Category: Uncategorized

  • Experiments with remote birthday greetings

    I’ve recently been experimenting with using remote conferencing tools to make it easier to use video for richer, more intimate messages, and below is a post I’ve shared in a few private social networks. I tried a few services, but it turns out that it’s totally possible to use enterprise teleconferencing software to share recorded…

  • Getting the bottom of that asinine article about the CO2 footprint of email

    I keep seeing people online talk about this piece in the Guardian. I shared this thread when it first came out, as it made me pretty angry before, but I think I need to expand on it now, as it Just. Won’t. Die. I’m miffed because this is the digital version of talking entirely about…

  • Notes from the Future Ethics at UX Book club

    I went to the first UX Book Club Berlin in a while last night, and it covered Cennyd Bowles’ book from 2018, Future Ethics. Below are my notes. Apologies for the quality. A set of notes for future reference Peter’s Bihr’s writing is accessible and really interesting in this field. This whose work I referred…

  • Why I spend time working on ClimateAction.tech

    I’ve been investing a bunch of time into ClimateAction.tech, an online community since around August 2018. I’ve seen it grow from a private slack group of about 100 people into something closer to 1600 people now, and I figured it would be worth writing down why I spend this time. I’ve tried to work out…

  • Quick notes from an EU Green Public Procurement Workshop for Cloud and IT in Brussels

    As part of my work with the Green Web Foundation, I’ve ended up spending time in Brussels going to workshops, to feed into policy for greening the way we do digital. I’ve just finished the second workshop today which was about the sexy, sexy subject of public procurement. Why am I doing this? Because I…

  • How to rate limit punks with nginx

    I do some ops work for the Green Web Foundation, and over the last few weeks we’ve been seeing nasty spikes in usage on our API, which have had the effect of overloading the machine on occasion. We resolved it in the end by applying some rate limiting in nginx. Here’s how. The process is…

  • In praise of sea otters

    Sea otters are awesome. I have a bunch of tabs open, and I wanted to drop some content here before I close them. Sea otters are great in particular if you care about climate change, because they eat sea urchins, which in turn really, really like eating kelp, a giant seaweed that forms huge, beautiful…

  • Two things I wish existed, and would want to make if had lawyer super powers

    A friend of mine, Ed asked me this in a private Whatsapp group before tagging me on twitter with this message: Two things I wished existed A “Green Oak” Software License Anything to discourage the use of open source software and services to support the extraction of fossil fuels would be good. We’ve seen previously…

  • How to forward requests with proxy_pass in nginx

    I’ve been doing some work of late with The Green Web Foundation, and recently we moved from using Gearman as a queue, to RabbitMQ instead. RabbitMQ has a management UI that makes it easier to tell what it’s doing, and it also exposes this information at a specific port, (lets say 12345) in the form…

  • Fellowship-it: an idea to get over the last hurdle when applying for funding

    I keep planning to apply for the Shuttleworth fellowship, and failing to apply, because I’m not happy with my final application, so I want to try a weird trick that might help. It might help you too. My experience I tried earlier this year, at the last minute, I flaked out, because, after spending hours…