Reads, takes and links. Posted here, before I forget them.

  • TIL: Gunicorn settings you will actually use

    I’ve recently been doing a bit of work setting up Django applications to work with Gunicorn and Caddy of late, and I’ve settled on these settings for now, as the ones I wish I had at my fingertips when working with Gunicorn to serve python apps. Read on for a sample config with explanations of…

  • 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…

  • Useful context for hydrogen economy convos – a recent keynote by Michael Liebreich on hydrogen

    This talk, by Michael liebriech communicates a massive amount of useful knowledge in 20 mins, and crucially provides useful context for assessing claims of hydrogen being a silver bullet in loads of sectors. Michael liebreich‘s keynote speech at the world hydrogen congress 2022 Things I learned Jacob Reese Mogg most had literally called hydrogen a…

  • 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…

Got any book recommendations?