Status:
A pottering day today, mostly in the garden, tidying up the pile of prunings I wasn’t able to mulch the other day.
Reading:
- Node Star: Own the Internet — A plain-language guide to setting up a mesh network in your neighbourhood. I’ve been vaguely away of these for years and did notice an uptick in chatter but this is the first time I’ve seen something that explained it simply and clearly. It’s giving me the same buzz I got from blogging and Twitter back in the day, like this could be right at the intersection of interesting and useful and fun. I see there are no nodes in Birmingham so it’d be starting from scratch but I think the People’s Republic of Stirchley would be a good test-bed. Could stick a node on the roof of the new building and take it from there.
- Shambala to become UK’s first employee-owned music festival — I’ve never been to Shambala but the folks who run it used to run Jibbering Records in Moseley with a little corner cafe where I did my blogging a couple of decades ago. I happened to look them up the other month and was delighted to see it’s still the same crew (and that I might have even gone to their first night, Africa Jam, with my old mate Suzi back in the 90s) so it’s great to see they’re cementing the legacy and going with a co-operative ownership model.
- Free plug-in solar panels to be rolled out to some households — This is very exciting, specifically the bit about regulations being changed by the summer. Installing ‘proper’ solar on our house roof is a bit too much of an investment but we could slap a few of these on the rabbit shed, or hang them from the south-facing fence, and plug them straight into the house circuit with no major hassle. And given our income has plummeted since my CFS we might even be eligible for the support scheme.