The next #PermaComputing #Berlin meet-up will be a _Wild Wiki Workshop_ with @Well Gedacht Publishing This Sunday 14, Sept. 14-18:00h @offline Lichtenrader Str. 49, 12049 Berlin Please join our collective publishing experiment. More details:

Well Gedacht Publishing

PermaPublishing Collective Hacking Session

Image: Fadi Houmani September 14th 14:00 - 18:00 at Offline Lichtenrader Str. 49, 12049 Berlin A PermaPublishing session exploring the...

Heads up #PermaComputing Berlin friends. Our next Meet-Up is approaching: # permacomputing & postmarketOS # 13. July 2025 at 19:00 @offline Lichtenrader Str. 49 Artist and Designer Chaline Bang ( @npub1pcgt...72lr ) will talk about her personal adventures and collective experiments in permacomputing. She is a member of the Rotterdam-based research group _permacomputing evenings_ and will share how they learned to build servers out of obsolete smartphones using postmarketOS. The group conducted experiments into practical techniques and aesthetic approaches as well as organizing public events with outside researchers. http://berlin.permacomputing.net

My latest refreshing creation: Firmematé Hits the spot on those 30+′C dog days. #fermentation

The next #PermaComputing Berlin Meet up is this Sunday 18. June: ## DITHERING HEIGHTS ## Image dithering was once a clever trick for digital imaging on limited hardware in the 1980s. It largely faded from memory as higher power graphic hardware become more ubiquitous. But recently, among those of us interested in a smaller more efficient web, it is having a bit of a renaissance. However, it's not without its critics. This PMC Berlin session will demonstrate and discuss techniques and styles for making images as small as possible. Florian Stolzenhain will bring his ancient Mac and show us some possibilities. We will have a general discussion of limited-palette aesthetics, dirt-style compression and dithering discontents. https://berlin.permacomputing.net/ at @offline

An organic, fair-trade, community-governed, collectively-owned, open-source oil rig is still an oil rig. Intentions, governance, ownership, etc. are all super important, but you also need to be honest about what the thing does and the consequences. I'm lookin' at you "Open-Source Local LLMs".

I'm not the first one to notice this, but just now thinking about citations and provenance… Beyond all the debates about copyright, LLMs are very anti-academic. Their makers seem to feel that source and context don't matter; that knowledge is just a big homogeneous soup of text. They also seem to have missed all the intellectual pleasure of digging into the references. You find so much cool, interesting stuff that way and have to consider the perspectives of the authors. The deep-dive through citations is one of the exciting parts of research.

Our veggie dealer gave me some Chicory roots (Belgian endive) this week. I will try to roast one to make chicory coffee but I thought I would do a little #fermenting experiment. I chopped the root up and threw it in with some yeast, lemon, sugar and a sprig of sweet clover. I suspect this will be super bitter but it's fun to work on my goal of making some DIY root beer / Malzbier.

Baby steps. I made a little #rustic step-ladder for the living room using a maple yoke piece that I ripped down the middle. And I added a removable slide for the junior woodworkers to have a some indoor playground fun. #woodworking

It's actually fine to not look at the news. Ignore the news for a day, a week, a month or as long as you need to. It's completely fine. You might feel a sense of responsibility as an informed citizen to keep up to date on current events. But subjecting yourself to constant exposure to upsetting minutiae about things that are far away that you have no influence or control over can be traumatic. And avoiding that painful experience is not the same as avoiding a direct personal problem that you need to face and deal with. It's actually a healthy, sensible choice to make. Read a book, take a walk, bake some bread, call a friend, whatever. Just don't look at the news if you don't feel up to it. The world will be fine if you are not up to date on the latest shameless palaver. You might instead focus on some of the many really important and nice things that you actually can manage and negotiate that are much closer to home.