Tags: notes
Meshtastic chat
Line of sight to provide the most reliable communication. Luckily many of us live on hills (feature of SE London) - note to summon all hill members!
Outreach ideas
- October will be the end of Windows 10. We should collaborate with West Central London Fixers and help out. Stephane mentioned that since our permacomputing gatherings began, a region in France has been moving all of their school computers to PrimTux - La distribution éducative. Mass OS migration is possible but we should still be looking at the issues of mass adoption.
- Not to lose sight of political or activist work - lobbying can fluidly happen between Monday evening workshops.
- Nick suggested making illustration zines for linux or other software installation.
- Ana and Stephane to chat more about making the tear off posters with Stephane's existing anti big tech manifesto/list.
- Find ways of enabling everyone to discover their own personal journeys with permacomputing and report back to the group somehow - we can use the bbs for this
Tags: notes
Cosmic Backups
Dan demonstrated how Kiwix can be used to create offline mirrors of useful websites, books e.t.c. He is hoping to set up an e-ink tablet which can interface to self-hosted copies of torrented content. Kiwix also has all the TED Talks, and we questioned their usefullness in a disaster recovery scenario. Wikipedia is available as a single 90GB compressed archive. We discussed limitations and options for users with low power and connectivity. Dan explained that a major power waster in the internet infrastructure is the CPU overhead of NAT, something that could be removed if we fully transitioned from IPv4 to IPv6. We talked about wikipedia markdown, and thought it would be fun to write a renderer for it that runs on old hardware (such as the Minitel). Dan explained how solar flares could wipe out computer infrastructure, in a 21st-century repeat of 1859's Carrington Event. iFixit and the Whole Earth Index got some praise.
Video Processing
Margo presented us with a mysterious IP address to visit. She has built an image processor using (cables.gl), and created a tool for playing with the user's webcam. We all admired cables.gl, Ana admitted she was surpised that a 3D graphics tool could succesfully embody permacomputing practices. Margo showed us some experiments she has been making with film archives and interactions. She is going to use what she has learned to teach an introductory course.
Personal Home Page
Ana has been rebuilding london.permacomputing.net, partly because the are.na API feels too mismatched & centralised, partly to reduce reliance on javascript. She's been using kiki, which is a javascript-free site builder developed by a member of the permacomputing community. It has a relatively tiny footprint, and uses markdown and PHP.
Ent-tennae
Delfos has been using the SOMA ETHER to record radio transmissions as they are received by trees. She's curious as to why trees seem to strongly receive BBC Radio 4, but is hoping to capture signals generated by the trees themselves, around 200Hz. She thinks she might have managed to record some static from a Hawthorne, going about its day. Unlike most modern radio receivers, the ETHER does not use filters to isolate a particular frequency band - all emissions received are heard at their respective strengths. Some of us tried the device on our foreheads, and found each of us produced different sounds. We discussed perhaps attempting to isolate frequencies relevant to trees, but agreed that the lack of filtering is refreshing. "We still put labels on negative space, even when we don't know whats there".
...and my laptop died here. I missed the project about london property & APIs?
Tags: notes
Text Adventures
Nick shared some PunyInform work he did with the CS department at University of Minnesota Duluth. Their cybersecurity programme uses a text adventure written by postgraduates to test undergraduates' ability to exploit physical security vulnerabilities.Cameras
Nick gave Margot a spare Cisco/NXP digital camera from circa 2012 to play with, in case it was useful. It has a glorious flip-out USB 2.0 plug, and a dastardly mini-HDMI socket. It also runs off AA batteries (packaged separately, so the alkaline crust was contained in the shrinkwrap!). It doesn't expose live video through the USB port, but perhaps the HDMI port could be a way to get a video stream.Printer
Dan brought the printer back out, and we learned that it was possibly running some sort of embedded Linux inside. There are hopes of an exploit to get into the thing, but also there are approaches to defeat the self-disabling features of the cartridges themselves: The printer hosts its own WiFi network in the hall, which you need to switch to in order to poke at the submission port. It runs its own service called "HP GGW", which was easily crashed in fuzz testing. We talked about various vegetable pigments to make custom inks (as inkcap mushrooms are too toxic to work with casually just yet).CMS
Ana looked into alternatives that were more distributed, but the project seems to be in a suspicious state regarding licensing and governance. This group would likely find raw git and markdown comfortable, but it presents an accessibility barrier to incoming participants. Nick mentioned his friend's Tai-Chi site, which is generated from markdown. Cici (the Tai-Chi instructor) edits the markdown from github's Web-based editor, and when he saves it the site is automatically refreshed. The clip art all comes from a single OTF font, so he can pick relevant illustrations of the forms he's teaching that session. It's an interesting midpoint in the accessibility and technical resilience sense.Chat
We all talked about the #permacomputing channel on Libera IRC, which hosts some of the luminaries who coined the term "permacomputing". Clients are a mess, and nobody remembers how they set theirs up, but wyrl and Devine Lu Linvega are on there. We exchanged Signal IDs (and those who have whatsapp), and Nick got gurk working on his pinebook pro for TUI access to Signal.Tags: notes
Notes for Permacomputing Club - 07.07.25
Changes to Website
- Potentially changing web host to leaflet.pub
- Ana wants to redesign site to be more grid based
- Nick suggested side notes (looking for link)
Liberating a Printer
- HP Deskjet 3055a - manual(s)
- Daniel brought in a printer and oscilloscope, so we could have a look at capturing and * modifying signals sent by the printer
- Ana talked to someone about 'inkcap mushrooms' which we could try to grow
- Nick also suggested iron gall ink, but it burns the paper
- There is an option on the webserver settings to disable cartridge protection
- We're in!
- Printers fingerprint every page you print with yellow dots, that can be used to track every page back to the printer it came from
- Yellow ink comes from 'gamboge' - a sap collected from the killing fields of Cambodia
Nick - Show and Tell - OLPC
- Nick has 4 'One Laptop per Child' laptops!
- One of them still works
- OS runs in a virtual machine
- OLPC website
Tags: notes
- Decided to take minutes!
- Discussion of the content of Margo's upcoming screening: she would
- Updates on Joe's screaming computer project: running a local LLM
- (Obligatory Algorave/Algorythms chat)
- Tom explained his work with housing campaigns: aggregating data from
- (Obligatory grep jokes)
- Nick explained his capstone project as part of the UCL Public
- Updates on the printer hacking project: everyone seems keen to try
- Retro-computing chat. Mat picked up a Macintosh SE to refurbish, but
- The National Museum of Computing vs. The Centre for Computing