ("last
season's collection") with largely the same implied level of regard for the
planet, workers' rights, and so on, unless carefully worded and qualified.Fairphone have clearly refined their process of getting products to market
that satisfy their ethical goals, and they appear to be improving with regard
to software support, but even with their resources it appears difficult to
convince others that their premium (£200 according to the article) is worth
paying or that their longevity goals can be realised. Will the phone still be
usable in five years?Coincidentally, another article approaches this latter problem from a
different angle:"To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution"
theguardian.com/technology/201…Although it is perhaps not a central observation of the article, one reason
why something like the Fairphone might not be usable in five years is down to
the ongoing escalation of end-user hardware requirements by software and
services. This is rather like the way Microsoft and Intel worked in concert to
make people upgrade their computers every few years, but now things like
"bloat" in Web and online services are factors, too.Making a top-end device can mitigate obsolescence to an extent, but this
raises some worthwhile questions about where less well-resourced efforts for
making genuinely open phones might be best directed. Smaller initiatives
cannot hope to be using the latest chipsets because these are all exclusive
things for the largest companies. And sadly, "consumers" are programmed to
obsess about specifications and how new the technology is.I wonder, and think that others have also wondered before, whether it isn't
worth concentrating on making more modest devices instead of supposedly
competitive smartphones where openness is the differentiator. I recall
discussions of the Fernvale kit, the Zerophone, and maybe Nikolaus considered
a featurephone design at one point.One aspect that will always detract from considerations of featurephones is
that their capabilities are maybe limited and do not appeal to all kinds of
users. That some Web sites or services may be too demanding, for instance, and
that the hardware just cannot deal with modern things.It certainly seems to be the case that there are systemic issues involved
here: the people writing software and deploying platforms need to stop and
consider their effect on the end-user, on device longevity, and on the planet.
But there must still be a core region of functionality that could
satisfactorily be addressed by a featurephone design (or something relegated
to that category by whatever it is that passes for a "proper" smartphone these
days).Anyway, I think I have now written enough on this topic, but I hope that it is
worthwhile to air these thoughts in the hope that they help to inform any
future directions of the efforts undertaken in this community.Paul
#tinkerphones #letuxos #sustainability #openhardware #freesoftware #fairphone #smartphone #featurephone
We (my SO and me) made a first attempt at firing some #clay objects in a fireplace.
To reach the fireplace they had to be carried for a bit of a walk, so for the first attempt we only brought 3 different whorls, one tiny vase and a round sample bit; one of the whorls (the thickest one) broke near the beginning (and we could only find one piece), but the rest came out decently, even if we accidentally let the fire slow down earlier than planned (they remained at temperature for something like a hour and a half).
The mini-vase is currently sitting on my kitchen sink, half-full of water and at 5 °C less than its surroundings. Before the next summer I want to make one of those refrigerating flasks…
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(since the preview on friendica isn't working, the article talks about the lack of a need for a new leader for the Free Software Movement)
Questa voce è stata modificata (6 anni fa)
Just to clarify: the preview in Friendica works. It adds corretly the iframe to embed the preview. But the url is http, while friendica is almost always https. and browsers block http content in https pages nowadays... :)
whooops, you're right
(I still don't understand when friendica uses the iframe preview and when it uses the snippet of text from the description in the editing window, but it's not like I've ever made an effort to understand it).
it depends on what the site offer as data. It this case the oembed endpoint offer html code to use as embed which contains the iframe (see here). Note that the blockquote with title and link is also in oembed reply.
If the site don't support oembed, friendica tries other systems: opengraph meta tags, "description" meta and title tag. As a fallback, it tries to extract first lines of body text... (I'm describing this from memory.. I could be wrong)
the site has no favicon and no opengraph meta tags so it's not really social-friendly; this is how it looks like in Mastodon:
In general Mastodon supports oEmbed; but I tried with another WP site served over https and it gave the same result as deblanc.net; whereas the oEmbed-from-WP example from oembed.com with type=link is better (but still no excerpt); the issue could be lack of support for type=rich oEmbeds:
github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/… ... in any case, homework for both deblanc.net and wp.libpf.com: install WP opengraph plugin
github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/… ... in any case, homework for both deblanc.net and wp.libpf.com: install WP opengraph plugin
Fabio likes this.
uh, my edit didn't appear on mastodon? when I realized that the preview looked pretty empty I added a short description.
ouch
The fight for diversity, equality and inclusion is the fight for software freedom. Our movement will only be successful if it includes everyone. RMS does not speak for these values.
sfconservancy.org/news/2019/se…
TFW you are on a commuter train between Varese (Italy) and Como (Italy) and an announcement warns you that you are now leaving the European Union!!1ONE!!! (and if you are carrying about a truckload of money or valuables you should leave the train at the next station to declare them)
(I knew I was going to leave Italy for part of the trip, I just didn't expect the EU bit)
tilo.ch/en/Collegamenti/Colleg… ---> this is the line, going through Switzerland.
Filed under: reality oversteampunking fiction.
Today I saw a flogo-pneumatic gun (wikipedia article in italian only, but it has a picture) built by Volta in 1776. The museum guidebook mentions that he commented “feel free to laugh, but don't be afraid of that word”. There is no mention whether the phrase continued with “you fools! BUAHAHAHAH”.
Oh, and it was inside the Volta Temple, which was designed to be a (small) museum, but it's in the shape of a temple, inspired by the Pantheon (so, if this was the discworld, there would now be a god called Volta)
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I think it is worth visiting, but you should either read up on Volta's activities (beyond the battery) in advance the visit or buy the guide when you get there and plan to have time to read it while you visit the museum.
It's full of interesting-looking devices, but the descriptions in the museum only give you their names, with very little hints on what they do. You can probably guess a lot (we did), but deeper explanations would be better.
Fabio likes this.
Vanilla @debian is installed/running on my @olimex TERES-I laptop via debian-installer. If you experience a black screen upon bootup, there is a workaround: remove the installation media at the debian-installer boot select menu. What does this mean? You can easily create your own installer media (a ~90MB image) to install the operating system the way it was designed to be installed. You don't need a custom image sourced from a vendor.
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The aim for today is either discovering that oil lamps are a pretty good source of light that produces little soot, or making my own writing ink (some bought gum arabic required).
Questa voce è stata modificata (6 anni fa)
He does grow enough basil for all of our pesto needs
So the basic needs are covered, I would say...
We only grow the basil, we don't have the trees (pine and olive) nor the right weather to grow them. We're not growing the garlic either, but that we could probably do.
Plenty of things missing from the basic needs :D
For some reasons, when I saw this at the egyptian museum in Turin I thought about mastodon :D
It's the report of a strike by the (relatively elite) workers from Deir el-Medina who were building the current pharaoh's tomb, when they stopped receiving payments/food rations.
bad picture is bad, but this is the first result I found with a quick search and it has another picture and a lot of information dianabuja.wordpress.com/2012/0…
Fabio likes this.
@Gruppo Linux Como especially the audiophiles of gl-como :D
people please host your webfonts. Don't use Google (or other proprietary, non-free, #privacy-violating) services.
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this. this. this.
A step in the wrong direction is "locking firmware", where a loadable firmware is made read-only by storing it to a ROM. (…) This is madness that needs to stop.
know likes this.
I'm not sure I understand what is going on - did Raspberry Pi try to lock the firmware of the GPU to a ROM and FSF supported that in 2012? What is the situation now?
Back in 2012 Raspberry Pi announced that they were the first arm board with FLOSS GPU drivers, when they in fact only had a shim that called the real drivers from the proprietary GPU firmware. Since then their situation has afaik improved a lot.
I don't know if the FSF ever dealt with Raspberry Pi, but they have suggested multiple times that putting a proprietary firmware on a ROM would make it part of the hardware and thus not a/their problem; I know it has happened with the GTA04 and with wifi card.
IMHO this policy is horribly misguided, does not improve the practical freedom of the user and reduces their potential freedom.
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I've tried to make an oil lamp with a small jar, a slice of cork covered with foil and a wick made with thread plied a few times.
The bottom of the jar is filled with water, with rice oil (i.e. an old and slightely rancid oil I had around the house) on top.
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btw, the jar of course had some food products in it, the wick is made from used basting thread, the cork came from a bottle of wine and the foil is a leftover from a solar panel.
I guess that the only “new” thing is the tap water at the bottom :)
apparently, coming with superior numbers and conquering their cities is not something you're supposed to do to your SO.
I don't really understand why :D
∿ und̷e̷l̷ě̷t̷e̷d̷ likes this.
Thank you, thank you for sharing this. There is so much I'd like to express about this...
But won't be able to state that clearly in a comment - this needs a proper post.
For now I just say this - I think we really need to keep the web more KISS, really. There is a lot of trendy stuff happening and it is dangerous when we start treating these trendy things as "best-practice" and copying them everywhere, when in fact they are counter-productive and even toxic at times. A great example of this is infinite scroll (diaspora's frontend has this same antipattern) - no way to link to a specific point in the list of items, no way to know what is the total number of them, and the back button is (usually) broken.
I'm trying to treat JS as an optional add-on with the stuff that I build, as much as I can. In one of my projects I did implement a page that would load parts of it via JS when the user selects an item in a list, but if the user did just visit the url directly, the server sends full HTML instead. I don't think this would be a performance difference, but rather a way to avoid full page reload when only part of it actually changes.
AMP's rewriting of stuff to be hosted by Google specifically in a way that increases their surveillance, with *pressure* to do so in exchange for a boost in traffic that will absolutely go away anyway once they've forced the entire ecosystem to move over to it, is a sure sign of monopolistic behavior that Google deserves to get hit with an antitrust lawsuit for more than anything else I've seen so far.
Harald Eilertsen likes this.
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DebianDay/2019 - Debian Wiki
wiki.debian.org/DebianDay/2019#Debian Day will be on Friday, August 16th in 2019. It is celebrated each year on August 16th.
“We are death,” the first of the three dragon heads said.
“And destruction,” said the second.
I turned to the third.
“And we like cookies!” It said with a grin. “Have you brought us any?”
I held up a basket filled with all sorts of snacks.
The first head spoke. “You shall be spared.”
“For now,” the second added.
“See you tomorrow!” Chirped the third as clawed hands snatched the basket away from me.
Harald Eilertsen likes this.
L'estensione #Unpaywall per trovare #ricerca ad #AccessoAperto da Firefox/Chromium è #SoftwareLibero gratis.Ha oltre 200mila utenti e un milione di usi al giorno. Riesce in 50+ % dei casi, precisione 98+ %.
Quanti #ricercatori la conoscono in Italia?
unipa.it/Unpaywall/
[event-adjust]1[/event-adjust]Debian Day 2019Inizia: Sabato Agosto 17, 2019 @ 8:00 PM GMT+02:00 (Europe/Rome)Finisce: Sabato Agosto 17, 2019 @ 11:59 PM GMT+02:00 (Europe/Rome)Posizione: Birrificio di Como, Camerlata<br><p class="map"><iframe style="width:100%; height:300px; border:1px solid #ccc" src="openstreetmap.org//export/embe… style="border: 1px solid black"></iframe><br/><small><a href="openstreetmap.org/?mlat=45.789…
This rules. DIY computer-controlled loom. (And it's open source!) retrotechjournal.com/2019/06/1…
Tobias likes this.
"I assure you, medieval people bathed"
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I might have accidentally bought some new #ink...
Text reads:
I wonder if being in love with the blood-red ink I've recently bough is yet another sign of the fact that I can't prove I'm not a vampyre(sic).
I should start wearing the black ribbon whose precepts I've always followed (with no plans to stop).
At least this looks like fresh blood and not something used to sign a pact with the devil.
The ink is Rohrer & Klingner writing ink, merinda.
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It wasn't my fault! it just happened!
(the fact that I visited two brick and mortar shops, opened a forum thread asking for more shops to try and then browsed through the online reseller list on the producer's website until I found one I liked doesn't mean I can't claim it was something like the devil forcing me to act, right?)
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waaaay overdue #tourDeFleece update: on day 13 I did indeed spin some wool I carded myself (forgot to take a picture while still on the spindle, but here it is before being lightly blocked: 
I think that for the rest of the fleece I want to try combing it, but with this bit I also want to try some naalbinding.
Then I finished some generic black roving from the yarn shop (that I had started before #TdF19 and kept as my to-go "spin for 5 minutes" project), spun worsted, and then, instead of being able to write this post life happened again, badly, and I just didn't have the energies for it.
In the next few days I also spun another bit of generic blue roving from the yarn shop, this time woolen, and that was it for my spinning this month.
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I'm definitely happy with the amount of spinning I did: I completed everything that I had planned (and didn't hurt my hands) and by the time I had the forced stop I was already thinking about stopping for a while and using some spun yarn in order to decide what kind I needed more: I'm weaving a scarf on the backstrap yarn and winging it without real plans, so I'm not sure if I'll have enough weft, but I also want to try some tablet weaving with the same fiber, spun thinner, so I want to leave some of the roving for the project that will need it most.
I think my spinning has improved a bit, and trying to card was also something I wanted to do: I'm definitely not proficient at it, but I have plenty of materials to learn (today I washed a bit more of the fleeces)
I also learned that whorls made in salt dough will. break., but then it is quite easy to “glue” them back with a few drops of water and some time.
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Meh. You are likewise not allowed to walk naked in the street, even though naked people have done much less harm than people in suits.
Hijabs, for instance, are banned (when banned) as religious symbols (and where similar religious symbols are banned). You'd have to be quite naive to think that those have no impact (whether you agree with those bans or not).
Well, the suits thing was mostly a joke / provocation, I don't think anybody who shared that post really wanted to ban suits instead of stopping to ban hijabs.
Saying that "all religious symbols are banned in the same way" however is misleading: in an area where the religious people are mostly part of either a dominant religion that does not mandate wearing any visible symbol (and if they do want to wear one, it's usually something small and easy to hide like a cross pendant) and one that is discriminated against that mandates that its followers must always show visibly their religion, such a law will not impact the followers of the former, but only the followers of the latter.
Also, there are laws that are not against religious symbols in general, but just against specific kinds of dress (especially the burkini, afaik) under the excuse that they are a symbol of the oppression of women and those are even worse: if a woman is being forced to wear a burkini when going to the pool, and the pool forbids that woman from entering while wearing a burkini, it's not like magically she can wear a swimsuit, they have just forbidden her from going to the pool.
So, yes, these things do have an impact, one that adds more burdens and discrimination to the weakest parts of society.
(disclaimer: I'm talking about the laws and proposed laws in Europe, mostly Italy and to a lesser extend France, I don't know what the situation is elsewhere well enough to have an idea )
(disclaimer2: I know that not everybody who is religious in Europe is either christian or muslim, but at the moment the political debate is on those, everybody else I'm afraid is going to end up as collateral damage)
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Last Friday of July! Today is the System Administrator Appreciation Day. In Debian we're very proud and thankful to the DSA Team dsa.debian.org/ You rock! #SysAdminDay
Thanks Aigars Mahinovs, the #DebConf19 group photo is already available wiki.debian.org/DebConf/19/Pho…
It's again that time of the year... :D
#DebConf19 has started and as usual the video team needs MOAR volunteers to provide full streaming and recordings coverage at the quality we're used to: if you are attending please attend one of the training sessions (they are announced in the [url=https://lists.debian.org/debconf-announce/2019/07/msg00009.html]daily announcement emails like this one): some of the tasks are pretty easy and you can sign-up for shifts during talks you wanted to attend anyway (they will not prevent you from following the talk, and in some case they may even help you do so).
If you are remoting (like me :( ) you can still help: hop on #debconf-video@OFTC to help with reviewing the recordings before they get published. If there are enough of us we can aim to release most¹ of the recordings before the conference is done! This is really helpful for people in different timezones or those who would like to attend two talks at the same time, but mostly, it's fun.
¹ except for the very last batch, of course.
Harald Eilertsen likes this.
Today is the #DebConf19 Open Day! See the schedule and follow the live streaming debconf19.debconf.org/schedule…
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#tourDeFleece update: on day 8 I did the Gotland samples as planned
Then on sunday (day 9) instead of spinning I washed a bit of the “distraction” I posted earlier, on monday life happened and I had a forced day of rest; on tuesday I mostly respected the day of rest (but I started a bit on the Coburg Fox sample) and today I finished them both.
And that's it for my basic plan for #TdF19 , which has been completed way early thanks to the power of lowered expectations!
But... tomorrow it's challenge day, when I want to try and spin some wool that I've (badly) carded myself (with dog brushes), so this evening I've done that
And then I must confess I couldn't resist starting to spin a bit of it, to see how it would be
(this one is going to be spun woolen, and then one day I think I'll buy or make a pair of combs, as for most of the things I want to do with the yarn worsted would be more appropriate)
Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • •The same petition, in German:
openpetition.eu/it/petition/on…
The TooItalian;Didn'tRead is that the province of Bolzano has decided to stop paying to develop FUSS, a Debian based system¹ that has been used since 2005 in the italian language schools of the province and move towards a microsoft-based solution.
¹ not just a distribution, the project also includes tools for both classroom management and teaching.