Benjamin @Benjamin@writing.exchange

If you are arranging an event, especially one that is a bit techie, and you have the ability to: please, please create an #ical file for people to add it to their calendars! (Looking at you #open2018 👁️ )

The #bookshop kobo.com sells lots of non-DRM eBooks!

However, they also sell lots of DRM eBooks, all mixed together with the non-DRM, and no filter to sort them out

This makes it very difficult to look for non-DRM books on #Kobo.

So, to solve this problem switching.social presents the Unofficial Kobo Search page, which lets you find non-DRM books available on your country's Kobo site:

https://switching.social/unofficial-kobo-search/

Any feedback very welcome.

#eBook #eBooks #Books #DRM

Yeah, that's still a terrifying violation of our privacy.

This is evil.

I wonder if someday people will learn about historical corporate acquisitions and mergers the same way we learn about the wars and invasions of empires and nation states today.

controlled opposition with the fascist talking points:

CNN: "The vanishing white American" https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2018/06/30/the-vanishing-white-american.cnn

whiteness is a centuries-old political myth used to weaponize colonizers. it is not a race or a people or a history, it is the absence of such. it is the subsumption of identity, of ancestry, within an agenda of subjugation.

whenever you hear "the white race is disappearing!" know that the death of the myth is long overdue.

The other afternoon I saw a dragon in the sky at sunset, but only had my phone with me to catch it.

I've wrote a blogpost sharing an idea about:

''curating content challenging antipatterns effecting comunication and culture within the fediverse'

How can we make it inclusive as possible?
How can power dynamics that acure from:
- louder voice, higher reach, more chatty..
- some having more informations what topic is discussed where, while others don't and by that can't participate

And how can suggestions to those answers be implemented within the fediverse?
here:
https://frama.link/ecU9kMS2

#deletefacebook Today is the day.

From now on my only social media account is on

Liberals keep trying to work incrementally, fixing capitalism, and fixing centralism.

You can only patch things for so long before a better radical alternative emerges.

"These days every geek has an ICO white paper in their hands and they're pushing (their algorithm). More than half of them are broken," Sirer said. Sirer's team at Cornell is developing a green blockchain algorithm called proof-of-useful work, in which the next computer to validate a block and collect new coins is chosen based on energy expended performing a useful function in the real world."

An interesting idea, that's for sure.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/23/bitcoin-blockchain-consumes-a-lot-of-energy-engineers-changing-that.html

Caffeine would be illegal if it didn't have thousands of years of western usage

"Both Bitcoin and Ethereum mining are very centralized, with the top four miners in Bitcoin and the top three miners in Ethereum controlling more than 50% of the hash rate.
The entire blockchain for both systems is determined by fewer than 20 mining entities."

In other words: decentralization in the crypto space is a myth, just as it is a myth that cryptos are currencies at all.

http://hackingdistributed.com/2018/01/15/decentralization-bitcoin-ethereum/

https://github.com/tootsuite/joinmastodon/issues/99

How can a "instance picker" support a healty federated grouth

What we really need is a federated GitHub/GitLab

What's the decentralized state-of-the-art for organizing and promoting an #event without #facebook?

(Trying to organize some free events in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Venue organizers largely non-responsive through email.)

#ical #caldav #posse #activitypub

James Schwab was sitting in front of a camera inside his San Francisco Bay-area home, explaining to a reporter why he abruptly quit his job as a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman three months ago. Then government agents showed up.
https://wapo.st/2lEVjNh

Publish your own reports, photos, video, and/or audio from any and all ICE protests on Indybay. Support anti-corporate, anti-oppression independent media. Tell a friend.
https://www.indybay.org/publish.php
Make Media. Make Trouble.
#AbolishICE #OccupyICE

The reason mechanical keyboards are so expensive is almost entirely because of commodity fetishism and nerd points. There is no reason to justify charging (and buying) keyboards at hundreds of dollars just because the switch underneath is slightly different. There is no better testament to the fact that geeks and their money are easily parted than mechanical keyboards.