Reads, Takes and Links

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

  • Making sense of the energy reporting deadlines for datacentres in Europe

    In the last 12 months, we’ve had a few laws passed in Europe that are likely to lead to us having access to new data about the energy demands of datacenters. Which laws specifically is a bit more complicated, and this post is an attempt to explain the mechanism to others, as well make sense…

  • What makes the web different from the internet?

    I’m not talking about specifics of protoocols like HTTP, but more the idea of who they should work for. Let’s look at the W3C Web Platform Design Principles They start with a short preamble about principles. I think this is a good summary what many web developers who love the web appreciate about it. Principles…

  • Being in the Green Driving Foundation

    I wrote this early one morning to partly as a way to help figure out what bothered me about many of the conversations around Green IT, and Digital Sustainability. I’ve phrased it in a way that I hope helps less technical people understand some of the dynamics in the industry, that are an open secret…

  • What I want from a mobile provider in 2024

    I’m dashing this post as a follow up to this thread on Mastodon, when I was asking for pointers for new providers, after getting sick of Vodafone’s poor broadband service. It’s an outline of my circumstances as I hunt around for an alternative provider of mobile connectivity for someone who lives in Berlin. Here are…

  • If you want greener energy, what’s the best way to get it?

    If you want greener energy, what’s the best way to get it?

    I saw an interesting chart fly by recently from a tweet by Juliaen Jomaux, taken from the recent IEA Renewables report (page 57), What does this chart tell us? The key thing that attracted my attention was how in China, the use of fixed-tariffs / premiums, where anyone building a renewables project gets a fixed…

  • TIL: Keeping your hair when upgrading Django 3.2 behind a Caddy server

    This is a quick note to my future self, on how I recently got Caddy and Django to play nicely after an upgrade from Django 3.2 to a something newer, like 5.0. The problem After updating to Django 4.0, every request that sent data like a POST (the kind you use to login) was no…

  • Notes on the Deutschland ticket

    I recently got round to subscribing to the Deutschland-ticket in Germany, and it got me thinking a lot about mobility in the wider sense. I’ve dashed out some thoughts now to come back to later. In Germany, where I know live, one of persistent areas where the country is underperforming on climate targets is on…

  • What gets to be called green online?

    I work at the Green Web Foundation, and part of my job is maintaining a platform to help people find providers of green digital hosted services. I was asked about whether recent changes in the law might impact what gets called a green hosted service there. I’ve shared my thoughts here because a) LinkedIn has…

  • Why we should be intentional about the mental models we use for thinking when we think about digital sustainability

    To make sense of our world, we often form incomplete, yet still useful mental models of how it works. Most of the time these are helpful, but when we are dealing with complex systems, what might feel intuitively right, can lead to outcomes totally at odds with we were initially aiming to achieve. This post…

  • Hydrogen datacentres – is this legit?

    Part of my job at work is to stay up to date about the options for decarbonisation of the digital sector. I listened to a podcast yestersday where there were a load of claims that seemed well.. too good to be true, even with my developing knowledge of the sector. I’ll outline them below, because…

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