Category: Uncategorized
-
A provocative, but fascinating way to think about climate impact in a services or consulting business
In 2008, after graduating from university, I saw a talk by Ed Gillespie at the Hub (now the impact Hub) in Angel Islington, London. It really stayed with me, and one result of me coming to that lunchtime talk was that I met someone Jamie Andrews, who was working on an idea called Loco2, a…
-
Hyperscale datacentre loads as the densest loads on the energy grid – still true?
I recently asked this question on a private mailing list focussed around ICT for sustainability, but having a public url helps when asking more widely. I run a podcast focussed on the environmental impact of ICTs, and I have a question that might be relevant for other studying here. Hyperscale datacentre loads as very dense…
-
Paper notes: Computational parasites and hydropower: A political ecology of Bitcoin mining on the Columbia River
I just finished reading this paper on a lazy Sunday morning, and this post is a bit of an experiment in trying to capture the stuff I learn and make it easier to come back to in future. Why is this paper interesting? This paper does a fantastic job of exploring the politics behind cryptocurrencies,…
-
Quick notes before I forget about last mile mobility, community tech and climate
I keep looking for these links, and searching through my own mastodon /twitter blog poss is getting old. so I’m going dump them here Ways to direct funding to more sustainable variants of community tech This is partly a response to a blog post from Matt Webb aages back about last mile delivery in COVID…
-
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…