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

  • Computing, Climate change and all your relationships

    Generally speaking, it’s a small, but growing group of folk who seem to interested in the intersection between climate change and tech. Earlier in May, I came across Nabil Hussein‘s talk, Computing, Climate Change and All Your Relationships, and boy is it a breath of fresh air – climate change for me is a very…

  • Losing earth and capitalism and the NY times

    I’ve just finished reading this gargantuan piece from the NY Times, Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, which tells the story in the late 80’s of how we almost ended up with meaningful, binding agreements globally to reduce CO2 emissions, when doing so would have drastically reduced the cost of dealing with…

  • Things I recently learned about greening aviation

    Later this month, I’m flying across the world to Bali, see my some of my sister’s side of the family for the first time in 9 years. This has led me to do more research into how the CO2 impact of flying can change, both over the short term, and the long term. Can we…

  • Debugging in python with pdb and dropping into a ‘proper’ session

    If you code in python, there’s a reasonably high chance you’ve heard of dropping into a debugger with something like pdb, or if you prefer ipython, ipdb. It’s a really, really handy skill, and if you haven’t done this before, this 40 minute video gives a good overview of how it can help you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnlZGhnULn4…

  • Trying out a sustainability focussed lean coffee in Berlin

    Through being involved in a democracy themed hackday last year, I ended up working at Factory Berlin, and using it as a coworking space. At a sustainability focussed event, I met another member Cherie Birkner of Sustainable Fashion Matterz, and we’re testing out a a lean coffee next week. Read on to find out the…

  • Quick notes from the UX Book Club Berlin

    o, I’ve just come back home from the most recent UX Book Blub Berlin, where we discussed Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries” by Steve Portigal. I got a lot out of the evening, and agreed to share a few links to thing we discussed, but meetup.com doesn’t let you share comments over a certain length,…

  • How much CO2 can you save when you remove ad-tracking from news sites?

    Now that GPDR has landed, we’re seeing companies serving EU specific versions of their site to EU users, which in some cases, serve a user experience which is cleaner, simpler and faster loading. Some are much smaller over the wire too. So, because moving data uses servers,and those servers use electricity, and that electricity usually…

  • My talk about a planet friendly web at DataNatives in Berlin last night

    So, last night, I did a talk at Big Data Berlin, with the shockingly linkbaity title of Green Clouds in a world of Blockchains and AI. Rather impressively the video is online already – and you can see it start at 37:01 in the video linked below: https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FDataNativesCon%2Fvideos%2F2032555460290623%2F&show_text=0&width=560 The talk The talk is online on…

  • How much of the web runs on renewables today?

    As part of the work I’m doing on the Planet Friendly Web, I’m trying to get access to data that I can base the guide on. In some cases this involves creating datasets from existing data. Here I share some findings from a dataset I generated along the way. For example, to get a figure…

  • I’m hosting the Mozilla Global Sprints in Berlin in May – come along!

    I’m helping host the Berlin Mozilla Global Sprint next week – it’s a two day event, set aside to create the space to make it easy to volunteer on existing open source projects, aligned with the key Mozilla’s key Internet Health issues, outlined in their recently published Internet Health Report. More specifically, these issues, taken…

Got any book recommendations?