2025-01-26

2025-01-24

• Listening to [[The Word for World is Forest]]
  • From [[libro.fm]].
  • Really enjoying it. The reader is great.
  • [[Ursula K. Le Guin]] mercurial as always.
  • Though, when I say enjoying it… it’s a bit grim. This Don Donaldson character is a nasty piece of work, pure American colonialist.

2025-01-13

• Reading [[Not the End of the World]]
  • Hmm, just plainly stated that [[Degrowth]] is wrong.
  • There was a mention of ‘effective’ optimism. Hope that’s not aligned with effective altruism.

2025-01-11

• Reading [[Not the End of the World]]
  • Got it on [[libro.fm]].
    • Intrigued to see how it pans out. Purports to be a data-backed, optimistic approach to tackling [[climate change]].

2025-01-06

• Read and finished [[Four Thousand Weeks]]
  • Thick time
  • Max Weber and Calvinism
  • I liked it in general. I’m on board with the general gist of the anti productivity sentiments.
    • Sometimes it came across a bit… wilfully contrary? Not sure.

2025-01-02

• Planning to update spacemacs to latest.
  • As noted recently, usually something breaks in this process.
  • So I’ll look at ways to do this with minimal disruption.
  • I think trying to do it using multiple config directories seems a good approach.
    • That’ll be useful for if I ever want to run spacemacs and Doom side-by-side, too, for example, or my own vanilla Emacs.
  • One issue to resolve first - you need Emacs 29 for the –init-directory flag. I’m still on 28.1.
    • OK, I’ll try and tackle that first.
• [[Updating to Emacs 29 on Linux Mint]]

2024-12-30

• [[Bookmarked]]
  • Charity Digital - Topics - Digital inclusion: A year in review

2024-12-28

• Reading [[Four Thousand Weeks]]
  • The efficiency trap - the more efficient you get, the more things you will fit into to do list, ultimately not gaining any time.
  • Productivity techniques are a way of facilitating avoidance of making hard choices.
    • By claiming you can get more efficient and fit more in, you can avoid having to decide what not to do.
  • Pay yourself first.
  • Keep three things in progress.

2024-12-26

• [[My answers to Sophie’s questions about digital gardens]]

2024-12-19

• [[Bookmarked]]
  • Starmer urged to change donation rules amid talk of Musk bankrolling Reform |…
    • [[Elon Musk]]. [[Reform UK]].
    • Oh hell.

2024-12-16

• [[Bookmarked]]
  • Supernote’s new E Ink tablet is upgradeable and repairable - The Verge

2024-12-14

• [[Bookmarked]]
  • New UK data centres could have a devastating impact on our environment, and o…
    • [[data centre]]
  • Library of Things Toolkit - Shareable
    • [[Library of things]].

2024-12-11

• [[Bookmarked]]
  • against the dark forest
    • [[Dark forest]]. [[Cozyweb]].
  • Britain leads the world in cracking down on climate activism, study finds | E…
    • [[climate activism]].
  • New report: Exploring a transition to alternative social media platforms for …
    • [[Alternative social media]].

2024-12-09

• [[Listened]]: [[Novara Live: Assad Falls: What Next For Syria?]]

2024-12-08

• [[Read]]: [[Wasteland]]
  • In the epilogue, a bit of reflection on how we actually reduce waste.
  • Looks at [[ethical consumption]], [[zero waste]] and the [[circular economy]] with a critical eye. Them having been coopted by corporations.
  • Ultimately, his conclusion seems to be: [[degrowth]]. Consume less, produce less.
    • That doesn’t really address the problems of industrial waste though.

2024-12-07

• Blurters gonna blurt.

  • [[microblurting]].
  • Going to try popping them in daily files in a subfolder.

• Read: [[Wasteland]].

  • [[Nuclear waste]]. [[Sellafield]].
  • The book is great, well written and researched.
  • But I’m finding the subject matter ultimately quite depressing.
  • Particularly as it’s getting into [[industrial waste]]. It’s huge in scale.
  • [[Nuclear power]] and the corresponding waste is such a prime example of human hubris and folly.
  • This shit is going to be around for tens of thousands of years, yet we don’t seem to have a clue what we’re doing with it.

2024-12-06

• The bookmarks from yesterday look pretty messy.

  • Maybe better to indent them all under one heading.

• [[Read]] (well, skimmed): [[Beyond Waste: Essential Skills for a Greener Tomorrow]]

• Read: [[Wasteland]]

  • [[household waste]] vs [[industrial waste]]

2024-12-05

• [[Bookmark]]: Climate Vanguard

  • "Political Education for Collective Liberation"

• [[Bookmark]]: How I Use Org-Roam to Take Notes for CS - Michael

  • Site inspiration.
  • Very pleasing looking font / text rendering.
  • I see it’s making use of Hugo.

• [[Bookmark]]: The Eco-Socialist Party — Climate Vanguard

  • [[Ecosocialism]].

• Today I was writing a newsletter. In my ongoing push to do everything in [[Emacs]], I set up org-preview-html to get a nice HTML preview pane as I was writing it in [[org-mode]]. I then copied and pasted from that into Drip’s wysiwyg editor. Worked pretty well.

• [[Bookmark]]: Levelling up through circular economy jobs » Green Alliance

  • [[Green jobs]]

• [[Bookmark]]: Beyond Waste: Essential Skills for a Greener Tomorrow report

  • [[Green jobs]]

• [[Bookmark]]: Capitalism kills: The case for ecosocialism | Green Left

• [[Bookmark]]: Reclaiming digital sovereignty

• As one might have noticed, I’m logging bookmarks in the journal stream.

• [[Read]]: some [[Wasteland]].

  • [[mining]]. [[Tailings]].

2024-12-04

• [[Read]] some [[Wasteland]].
  • [[Agbogbloshie]]
  • [[Basel Convention]]

2024-12-03

• [[Wasteland]].
  • [[Toxic colonialism]].
  • Companies incinerating products to save money.
  • Little bit if a history of [[planned obsolescence]].
  • Types of obsolescence.
  • [[Batterygate]].
  • [[Right to repair]].

2024-12-02

• Read Where to draw the line? - by Gordon Brander

  • About [[complex systems]], modularity, compositionality, and boundaries.
  • Not a fan of [[Substack]], but always enjoy [[Gordon Brander]]‘s writing on [[systems]] and adjacent topics.
  • A shame that Gordon canned [[Subconscious]].

• Note that [[Substack]] has it’s short form posts now.

  • A decent move, a combining of elements of the garden and the stream in one service.
  • Essentially another walled garden version of what [[IndieWeb]] does.

• I love using [[spacemacs]] and [[Emacs]].

  • However, one big negative - I’m always scared to update spacemacs to latest, as well as packages from Melpa.
  • Pretty much at least one important thing breaks every time that I do, and as I need this for my work, I can’t often spare that time.
  • So I tend to put it off and lag behind.
  • I imagine there’s things I can do that would mitigate the risk and friction - I should look into those.
    • One simple idea is just to have two version running side-by-side. I might be able to do that actually, I think there’s a flag you can pass Emacs to say where to look for your conf folder.

2024-12-01

• Continuing from yesterday, yeah it seems like the touch input doesn’t work great on the native Android Emacs build, either.
  • So, Termux’s text input view is probably the best option for now.
  • orgzly is brilliant for task management, but you don’t get the whole range of Emacs’ powers.

2024-11-30

• [[Wasteland]]

  • [[Food waste]] and [[gleaning]].

• Writing prose in [[Emacs]] with [[Termux]] is a little weird.

  • It’s because you have to workaround the fact that terminal emulators don’t generally work well with touch keyboards.
  • Termux solves this cleverly with a text input view you can access by swiping left on the extra keys row.
  • It’s neat, but not optimal for longer-form writing.
  • Options:
    • Use orgzly for longer text input.
    • Try Emacs native Android build again.
    • Stick with it, it’s not that bad.

• Going all in on [[libre software]] and [[open hardware]] is a key part of [[digital ecosocialism]].

  • That said, use of proprietary alternatives may be necessary during transition.

• Provisioning the [[knowledge commons]] with info on what software is good, how to use it, how to switch to it, etc, also very important.

• [[Wasteland]]

  • [[Soil]], [[composting]], and a surprise mention of [[metabolic rift]].
  • It’s a well-written book - well paced, informative, humorous.
  • [[Biogas]].

• [[Waste]] and what you do with it is an important part of any [[system]].

  • This is part of why I’m finding [[Wasteland]] so interesting.
    • Here the system is society.
  • You can try and reuse it circulate it back into your system. Or you sink it somewhere in the environment.
    • It seems though, nothing is ever truly a sink - it always comes back one way or another…
  • Or you try and reduce how much of it there is in the first place.

2024-11-29

• Watched [[Why Spaced Repetition Doesn’t (Always) Work]]

  • Clickbaity title, but good points about [[spaced repetition]].

• [[Wasteland]]

  • [[Cholera]]. [[Sewers]].

2024-11-28

• Watched [[Agentic Product Development]]
  • Not sure I understand how the talk relates to the title.
  • But I like the concepts discussed a lot.
    • To me it felt like a description of [[IndieWeb]] without really mentioning IndieWeb.
      • Except in the talk subtitle? And one side mention of IndieAuth.

2024-11-27

• [[Wasteland]]

  • Now discussing [[reuse]]. Waste prevention.

• Learned of [[Weird]] and [[Leaf]] from Zicklag on Agora Discuss.

  • Very interesting!
  • Weird: "prosocial network based on the cornerstone of the internet:Personal websites."
    • This is music to my ears.

• [[Watched]] [[Why Ethical Consumerism Is a Trap]]

  • It’s a trap!
  • [[B Corps]] started off decent enough, but some problematic admissions recently (Nespresso?)

2024-11-25

• [[Wasteland]].

  • [[Landfill]].
  • [[Recycling]].
  • [[Energy from waste]].

• All of the above methods of [[waste disposal]] are problematic one way or another. Reduction of production and consumption rates really is the only solution. (i.e. degrowth).

2024-11-24

2024-11-23

• [[Wasteland]].

  • When Blue Planet had its episode on plastic waste in the oceans, the anti-plastic public reaction gave the price of recycled plastic a huge boost.
    • Interesting to think how television programmes can still have such a system changing effect.
    • See also the documentary about the [[British Post Office scandal]].
  • Apparently a plastic bag was found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

• I hope to find the time to start participating in the [[IndieWeb Carnival]].

  • I like it as a concept for nudging people to write in their blogs.
    • It is an example of the [[Ritualize Togetherness]] pattern of commoning, too.
      • Which reminds me… would be good to keep [[Node Club]] going.

2024-11-22

• Downloaded [[Wasteland]] from [[libro.fm]].

  • But… now I can’t find my headphones.

• Found them!

• The opening to [[Wasteland]], where he outlines the scale of waste we produce worldwide, puts me in mind of the bit in [[Doughnut Economics]] where she discusses broadening our conception of the economy to be embedded within the biosphere.

  • How the economy has sources and sinks to the wider environment.
  • Wasteland tells just how much of a sink we treat the planet as, as we dump our waste into it.