Rooted Software Ltd., September 2023
I am delighted to be joining the PubHubs project, working on adding moderation tools.
The purpose of PubHubs is to enable real-world public organisations such as libraries, broadcasters, schools or health care, to provide online group communications for local citizens, in ways which match their real-world values and needs.
School communities are begging Google to continue supporting Chromebooks beyond the scheduled end date this year. I wish them success with their short term goal. However, I wish more dearly that they would have an opportunity to learn about the down sides of corporate involvement in education, and about ethical alternatives.
Whichever way the petition goes, the media focus there will on Google pushing their Big Tech, likely framed as “generosity”, which we recognise as an anti-pattern. It would be good if we could avoid wasting our energy engaging directly with this news story but instead, riding the wave of it, promote our own story.
Could we write a story something like this?
Having placed all of their eggs in Google's gift basket of once shiny Chromebooks, now rusting away, some schools react by begging the Big Tech for an extension. Meanwhile the [Codename: Ed Foundation?] is preparing to show school leaders a more wholesome future aligned with educational values, with the launch of *[Codename: Ed Suite?]*
You! You, university! You, sports club! You, local library, city council, school, church, youth group! Your social media links could look like this:
Join us in our own spaces! — [Mastodon] – [Pixelfed] – [Friendica] – [PeerTube] ...
— [Blog] – [Fediverse] – [Matrix] ...
We are also on commercial media: — [G] [A] [F] [A] [M] ...
with an explanatory footnote or pop-up:
In the series: Gadgets and Gifts that Respect Our Freedom
A smart soldering iron? An open-source-hardware soldering iron?
Designed by Pine64.
Pinecil-v2 reviews: at hackspace.raspberrypi.com, at tomshardware.com
Pinecil Accessories include a flexible heat-proof cable and sets of tips.
Since I was a teenager I have been using my father's trusty old 15W Antex Precision Model C soldering iron, which has gone through a couple of new tips back in the days when I was building a lot of circuits, and otherwise just keeps working.
However, the old soldering iron's mains cable, very thin though it is, has become so hardened and springy that I have to pull against it to move the iron where I want it. And it heats up slowly so after plugging it in, and waiting for minutes before tinning it, I end up leaving it on, its tip smoking and charring, until clearing up time at the end of the project.
I would love a Pinecil, especially for its temperature regulation and for its quick heat-up, claimed as 6 seconds.
But the 32-bit microprocessor? The control buttons, the USB connector? I can't see it lasting 50 years. This would not be a purchase for lifetime reliability. This would be for fun, for utility, and for the sake of supporting open hardware design.
UPDATE 2023-2024: YES — Thanks to my father, I now have a Pinecil. It works well. I am very pleased with it.
Where does your project live? Where do people find it? Who controls how people access your project's resources on the Internet?
https://our-project.org/
See also: Open Tech, Be Very Afraid
In practice, what do ninety-something percent of small FOSS projects do? They sign up on Microsoft Github. If we are one of these, then we feel our little project has a home on the Internet, its own address: https://github.com/our-name/our-repo. Oops, but did I say an address of its own? Well, there's the catch. I meant an address of Microsoft's own.
Github is a Gatekeeper. Every link to our project now takes the reader through a virtual gateway owned and ruled by Github's owner, Microsoft. The domain name is the gate, and its owner holds the key. Want to visit the source code? Before we reach our-name/our-repo we must walk through their gate at github.com. We must pass through whatever they put in the gateway. Ads? Nagging to sign up? Then they will let us visit the source code that we feel is “ours”.
I have been trying out a matrix-based blog comments system.
WriteFreely is a simple self-hosted blogging system. It uses Markdown for content. To let readers subscribe to follow new posts, it supports both RSS and ActivityPub (Fediverse). It has no comments system of its own.
Cactus Comments is a simple self-hosted comments system. It lets us add a comments section to any web page we control, such as a blog. It uses Matrix for the comments.
I describe a self-hosted deployment.
I wish our children could grow up making their digital footprints in their own digital gardens. In the current system our children visit shopping malls run by the Big Tech companies whose business model is to find every way to maximise profit from their “users”.
This is my list of Open EdTech resources that I see as helpful toward my goals.
From: Google
“Your Google Account will soon be considered as inactive“
”... if you don't sign in soon”
“Is this a phishing scam?” was my first thought. But no, it's true! This officially confirms I am freed at last from Google's clutches on my data, on my digital life.
Hurray!
I once thought Google was my friend. The most convenient email, the most convenient search, a great phone, with a feeling of being quite open-source-y, not too locked-in. But of course their lock-in is immense, almost inescapable, just like all the other Big Tech silos. Once disillusionment set in, it was hard to leave that all behind. Took me five years.
Now, for months and months I haven't signed in to my gmail, to play store, to youtube, nothing.
And I feel great!
Want to know more?
I am publishing the Open Tech Will Save Us (OTWSU) talks on an Open Tech platform — namely on my own instance of PeerTube.
To view and listen to the talks, go to my OTWSU mirror channel. Find a list of recent editions at the end of this article.
To watch the next edition live, with the opportunity to ask questions, see the OTWSU home page for details.
The rest of this article explains the why, the what, the who and some technical details.
“All I Want for Christmas is...” a device working as a tool for me, not as an agent for its maker
We love a new tech gadget. What will it be? It's all about “smart” these days, but when they say “smart” they usually mean “we're still in control of it”.
Learn how you can have a freedom-respecting
