Saw the People’s Emergency Briefing film yesterday. I strongly recommend seeing it if there is a showing near you https://www.nebriefing.org/the-film

🆕 blog! “UK Government Kicks Out Palantir” The UK Government, for all its faults, is pretty good at publishing contracts it has awarded. That's why I get depressed when I see rage-bait nonsense about how companies have been award "Top Secret" deals. Right now you can go to […]

BTRFS and snapper save the day 😀 Talking a relative through running the commands needed for a reverse ssh tunnel was the hard bit. Need a better solution there, as it nearly required train journey.

PyDataMCR Talks on 28th of May * How to handle homelab paranoia with Arroyo * Is Python's dependence on C being corroded? https://www.meetup.com/pydata-manchester/events/314622186/ #manchester #python #rust

Experimenting with graphics transforms on #tildagon

If you are having a quit the tech industry and become a farmer day: The Kindling Trust (Manchester food non-profit) have a couple of job vacancies. https://kindling.org.uk/news/join-our-growing-teams Community Food Hub Co-ordinator, Stockport, full time, £26k […]

My perspective on #OggCamp day two: a total success! My discussions with OggCamp's many fellow attendees today ranged from new British regulations for microlight aircraft to the intricacies of German charity structures for FOSS non-profits, and I […] [Original post on social.seabass.systems]

Just wrote to my local MP asking them to support EDM 2650 and sort out the UK's digital sovereignty. https://action.openrightsgroup.org/protect-britain%E2%80%99s-digital-backbone-%E2%80%94-ask-your-mp-act

"Modular Monolith" by @kevlin is just the kind of architecture talk I love: - historic reference to help us ground trends in tradition - semantics: care about what things mean so that we can actually say something of value, while - playing with words and language to show how malleable this […]

Brilliant news! The UK's Labour Government are going to make "plug in solar" legal. Grab some panels from Lidl, hang them off your balcony or out your window, plug them in to your mains. Done! https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-go-further-and-faster-in-becoming-energy-secure #solar

Very nice thread and worth the long read too on why UK electric prices are still influenced by gas. https://mastodon.energy/@drsimevans/116222845147511874 [email protected] - NEW: Why does gas set the price of electricity – and is there an alternative? Make yourself a tea (or grab a […]

Walk Ride Greater Manchester have 2 vacancies: - Walking and Cycling Bus Coordinator - Project Administrator for Walking and Cycling Bus Programme Walk Ride GM has launched an ambitious new pilot project to establish the UK’s first coordinated network of walking and cycling buses for school […]

"Levenshulme Inspire is looking for dynamic Cafe Manager who will lead the community café" https://www.lev-inspire.org.uk/job-opportunity/ #levenshulme #manchester #getfedihired #nonprofit #gortydents

Do you know anyone in the western Peak District who'd be willing to sell some land for conservation? We've started sending letters/emails direct to land-owners, asking if they'd consider selling 10-20 acres. If you know of anyone, please send them our way! Contact details are on wild-ling.org.uk 🌰

Don't change train station names. It can be really confusing. Sure 99% of travellers know where they are, but some people are using those sign to know when to get off. Making a mistake can mean missing a connection, being fined, or having to buy a new ticket […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

Recycle for Greater Manchester's Repair Week 2026, 2-8th of March. Lots events including a talk at Manchester Library of Things in Levenshulme and RepairFest at Gorton Monastery. https://recycleforgreatermanchester.com/repair-week-2026/ #r4gm #repairweekgm #manchester #repaircafe #mcrlot

Today is the 10th anniversary of Liberapay's launch! In its first decade, Liberapay processed donations worth a total of around 5 million euros, from more than 40k donors in more than 110 countries to more than 3500 recipients in more than 80 countries. Thank you all. To keep making the world […]

Come and work with me! We’re looking for a Research Software Engineer to join the Oxford RSE group. Deadline 13th February. https://www.rse.ox.ac.uk/vacancies

1. In 2009 I wrote this. I argued that Peter Mandelson's department “functions as a fifth column within government, working for corporations to undermine democracy and the public interest.” This thread explains what I saw, and reaches a startling conclusion.🧵 www.monbiot.com/2009/05/04/m...

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Space

For anyone with current grants under review at #MRC, this is what's happening, according to Research Professional: www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r... We are facing a major #UKsciencefundingcrisis but no outcry, no news. As we said in 2010, #ScienceIsVital, we need to do something!

"Cutting edge research in nuclear, astrophysics and more is today facing funding cuts of up to 60%" :-( https://www.iop.org/about/news/vital-science-cut-in-devastating-blow #ukpol #austerity #physics

overly in-depth (i love it) explanation of why usb-c audio dongles/headsets hit USB-FS bandwidth limits https://epenguin.imalone.co.uk/2025/06/audio-dongles-and-ghost-of-usb-1.html

Our workshop from RSECon is now available on YouTube; an introduction to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and accessibility testing with the WAVE browser extension. https://youtube.com/watch?v=M-5KPeUtTys

This years RSECon25 Emerging voices talk - by Ana Cavalcante, Piper Fowler-Wright https://youtu.be/65rd7VUYhe0

Um, you might want to check that BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly08y25688o (I've reported to them by email). #gellmannamnesia

For the last few years I've been running a proxy of the BBC News RSS feeds (https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev) that strips out duplicate content, non-news content, and (optionally) sports news. This weekend, for the first time, somebody asked if it could produce an edition that included only the […]

Nice session of sustainable computing talks at CIUK. Storing heat in old coal mines under Durham, immersion cooling and methods monitoring energy use on clusters. #ciuk2025 #sustainablecomputing

EcoHome Lab: Battery optimisation strategies, Dec 11, 18:00, online. https://www.meetup.com/eco-home-lab-manchester/events/311853741/ These are always interesting discussions on making homes more sustainable with open source tech. #solarpunk #homeassistant #carboncoop

The layout of this paper is expert level trolling! https://journals.uc.edu/index.php/vl/article/view/5765/4629

@katiefenn You are not the only one. There was an open hardware project that made something similar https://www.crowdsupply.com/cool-tech-zone/tangara . Looks like they have sold out of the first batch but are planning a next version.

What do Youth Hacking 4 Freedom participants do about an hour before the award ceremony for the winners? They sit in the hotel's lobby and try to get the #FreeSoftware operating system @postmarketOS running on a @Fairphone#freesoftwareversion 2. 🤗 #YH4F

UPDATE: still looking! Since May, we have: - Bid on some land (unsuccessful) - Contacted landowners & managers about making direct offers - Started a MSc in Ecological Restoration Full update: wild-ling.org.uk/october-2025... Know someone who might sell land in the Peak District? Let us know!🌰

It's good to see that GMCA has adopted a retrofit framework agreement that includes calculating embodied carbon. As we showed in relation to GMCA's own Joint Development Plan, Places for Everyone, it's embodied carbon that's the big problem in building new homes etc. So at least try to make […]

BTW if you're looking for an open hardware, repairable laptop made by a small team in berlin with no venture capital, maybe MNT Reform Next could be interesting for you: https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/mnt-reform-next

#tfw you have a glass of wine on the train and things get surreal. #kevlinhenney #avantiwestcoast #timetravel

From a slide at the Durham NetDRIVE Workshop. The Manifest Destiny of AI Hanna Barakat & Archival Images of AI + AIxDESIGN https://betterimagesofai.org/images?artist=HannaBarakat&title=FrontierModels3 #betterimagesofai #sustainablecomputing

Quarter of UK university physics departments at risk of closing, survey finds https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/sep/20/quarter-of-uk-university-physics-departments-at-risk-of-closing-survey-finds Four out of five making staff cuts as physicists say findings are ‘great concern’ for UK’s […]

@neiman @ligasser Chatting with a friend, I got this expressed better in graph terminology. Each person is a vertex, each coffee break is an edge, edges are labelled with the week. We are looking for a complete graph (there is an edge between every pair of nodes) of N vertices, with labelled […]

i'm looking for a KiCAD EE freelancer who is skilled and well organized (meaning: can finish pcb projects so they are orderable without much nagging from my side (not necessarily with BOM fully picked though)) to offload some of my projects (sometimes partial or redoing something i did, but […]

I spoke at the HPC RSE training and community session at #rsecon25 today. Introduced the Reasonable Performance Computing SIG and our “Python Profiling & Optimization” course first, then had good discussions on the panel afterwards!

Maria from the Manchester Library of Things https://mcrlot.com/ is a finalist for BBC Radio Manchester Make a Difference awards: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0lzr9d0 #mcrlot #libraryofthings #manchester

What would it take for our home to be Solar Self-Sufficient? Work in progress, but I think I have the answer. 🏠 I live in an ordinary house in suburban London. ☀️ Our solar panels generate 3,800kWh per year. 🔌 We use the same amount of electricity per year […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

This feels like a very @SwiftOnSecurity story but I’m going to tell it. Chat bots (not just LLM driven) are surprisingly old. In the mid 90s, a mark up language for string-driven bots called AIML was released. A small community of early hackers and devs got really into it. I was part as a teen.

I did it http://alifeee.co.uk/tpe-soundboard/ (source: https://github.com/alifeee/tpe-soundboard)

opportunity for a hardware/mech/process engineer to join a #climatetech startup, in Falmouth UK. The team are excellent folk, working on a neglected problem (capturing SF6 emissions from substations) to make a properly net zero grid. Might suit a #maker type who likes living by the sea? […]

#manchester's filthy air. A long way to go. "All in all, the measures will get Greater Manchester’s air to 40.3 micrograms of nitrogen dioxide in one cubic metre of air. "The UK legal limit is officially 40, but results under 40.4 are rounded down, making TfGM’s plan compliant. "But the World […]

Manchester to Copenhagen by train for INCS025. Great journey for tunnels and bridges. #academicchatter #academictravel #FlightFree #staygrounded #Climate #gianlucagrimalda #neutrons #ICNS