• Dissertations on fab labs and maker culture. [Cindy Kohtala] “A list of doctoral dissertations and master’s theses on open design, fab labs, makerspaces, digital fabrication, 3D printing, maker culture, etc.. Contact me to add yours, and sorry if I missed it!”
• Introduction: Alternative Histories in DIY Cultures and Maker Utopias. [Digital Culture & Society] “Activities considered “low-tech”, the non-digital in DIY (Do-It-Yourself) cultures, are often pushed aside in the rush to promote the most photogenic high-tech tools, such as 3D printers, laser cutters and computer numeric-controlled (CNC) routers.”
• Solar Generator Trailer- Electrical System. [Low-tech Lab] “This tutorial presents the sizing and construction of an electrical system for a solar generator (1 kWp or ‘kilowatt peak’) which can be moved by bicycle. This structure was designed to fit on the CHARRETTE, an assisted trailer designed by the Véloma association, whose plans are freely available.”
• Opportunities of living in an urban and low-tech environment. [Low-tech Lab] “Andréane Valot, designer and graduate of ENSCI – Les Ateliers in 2021, shares her assessment of 8 months of experimentation with a low-tech approach to life in an urban environment, in this case applied to her Parisian studio.”
• Rower generator. [Gene’s Green Machine] “I thought it might be a fun challenge to build a rowing machine generator.”
• The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy. [The Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy] “Something happened when we shifted to digital formats that created a loss of rights for readers. Pulling back the curtain on the evolution of ebooks offers some clarity to how the shift to digital left ownership behind in the analog world.”
• How to generate an Ourzine pdf? [Ourzine] “Ourzines are a way for people to connect with written text without the distractions of digital screens. By refocusing our attention from the unending onslaught of new content to paper, Ourzines give readers the space to choose what they want to engage with and to do so mindfully. No links, no ads, no rabbit holes – nothing but what you have decided to read.”
• Reviving Chromebooks with Ubuntu: Autonomous Servers, Planned Obsolescence, and Permacomputing. [Anarcho Solarpunk] “A tutorial and slight manifesto on reviving end-of-life Chromebooks. How to make them into autonomous servers, and why we need to rethink computing in the age of climate collapse.”
• The buttons on Zenith’s original ‘clicker’ remote were a mechanical marvel. [The Verge] “The Zenith Space Command, one of the first wireless television remotes ever to exist, is a monument to a time before we took the remote for granted. It also just so happened to contain one of the most influential and intriguing buttons in history.”
• Version 2 of my solar-powered, ePaper digital photo frame. [Plotting The Curiosity Vector]
• The myth of neutral tech and the politics of not doing in the attention economy. [Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies] “When performance is increasingly monitored, output and achievement glorified, inactivity deemed laziness and laziness deemed undesirable, doing nothing can be a radical act.”
• Clicks of Desire – How  the Internet obeys you. [The New Atlantis] “Where once it was occasionally possible to opt out of ‘reality’ (by taking drugs, say), it is now increasingly necessary to think about how to opt in to it.”
• Who Makes Our Smartphones? Four Moments in Their Lifecycle. [The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies] “We hope we have provided reasons for holding on to smartphones for as long as possible, if for no other reason than to help release some of the pressure on workers laboring across the supply chain.”
• Low-tech et sobriété numérique: une étude d’usages du smartphone. [Université du Québec à Montréal] “Afin d’interroger la sobriété d’une
  high-tech, nous nous sommes concentrés sur le smartphone; objet emblématique du quotidien, autour duquel nous avons mené un travail de design. Nous avons ainsi mis au point une pellicule de sobriété numérique, qui permet de flouter l’écran et gêner l’usage du smartphone, créant ainsi une barrière entre l’usager et son objet high-tech. Notre objectif de recherche est d’étudier les effets et la potentielle diminution d’usage quotidien de ce dispositif.”

• I Made My Blog Solar-Powered, Then Things Escalated [Louwrentius] What happens when you try to run a solar powered website from your balcony in the Netherlands? “Only with a 740 Watt rated solar panel setup was I able to power my Raspberry Pi through the winter.”
• The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics [The Tyee] “The current prescription for stopping climate change with a mining boom to support an industrial production of renewable technologies is a dangerous course.”
• Half-farming, half-anything: Japan’s rural lifestyle revolution [Japan Times] “An increasing number of people from all age brackets are leaving behind their lives in Japan’s cramped megacities in favor of growing their own food sources, combined with a vocation that reflects their own unique interests and talents.” [Via Wrath of Gnon]
• The age of average [Alex Murrell] “Whether you’re in film or fashion, media or marketing, architecture, automotive or advertising, it doesn’t matter. Our visual culture is flatlining and the only cure is creativity.” [Via Ran Prieur]
• Nick Cave on Christ and the Devil [Unherd] “The idea that you can offend people, or that your songs can be dangerous enough for people to be scared of them, is exciting for me.”
• In an isolated world, humans need to dance together more than ever – but we’re running out of places to do it [The Guardian]
• A Humanism of the Abyss [The New Atlantis] “Illich and Sacks had in common a desire to reform the medical system — a desire that today still remains unfulfilled.”

• These scientists lugged logs on their heads to resolve Chaco Canyon mystery. [Ars Tecnica] “Tumplines allow one to carry heavier weights over larger distances without getting fatigued.” Thanks to Matthew McNatt.
• Barbed Wire Telephone Lines Brought Isolated Homesteaders Together. [Atlas Obscura] “In some cases, as many as 20 telephones were wired together—all of which would ring simultaneously with each call, regardless of who was making it and who they were trying to reach. Agreed-upon codes—three short rings for you, two long rings for me—helped people know if the call was for them.”
• The vertical farming bubble is finally popping. [Fast Company] “In a typical cold climate, you would need about five acres of solar panels to grow one acre of lettuce”.
• Seaweed as a resilient food solution after a nuclear war. [ResearchGate] “We find seaweed can be grown in tropical oceans, even after nuclear war. The simulated growth is high enough to allow a scale up to an equivalent of 70 % of the global human caloric demand (spread among food, animal feed, and biofuels) in around 7 to 16 months, while only using a small fraction of the global ocean area. The results also show that the growth of seaweed increases with the severity of the nuclear war, as more nutrients become available due to increased vertical mixing. This means that seaweed has the potential to be a viable resilient food source for abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios.”
• Traditional Fishing Gears and Methods of the Bodo Tribes of Kokrajhar, Assam. [Fishery Technology] “The popularity and usage of some of the gears like Sahera, Baga, Borom Je and Dura Je were found declining, which may be attributed to increasing popularity of destructive fishing techniques like electric fishing, blast fishing and poisoning.”
• Low-tech approaches for sustainability: key principles from the literature and practice. [Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy] ” This article develops a seven-principle framework to categorize low-tech concepts based on an abductive approach which included a literature review and interviews with low-tech actors.”
• Ministry of Truth: The secretive government units spying on your speech. [Big Brother Watch] “The internet contains masses of incorrect information – but this is a defining feature of an open forum, not a flaw.”
• We’ve lost the plot. [The Atlantic] “Our constant need for entertainment has blurred the line between fiction and reality—on television, in American politics, and in our everyday lives.”

Some low-tech computing links:

• How to Start Your Blog in 2023.
• Small Technology Foundation.
• Noгma Design.
• Degrowth and strategy.
• The small web is beautiful.

• Your stuff is actually worse now. [Vox] How the cult of consumerism ushered in an era of badly made products.
• The Automation Charade. [Logic] The rise of the robots has been greatly exaggerated. Whose interests does that serve?
• How Stanford Failed the Academic Freedom Test. [Tablet] For America’s new clerisy, scientific debate is a danger to be suppressed.
• Minimal Computing. [Digital Humanities Climate Coalition] Minimal computing is a set of principles and practices that aim to reduce both environmental impact and barriers to access and engagement.
• Open hardware: From DIY trend to global transformation in access to laboratory equipment. [PLOS Biology] This Essay examines the global spread of open hardware and discusses which kinds of open-source technologies are the most beneficial in scientific environments with economic and infrastructural constraints.
• Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable? [MIT News]
• Speeding up. Prehistoric animal traction and the revolute joint. [Eva Rosenstock] The revolute joint, an innovation of the late fourth and the early third millennia BCE, brought about wheelsets and wheels for carts and wagons along with other applications such as pivoted doors, the potter’s wheel, and levers. In terms of acceleration, these innovations were as significant as the acceleration period we currently encounter that started with industrialization.
• The candle clock. [Wikipedia] While no longer used today, candle clocks provided an effective way to tell time indoors, at night, or on a cloudy day. Previously: Human alarm clocks.
• Brandalism. A revolt against the corporate control of our culture and space.
• Pickup Trucks: From Workhorse to Joyride. [Axios] In the 1980s, about half of pickup trucks were categorized as small or midsize, but by the 2010s small pickups had nearly vanished and fullsize trucks dominated.