Our goal with this project is to speculate on the future of cities, and to celebrate the vitality and diversity of urban spaces, by imagining ways that communities can use the clean-energy transition as an opportunity to enhance what makes them special. The transition will involve messiness, discomfort, and in some cases, dislocation and displacement. Yet it is also a chance to strengthen neighborhoods, foster greater equity and civic engagement, and repair the natural environments and ecosystems that both surround and wind through our cities. In this collection, we aim to provide glimpses into possible configurations of clean-energy infrastructure—along with its concomitant social relations, political structures, and institutions—that embrace the unique circumstances of different cities. We hope to encourage dialogue, debate, and critical thinking about how to navigate urban energy transitions in ways that are culturally responsive and inclusive, and in ways that honor and amplify the beauty and grandeur of cities, as well as their ability to provide places where people can live and thrive and make futures for themselves, their neighbors, and future generations.

This article explains the role of the X Window System when it was first developed in the 1980s, and today. I highlight three advanced traits:

X was highly portable, so that applications written for X could run on virtually any Unix system, on BSD, on GNU/Linux, and on the Mac.
X allowed distributed computing. You could run graphical applications hosted on another computer, displaying them on your local desktop.
X was customizable to an almost limitless extent. This made X a platform for sophisticated interfaces such as KDE and GNOME.

Since last year, I’ve become a bit of an arborist throw line evangelist. Arborist throw lines have made my wire antenna deployments so quick and easy compared with using monofilament fishing line or more complicated systems.

Since purchasing this arborist throw line last year, I’ve never looked back. The throw line never gets caught in tree branches, it’s reusable hundreds of times, and with it I can easily snag branches 50’+ above the ground to hang my wire antennas.

Here are 11 Linux commands that one sysadmin cannot live without.

This is all to say that the more standard tools I know about, the more powerful my throwaway commands become, the faster I can write them, and the quicker my clients get their actual problems solved.

Did you know there is a Linux package you can install that is actually called "HOLLYWOOD" and that is designed to simply LOOK COOL ON SCREEN? (I've already spotted it on at least one major news site this cycle)

via Ethan "Mr.E" Schoonover (@ethanschoonover)

The names have two-character prefixes based on the type of interface:

en for Ethernet,
wl for wireless LAN (WLAN),
ww for wireless wide area network (WWAN). 

The names have the following types: ...

The pandemic has shown how difficult it can be for the US to succeed with major technology projects. We asked leading thinkers what they would do to change that.

There are a number of reasons people are seeking a change, in what some economists have dubbed the ‘Great Resignation’. For some workers, the pandemic precipitated a shift in priorities, encouraging them to pursue a ‘dream job’, or transition to being a stay-at-home parent. But for many, many others, the decision to leave came as a result of the way their employer treated them during the pandemic.

Psychologists have now tested the influence of personality on people’s mental health during the pandemic – and their results suggest that introverts found it much harder to cope with the isolation than many had expected. Besides highlighting some common misconceptions about different personality types and their need to socialise, the insights from these studies can help us all to navigate life post-lockdown

The Mathematical Laboratory’s first computers, EDSAC and EDSAC 2, were made available to researchers elsewhere at the university who wrote programs that were punched out on paper tape and fed into the machine.

At the computing center, these paper tapes were clipped to a clothesline and executed one after the other during business hours. This line of pending programs became known as the “job queue,” a term that remains in use to describe far more sophisticated means of organizing computing tasks.

Cyber insurance isn't exactly driving organisations to improve their infosec practices, a think-tank has warned – and some insurers are thinking of giving up thanks to the impact of ransomware.

We know alternatives are possible, because we used to have them. Before private commercial platforms definitively took over, online public-interest projects briefly flourished. Some of the fruits of that moment live on. In 2002, the Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig helped create the Creative Commons license, allowing programmers to make their inventions available to anyone online; Wikipedia—which for all the mockery once directed its way has emerged as a widely used and mostly unbiased source of information—still operates under one. Wikipedia is a glimpse of the internet that might have been: a not-for-profit, collaborative space where disparate people follow a common set of norms as to what constitutes evidence and truth, helped along by public-spirited moderators.

MAX! ist eine Heizungssteuerung, die die Raumtemperatur durch funkvernetzte Heizkörperthermostate an den Heizkörpern regelt. MAX! stellt eine Alternative zur FHT und HomeMatic Heizungsteuerung dar.

This pages describes the steps required to migrate a house installation from MAX!Cube solution (using a Cube and MAX! Software from ELV/EQ-3) to FHEM on a Raspberry Pi combined with a CUL. The benefit of such a migration is to gain better logfiles, to get graphs (Desired vs. Actual temperature and Valve position) and more reliable software.

FHEM is a software, written in perl, which enables you to manage (eg. EVL) home automation devices over a Webinterface, with the Help of a radio transmitting USB Stick (CUL/CUN). As an alternative to USB Transmitters/Receivers LAN-devices can be used (CUNO/HM-CFG-LAN). I installed it on a Buffalo WZR-HP-AG300H, which has plenty of memory and storage. You might have to install it on an external usb storage or make a swapfile on the usb drive.

I’ve been a NetBSD developer for three years and it’s been my primary operating system for a long time too - on everything: routers, laptops, Raspberry Pis, PowerPC mac minis, Vortex86 embedded boards, and servers.

I’ve recently been using FreeBSD a lot at work. We have a lot of servers and embedded boards running it, and I was given the option of installing anything I wanted on my workstation. I chose FreeBSD to maintain a separation of BSDs between my work and home life ;)

I thought I’d write a little bit about some differences that stand out to me. Since everyone that knows me well knows that typical use cases like web hosting aren’t really my jam, and I’m more of an embedded, audio, and graphics person, maybe I can offer a more uncommon perspective.

Tufte CSS provides tools to style web articles using the ideas demonstrated by Edward Tufte’s books and handouts. Tufte’s style is known for its simplicity, extensive use of sidenotes, tight integration of graphics with text, and carefully chosen typography.

Edward Tufte instead suggests the use of “sidenotes”:

Sidenotes are like footnotes, except they don’t force the reader to jump their eye to the bottom of the page, but instead display off to the side in the margin.

So my objective was to use the existing kramdown pipes and generate the footnotes, but display them off to the side in the margin instead of at the bottom.

Pulling this off is tricky with pure CSS but is baby talk for javascript. So I pulled out my trusty old jQuery2 chops and got this fun side project done.

Fire up your linux terminal and $ telnet http://mapscii.me # to browse the world, and $ curl http://wttr.it # to get the weather and finally install and run cmatrix