[viddler id=e83b64e1&w=437&h=288]

For a while now I’ve wanted to be able to check my CurrentCost meter‘s graphs on my iPhone.

Up until now I’ve been hooked up to the “Hursley mothership” and been publishing my data to a central dashboard. Unfortunately, although that draws some pretty graphs, it runs in Java and therefore isn’t supported in Mobile Safari on the phone.

This is still a work in progress, but with a combination of Ubuntu running on a Viglen MPC-L, rrdtool for gathering and graphing the stats, and the iWebKit framework for creating the user interface, I now have a simple iPhone-optimised web application which lets me view the graphs. All that’s happening here is that the data from the serial port is being dropped into rrdtool and graphs generated; and then Apache / PHP is serving up an optimised dashboard for looking at the graphs.

I just mentioned about three different topics I really should blog about in more detail (MPC-L, rrdtool, and iWebKit) but that will all have to wait.

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#currentCost #iphone #iwebkit

Home - iWebKit – Make a quality iPhone Website or Webapp

IWEBKIT IS A SIMPLE FRAMEWORK TO CREATE YOUR OWN IPHONE AND IPOD TOUCH WEBAPP IN JUST A FEW MINUTES. What’s […]

^{iWebKit – Make a quality iPhone Website or Webapp}

Andy Piper

2008-04-27 19:50:15

The buzz
There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.

Rich, James, Nick and Ian have all written about their Current Cost meters already, amid much twittering and the support of @andysc.

The product
The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.

Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.

Update: Roo points out that Eco Gadget Shop have them for sale to consumers, minus data cable.

The impact

One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).

It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.

The ideas

I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!

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#currentCost #currentcost #efficiency #electricity #energy #homeAutomation #hursley #MQTT

Current Cost display

Explore Roo Reynolds' 5733 photos on Flickr!

^Flickr

One of the first Hursley-related things I wrote about here and on the eightbar blog back in 2006 was how much I enjoy helping with our annual schools event for National Science and Engineering Week in the UK – Blue Fusion (the event website has gone AWOL at the moment but here’s a link to the press release).

This year was no exception, and referring back to my old blog entries it turns out that this is now the fifth year that I’ve been a volunteer. Unfortunately I only had room in my schedule to spend one day helping this time around, so I chose to host a school for the day rather than spending all day on a single activity (that way, I got to see all of the different things we had on offer).

So, yesterday I had the pleasure of hosting six intelligent and polite students from Malvern St James School and their teachers – they had travelled a fair distance to come to the event, but despite the early start I think they did really well.

I won’t go into too much detail and spoil the fun for people who might read this but have not yet taken part in this week’s event, but I think we had some great activities on offer. I twittered our way through a few of them. My own personal favourite was a remote surgery activity. You can’t see much in this image (it was a dark room) but the students basically had a “body” inside a box with some remote cameras to guide their hands around and had to identify organs and foreign objects.

There was also some interesting application of visual technology / tangible interfaces – a genetics exercise using LEGO bricks and a camera which identified gene strands, and an energy planning exercise which used Reactivision-style markers to identify where power stations had been placed on a map (sort of similar to what we built in SLorpedo at Hackday a couple of years ago). We also had some logic puzzles to solve, built a, err… “typhoon-proof” (ahem) tower, simulated a computer processor, and commanded a colony of ants in a battle for survival against the other school teams.

Things I learned

1. Facebook (not Bebo) is now where it’s at.
2. If a tornado is coming, get out of the way or into a safe room.
3. Girls are much better than boys at listening to multiple streams of conversation (actually I think I worked this out a long time ago!).

A now, some notes just for my team…

Here are links to a few of the other things we talked about during the day:

• my home power monitoring
• my Twittering weather station
• IBM Smarter Planet
• Andy Stanford-Clark’s automated house
• Home Camp, the home automation and green energy event (next one is at the end of April).

And most importantly, here’s the evidence that we started off in first place 🙂 and I think you were an awesome team throughout. Well done, it was brilliant spending the day with you.

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#BlueFusion #events #hursley #IBM #malvernStJames #schools #smarterPlanet

Andy Piper

2008-12-11 21:53:35

[viddler id=e83b64e1&w=437&h=288]

For a while now I’ve wanted to be able to check my CurrentCost meter‘s graphs on my iPhone.

Up until now I’ve been hooked up to the “Hursley mothership” and been publishing my data to a central dashboard. Unfortunately, although that draws some pretty graphs, it runs in Java and therefore isn’t supported in Mobile Safari on the phone.

This is still a work in progress, but with a combination of Ubuntu running on a Viglen MPC-L, rrdtool for gathering and graphing the stats, and the iWebKit framework for creating the user interface, I now have a simple iPhone-optimised web application which lets me view the graphs. All that’s happening here is that the data from the serial port is being dropped into rrdtool and graphs generated; and then Apache / PHP is serving up an optimised dashboard for looking at the graphs.

I just mentioned about three different topics I really should blog about in more detail (MPC-L, rrdtool, and iWebKit) but that will all have to wait.

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#currentCost #iphone #iwebkit

Current Cost graph

Showing the power consumption based on the Current Cost meter. More about the Current Cost meter on my blog.

^Flickr

I’m in San Francisco today for the launch of a new company – Pivotal.

Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like PivotalHD.

I’ll be live tweeting from the event, where Paul Maritz our CEO will be introducing the company and vision. You can also follow the @gopivotal Twitter ID, and check out the new website.

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andypiper.co.uk/2013/04/24/go-…

#cloudFoundry #gopivotal #paulMaritz #pivotal #pivotalOne #pivotalhd #rabbitmq #spring

My boss and mentor, James Watters, just blogged about the launch of what we’ve been working on since before Pivotal was formed earlier this year – Pivotal One, powered by Pivotal CF (based on Cloud Foundry).

As I wrote back in April…

Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like Pivotal HD.

What we’re announcing today delivers on that promise and our vision – the consumer-grade enterprise, enabling organisations to create new applications with unprecedented speed. The cloud – infrastructure clouds, IaaS like Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, OpenStack, CloudStack, etc – can be thought of as the new hardware. It’s like buying a beige server box back in the 90s – the IaaS layer gives you a bunch of CPU, network, and storage resources, and for your application to use them, you need a layer in between – an operating system, if you like. We’ve spoken of our ambition for Cloud Foundry as “the Linux of the Cloud”, and it already runs on all of those infrastructures I’ve listed above – in the future, hopefully more.

Why is that important? Why should developers care about this Platform (PaaS) layer? A development team shouldn’t have to go through an 18 month delivery cycle to deliver an app! We’re putting an end to the whole cycle of calling up the infrastructure team, having new servers commissioned, operating systems installed, databases configured etc etc just to get an application deployed and running. When you first push an application to Cloud Foundry, and can then bind data services and scale out with simple individual commands, it really is a liberating experience compared to what traditionally has been required to get your application running. We’re making it quicker and easier to get going – a friction-free, turnkey experience. You should just be able to write your code and make something amazing.

We’re also delivering choice – of runtimes and languages, data services, and also importantly, a choice of “virtual hardware”. When Comic Relief ran in the UK this year, in order to avoid any risk of hardware failure (we all know there’s a risk that Amazon might go down), the applications were deployed on Cloud Foundry running on both Amazon EC2 with geographical redundancy, and on VMware vSphere – no lock-in to any cloud provider, and the developers didn’t have to learn all of the differences of operating different infrastructures, they just pushed their code. We’re happy to know that it was a very successful year for the Comic Relief charity, and that Cloud Foundry helped.

Pivotal One also includes some amazing data technologies – Pivotal HD (a simple to manage Hadoop distribution) and Pivotal AX (analytics for the enterprise). We recognise that as well as building applications, you need to store and analyse the data, so rather than just shipping a Cloud Foundry product, we roll up both the elastic scalable runtime, cutting-edge technologies like Spring.io, and and our big data offerings. That’s different from many of the others in the same market. We’ve been running our own hosted cloud, now available at run.pivotal.io, on AWS for over a year now, so we’ve learned a lot about running systems at scale and Pivotal One can do just that.

Above all, I wanted to say just how excited I am to be part of this amazing team. It is an honour to work with some incredibly talented engineers and leaders. I’m also personally excited that our commercial and our open source ecosystems continue to grow, including large organisations like IBM, SAP, Piston … it’s a long list. We took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal to thank them. I also want to thank our community of individual contributors (the Colins, Matts, Davids, Dr Nics, Yudais… etc etc!) many of whom, coincidentally for me, are in the UK – check out the very cool Github community where some of their projects are shared.

I’m convinced that this Platform is the way forward. It’s going to be an even more exciting year ahead.

A small selection of other coverage, plenty more to read around the web:

• a brief interview I gave to JAXenter
• Pivotal One press release
• VentureBeat coverage
• GigaOM coverage
• InfoQ coverage
• Wired on the Pivotal culture

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#cloudComputing #cloudFoundry #community #gopivotal #Java #openSource #OpenStack #pivotal #PivotalHD #PivotalLabs #platform #platformAsAService #rabbitmq #spring #VMwareVSphere

Pivotal Announces Pivotal CF Based on CloudFoundry

Today, Pivotal announced the availability of Pivotal CF, an enterprise cloud platform based on Cloud Foundry, along with a number of Pivotal One services such as an Apache Hadoop and Analytics service

^{Alex Blewitt (InfoQ)}

Andy Piper

2013-04-24 16:25:55

I’m in San Francisco today for the launch of a new company – Pivotal.

Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like PivotalHD.

I’ll be live tweeting from the event, where Paul Maritz our CEO will be introducing the company and vision. You can also follow the @gopivotal Twitter ID, and check out the new website.

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#cloudFoundry #gopivotal #paulMaritz #pivotal #pivotalOne #pivotalhd #rabbitmq #spring

IMG_0116.jpg

Explore andyp uk's 3924 photos on Flickr!

^Flickr

In late 2011, I was contacted by a very charming, smart and persuasive French gentleman who spoke of clouds, platform-as-a-service, and polyglot programming. It took him and his team a couple of months to get me thinking seriously about a career change, after 10 great years at IBM. I’d spent that period with “Big Blue” coding in Java and C, and primarily focused on enterprise application servers, message queueing, and integration – and yet the lure of how easy vmc push[1] made it for me to deploy and scale an app was astounding! Should I make the transition to a crazy new world? Over Christmas that year, I decided it would be a good thing to get in on this hot new technology and join VMware as Developer Advocate on the Cloud Foundry team. I joined the team early in 2012.

The Cloud Foundry adventure has been amazing. The day after I joined the team, the project celebrated its first anniversary, and we announced the BOSH continuous deployment tool; I spent much of that first year with the team on a whirlwind of events and speaking engagements, growing the community. The Developer Relations team that Patrick Chanezon and Adam Fitzgerald put together was super talented, and it was brilliant to be part of that group. Peter, Chris, Josh, Monica, Raja, Rajdeep, Alvaro, Eric, Frank, Tamao, Danny, Chloe, D, Giorgio, friends in that extended team… it was an honour.

A year after I joined, VMware spun out Cloud Foundry, SpringSource and other technologies into a new company, Pivotal – headed up by Paul Maritz. I’ve been privileged to work under him, Rob Mee at Pivotal Labs, and most closely, my good friend James Watters on the Cloud Foundry team. I’ve seen the opening of our new London offices on Old Street, welcomed our partners and customers into that unique collaborative and pairing environment, and observed an explosion of activity and innovation in this space. We launched an amazing product. James Bayer heads up a remarkable group of technologists working full-time on Cloud Foundry, and it has been a pleasure to get to know him and his team. Most recently, I’ve loved every minute working with Cornelia, Ferdy, Matt, Sabha and Scott (aka the Platform Engineering team), another talented group of individuals from whom I’ve learned much.

Over the course of the last two years I’ve seen the Platform-as-a-Service space grow, establish itself, and develop – most recently resulting in my recent talk at bcs Oxfordshire:

slideshare.net/slideshow/embed…

Last week, we announced the forthcoming Cloud Foundry Foundation – and one could argue that as a community and Open Source kinda guy, this was the direction I’ve helped to move things in the past two years, although I can claim no credit at all for the Foundation announcement itself. I’ve certainly enjoyed hosting occasional London Cloud Foundry Community meetups and drinks events (note, next London PaaS User Group event has 2 CF talks!), and I’ve made some great friends locally and internationally through the ongoing growth of the project. I’m proud of the Platform event we put on last year, I think the upcoming Cloud Foundry Summit will be just as exciting, and I’m happy to have been a part of establishing and growing the CF community here in Europe.

Cloud Foundry is THE de facto Open Source PaaS standard, the ecosystem is strong and innovative, and that has been achieved in a transparent and collaborative way, respectful to the community, in a good-natured way in the face of competition. Rest assured that I’ll continue to watch the project and use PaaSes which implement it (I upgraded to a paid Pivotal Web Services account just this past week, I tried BlueMix, and I’m an ongoing fan of the Anynines team).

There are many missing shout-outs here… you folks know who you are, and should also know that I’ve deeply enjoyed learning from you and working with you. Thank you, Pivotal team! I do not intend to be a stranger to the Bay Area! In my opinion, Pivotal is positioned brilliantly in offering an end-to-end mobile, agile development, cloud platform and big data story for the enterprise. I look forward to continuing the conversations around that in the next couple of weeks.

[…]

What happens after “the next couple of weeks”? Well, this is as good time as any (!) to close that chapter, difficult though it is to leave behind a team I’ve loved working with, on a product and project that is undoubtedly going to continue to be fantastically successful this year and beyond. So, it is time to announce my next steps, which may or may not be clear from the title of this post… 🙂
Joining Twitter!
I joined Twitter as a user on Feb 21 2007. On the same day, seven years later, I accepted a job offer to go and work with the Twitter team as a Developer Advocate, based in London.

If you’ve been a long-term follower of mine either here on this blog, or on Twitter, or elsewhere, you’ll know that Twitter is one of my favourite tools online. It has been transformational in my life and career, and it changed many of my interactions. True story: between leaving IBM and joining VMware I presented at Digital Bristol about social technologies, and I was asked, which one I would miss the most if it went away tomorrow; the answer was simple: Twitter. As an Open Source guy, too, I’ve always been impressed with Twitter’s contributions to the broader community.

I couldn’t be more #excited to get started with the Twitter Developer Relations team in April!

Follow me on Twitter – @andypiper – to learn more about my next adventure…

[1] vmc is dead, long live cf!

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#career #cloud #cloudFoundry #job #paas #pivotal #social #SocialNetworking #springsource #Twitter #vmware

Andy Piper

2013-11-12 14:33:44

My boss and mentor, James Watters, just blogged about the launch of what we’ve been working on since before Pivotal was formed earlier this year – Pivotal One, powered by Pivotal CF (based on Cloud Foundry).

As I wrote back in April…

Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like Pivotal HD.

What we’re announcing today delivers on that promise and our vision – the consumer-grade enterprise, enabling organisations to create new applications with unprecedented speed. The cloud – infrastructure clouds, IaaS like Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, OpenStack, CloudStack, etc – can be thought of as the new hardware. It’s like buying a beige server box back in the 90s – the IaaS layer gives you a bunch of CPU, network, and storage resources, and for your application to use them, you need a layer in between – an operating system, if you like. We’ve spoken of our ambition for Cloud Foundry as “the Linux of the Cloud”, and it already runs on all of those infrastructures I’ve listed above – in the future, hopefully more.

Why is that important? Why should developers care about this Platform (PaaS) layer? A development team shouldn’t have to go through an 18 month delivery cycle to deliver an app! We’re putting an end to the whole cycle of calling up the infrastructure team, having new servers commissioned, operating systems installed, databases configured etc etc just to get an application deployed and running. When you first push an application to Cloud Foundry, and can then bind data services and scale out with simple individual commands, it really is a liberating experience compared to what traditionally has been required to get your application running. We’re making it quicker and easier to get going – a friction-free, turnkey experience. You should just be able to write your code and make something amazing.

We’re also delivering choice – of runtimes and languages, data services, and also importantly, a choice of “virtual hardware”. When Comic Relief ran in the UK this year, in order to avoid any risk of hardware failure (we all know there’s a risk that Amazon might go down), the applications were deployed on Cloud Foundry running on both Amazon EC2 with geographical redundancy, and on VMware vSphere – no lock-in to any cloud provider, and the developers didn’t have to learn all of the differences of operating different infrastructures, they just pushed their code. We’re happy to know that it was a very successful year for the Comic Relief charity, and that Cloud Foundry helped.

Pivotal One also includes some amazing data technologies – Pivotal HD (a simple to manage Hadoop distribution) and Pivotal AX (analytics for the enterprise). We recognise that as well as building applications, you need to store and analyse the data, so rather than just shipping a Cloud Foundry product, we roll up both the elastic scalable runtime, cutting-edge technologies like Spring.io, and and our big data offerings. That’s different from many of the others in the same market. We’ve been running our own hosted cloud, now available at run.pivotal.io, on AWS for over a year now, so we’ve learned a lot about running systems at scale and Pivotal One can do just that.

Above all, I wanted to say just how excited I am to be part of this amazing team. It is an honour to work with some incredibly talented engineers and leaders. I’m also personally excited that our commercial and our open source ecosystems continue to grow, including large organisations like IBM, SAP, Piston … it’s a long list. We took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal to thank them. I also want to thank our community of individual contributors (the Colins, Matts, Davids, Dr Nics, Yudais… etc etc!) many of whom, coincidentally for me, are in the UK – check out the very cool Github community where some of their projects are shared.

I’m convinced that this Platform is the way forward. It’s going to be an even more exciting year ahead.

A small selection of other coverage, plenty more to read around the web:

• a brief interview I gave to JAXenter
• Pivotal One press release
• VentureBeat coverage
• GigaOM coverage
• InfoQ coverage
• Wired on the Pivotal culture

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#cloudComputing #cloudFoundry #community #gopivotal #Java #openSource #OpenStack #pivotal #PivotalHD #PivotalLabs #platform #platformAsAService #rabbitmq #spring #VMwareVSphere

Pivotal Announces Pivotal CF Based on CloudFoundry

Today, Pivotal announced the availability of Pivotal CF, an enterprise cloud platform based on Cloud Foundry, along with a number of Pivotal One services such as an Apache Hadoop and Analytics service

^{Alex Blewitt (InfoQ)}

I’m very excited to announce that, from April 10th, I will be joining the Developer Relations team for Cloud Foundry at VMware.

This is a thrilling opportunity for me for a number of reasons.

• from a technology perspective: Cloud Foundry is very, very, very cool. In my opinion, it really comes from a different set of thought processes than the other Platform-as-a-Service offerings out there, which make it unique and compelling.
  
  • the operating system stuff gets out of the way (why should it matter?), but multiple language runtimes and backend resources are available for easy scaling. Seriously, the first time I walked through the command-line tutorial and scaled a Ruby app to 6 load balanced instances with a single command, I was instantly impressed.
  • it is Open Source. The code is on Github. You can run your own cloud if you like. You can add support for your own languages and frameworks, much as AppFog have done for PHP, Tier 3 and Uhuru have done with .NET in Iron Foundry, and so on. This provides a huge amount of flexibility. Oh, and of course mobile and cloud go hand-in-hand, so last week’s announcement of FeedHenry providing tools to develop HTML5 apps to deploy on Cloud Foundry was really significant, too.
  • you can take your cloud with you using Micro Cloud Foundry – so the development and deployment model remains the same whether you are online or offline. I love this idea.

  
  

• for me, personally: it’s a natural evolution of much of the work I’ve been doing over the past few years – focusing on developer communities and promoting technology adoption, as much as top-down solution selling. As my good friend James Governor is fond of saying and as his colleague Steve O’Grady wrote, developers are the new kingmakers – and with trends like mobile, cloud, and devops, nurturing those communities is more important than ever. You don’t impose technology on a community – you explain it and earn your place and reputation.
• I’m looking forward to more speaking, more writing, more mentoring, and more online community building. These are things I’ve grown to enjoy (and in the case of the latter, appear to do naturally).
• I’ve followed Patrick Chanezon, the Senior Director of the team, since he was setting up the developer advocacy programme back at Google – I have a lot of respect for what he’s achieved and the way he operates, so I’m delighted to have the chance to work closely with him. I’m excited to join everyone in the team, of course – I have spoken with most of the group already and I’m really looking forward to learning from their diverse range of experiences and backgrounds.

Between now and April 10th, I have a few things planned including a vacation (!), heading to EclipseCon to talk about MQTT and M2M topics, and some other speaking engagements. After I start the new role, I expect I’ll join in on the Cloud Foundry Open Tour and start to meet folks. I’ll also be on the team for the GOTO conference in Aarhus in October – exciting times ahead!

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#career #cloudFoundry #developerAdvocate #developers #events #job #Life #role #Technology #vmware

twitter.com/andypiper

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#Technology

In November last year, I abandoned my Twitter account – I set it to private, did not visit, did not interact, ignored any direct messages, etc. It was simply too painful to watch friends and coworkers suddenly and systematically being fired, the company culture destroyed, and the developer communities that I supported for 9 years, finally cut off without support or API access. It has been a heartbreaking time.

Today, I took the last step in going back through my password manager vault and deleting all of my X/Twitter accounts. I’ve watched the shambolic rebranding over the past week, and frankly, I wish it had all happened far sooner – rather than seeing my beloved bird being dragged down, and the brand and memory ruined, piece by piece.

There are a few accounts that I share access to with others (for podcasts, sites or communities) that remain, but over the past hour or so I deleted 15 accounts, four of which had associated Twitter Developer Accounts.

Why so many?

• Of course, I had my main account, @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url], which was first created after hanging out with my friend Roo Reynolds in his office at IBM Hursley, and hearing about Twitter, just starting to gather buzz from events like SxSW. Created February 21, 2007. The title of the blog entry I wrote that day seems accidentally prophetic (although, in truth, I do not regret it at all).
  
  • my jobs at VMware / Cloud Foundry in 2012, and at Twitter from 2014, were both direct results of being on Twitter, sharing my knowledge, interacting with different communities, and doing my work on the platform.
  • I’ve made countless friends through being on Twitter, and I’m grateful for that. It truly changed my life to be there.

  
  

• Back at the start, those heady times of 2007-2009, it was not unusual to have a few accounts for fun, so certainly there were a few of those that just went away.
• There was the time when I was copying friends like Andy Stanford-Clark and Tom Coates, and putting sensors around my house online (there’s brief mention of it in this 2009 post).
• There were test accounts I created for projects as far back as my time doing Service Oriented Architecture things at IBM.
• There were a couple of accounts I’d created during education sessions, literally to show others how to get started on Twitter, growing the user base.
• There were a couple of accounts from my demo apps and projects on the @TwitterDev team, such as the IoT sensors I demonstrated on stage at the first Twitter Flight conference in 2014.
• There were the super-sekrit accounts I had for testing features, such as the original internal test for ten thousand character Tweets (yes, this nearly happened, a long time back), the customisable Tweet Tiles we would have launched at the developer conference that was cancelled at the end of last year, and so on.

Finally, it’s time to say goodbye to my main @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url] account. Twitter is not Twitter any more, it is X – and I never signed up for X.

In the near future, I’ll upload a searchable archive of my Twitter content, likely using Darius’ Twitter Archive tool. For now, it’s all done. I’m very happy elsewhere (personal sites and links here and here), and I will not be sad that X is out of my life.

… apart from the laptops that they still have not collected!

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andypiper.co.uk/2023/07/31/goo…

#Life #socialMedia #Technology #Twitter

Andy Piper

2007-02-21 15:54:44

twitter.com/andypiper

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#Technology

Join the fediverse!

Learn about the fediverse and find your community.

^{jointhefediverse.net}

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the notion that governments can do more to secure their own online voices by owning and operating their own Fediverse instances (Mastodon, as an example).

I am by no means the only blogger to propose that this is a good way to avoid being locked-in or censored by commercial “Big Tech” or other interests. It turns out that George Peretz had posted something along the same lines as me only a few days earlier (How the Labour Government, and others, should respond to Musk); I was unaware of that post until I ran into it via Seize The Means Of Communication!¹ on the Lightly Seared blog much more recently.

Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz went on to cover my post on their For Immediate Release podcast, and in particular Neville asked for me to share more about what I know in relation to existing government or state owned-and-operated Mastodon instances. I’m happy to do so!

Proof of value

One of the more visible examples of governments embracing the Fediverse is case of the European Union. Initially running EU Voice (Mastodon) and EU Video (PeerTube) as pilots, these were evaluated for 2 years, and then closed in May. However, this year the European Commission formally joined the Fediverse with a Mastodon instance (supported by Mastodon gGmbH).

Beyond that, but still in the European continent: France, Germany and the Netherlands (more on the Dutch instance via the excellent Fediverse Report) have prominent presences in the Fediverse.

The government of #France 🇫🇷 now has an official Fediverse server 🥳

(All accounts in French unless otherwise noted)

➡️ @cnes – France's space agency

➡️ @ambnum – French ambassador for digital affairs (in English)

➡️ @sup_recherche – Ministry of Higher Education & Research

➡️ @astroIAP – Astrophysics Institute of Paris

➡️ @cnrs – CNRS, the French National Centre for Scientific Research

➡️ @umrGeoazur – Geology/geophysics research unit for Côte d'Azur Univ, CNRS, Côte d'Azur Observatory

🧵 1/4

— FediFollows (@FediFollows) 2024-02-05T14:20:03.369Z

Hallo Fediverse 🙂

Für die vielen neuen Menschen hier gibt es nochmal ein paar aktualisierte Informationen von uns, die wir anheften können:

1. Eine Übersicht über alle Accounts unserer Instanz gibt es unter: social.bund.de/directory (Filtereinstellungen nicht vergessen)
2. Pixis gibt es kostenlos hier: bfdi.bund.de/DE/Service/Publik…
3. Merch verlosen wir immer mal wieder hier oder verteilen es auf Veranstaltungen.

/ ÖA

— BfDI (@bfdi) 2022-12-19T10:30:54.149Z

In addition, the Swiss Government launched an instance in September 2023 as a pilot which was due to last for one year; I’ll be curious to watch how that is evaluated.

Taking a step beyond central government, I’ve read that various federal states in Germany have their own instances.

There are also good reasons for broadcasters to run their own Fediverse instances (the BBC has had a pilot here, for example); universities and academics; and more.

I’m curious to learn of more of these, let me know in the comments if you are aware of others.

If you are interested in managed support for this kind of instance, the team at Mastodon gGmbH would be happy to hear from you to discuss how we can help.

A case for Brazil

Finally, I want to talk briefly (but, only because I must) about X.

We talked about the events of the end of last week, when Brazil’s courts chose to block access to X in that country, on episode 3.19 of the TechGrumps podcast that was recorded this weekend, and should be released any moment.

Along with Musk’s direct personal attacks on the UK Prime Minister and his efforts to spread dangerous misinformation, this is yet another example of Musk, specifically, demonstrating his untrustworthiness, and lack of willingness to be bound by the rule of law – national or international. According to the media, there has been a swift take-up of Bluesky by many Brazilian users; it is difficult to measure Mastodon or other Fediverse instance signups because there are many individual instances that comprise the network, but we know that there was a significant surge of interest at the end of last week.

A lot of people who are up in arms over Brazil banning Xitter aren’t acknowledging the fact that the country cast off a military dictatorship in 1985 and Elon’s openly allied with the neofascist who tried to restore it, with help from Elon Social, just two years ago. Pretty unique situation.

That judge may well have a beef with Musk because of his intransigence but the stakes are much higher than that.

#elonmusk #brazil #twitter #bolsonaro #fascism

— Joshua Holland (@JoshuaHolland) 2024-09-01T13:08:57.793Z

Whichever directions users migrate, the important thing is that more people must leave X as a platform, and disempower Musk’s efforts to disrupt the law.

As I typed this blog entry, my friend Evan Prodromou posted

So, who is in the Free/Open Source software community in Brazil, advising the government on how to move to the Fediverse? And how can I help you?

— Evan Prodromou (@evan) 2024-09-02T15:43:26.988Z

I don’t speak Portuguese, but add my name and voice to this offer of support!

@evan I am somehow surprised that the actual Brazilian government still doesn't have an instance of some software compatible with activity pub.

Before leaving Brazil, I was part of a group engaged in open government data and civic hacking. I really hope these groups are still strong as they were a few years ago!

By the way, in 2011, I was advocating the City Council of São Paulo to have an identi.ca server, instead of Twitter. This didn't work, but at least I could open up some government data.

Post in Portuguese social.vivaldi.net/@everton137…

#activitypub #OpenSource #softwarelivre #Brasil #opendata

— everton137 (@everton137) 2024-09-02T15:53:31.668Z

1. … a title which is delightfully reminiscent of Cory Doctorow’s book The Internet Con, subtitled How To Seize The Means Of Computation, which I think about a lot. And obviously, as an historian, I’m very aware of the original quotation from which both of these derive. ↩︎

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#100DaysToOffload #brazil #communications #europe #europeanCommission #europeanUnion #federal #fediverse #german #government #legal #netherlands #socialMedia #switzerland #Technology

Lightly Seared on the Reality Grill

2024-08-28 06:30:00

Seize The Means of Communication!

George Peretz makes a very sensible suggestion as to how the Labour Government, and others, should respond to Musk:

[T]here is an obvious thing that government could do now and that requires no legislation and costs no money: government could simply shift all the material it currently puts out on X to another platform or platforms

He goes on to mention both BlueSky and Mastodon as obvious contenders.

I certainly agree that governments — and any organisation that values its reputation, for that matter — should be moving away from X, but simply moving to another platform amounts to a sticking-plaster solution at best.

The problem with being on someone else’s platform is that you are giving that someone else control over which messages you see and which of your messages are seen. Indeed, the EU’s Digital Services Act recognises this by identifying Very Large Online Platforms, and imposing additional requirements on them around areas such as transparency and disinformation.

Federated technologies, such as Mastodon (and many others exist) resolve the problem of ownership far more effectively by allowing you install and run your own instance. Many governments — and even the European Commission — already use these solutions, thus putting themselves in control of their own communication and ensuring that individuals can access these communications without putting themselves at the mercy of commercial priorities.

Obviously, there are both costs and challenges associated with running your own instance, but none of these are insurmountable and if organisations truly want to ensure that their communications remain free (as in speech) they really should be investing in the already existing infrastructure that allows them to do so.

Any organisation should be taking steps to protect the integrity of it’s communication. This is especially true in the case of governments, political parties and campaigners, for whom free and open discussions are essential.

#Fediverse

How the Labour Government, and others, should respond to Musk

Elon Musk's use of his X platform to promote murderous voices of hate is unacceptable. One way of fighting back would be to try to break the co-ordination problem that underpins X's power.

^{George Peretz KC (The Political Lawyer)}

Today, I received some fun post from some lovely people in New York City.

Those in the know, may recognise these stickers as the logos of Glitch and Fastly.

I’ve been using Glitch to write and host web apps for quite a few years now – it is super helpful when working in a role like developer relations, needing to rapidly spin up demos, examples, or to demonstrate new features. A couple of years ago, Glitch came together with Fastly, and in the past couple of months their new developer platform vision really started to come together.

If you haven’t been keeping up with what they have been up to, and were not able to be at their recent special developer event in NYC (don’t worry, I couldn’t get there either), there’s a helpful ~6 minute video that summarises the announcements. I’m particularly interested and excited about this because I know and respect the folks involved – Anil Dash, Jenn Schiffer, Hannah Aubry, many others across their teams – and I know that they get and they care about developer experience, Open Source, and the free and open web. I’m talking about the big stuff, the infrastructure, the stuff that needs to invisibly just work in order for the web to run; and also the smaller things, the quirky indie little pieces, the fun and new experiences, helping people to learn to code and to be creative. It’s no exaggeration to say that Fastly’s Fast Forward program is a massive supporter of Open Source, open standards and the Fediverse. All of these things are reasons why I love Glitch & Fastly.

I’ve been running my main profile links page on Glitch in Bio for several years now (it’s a bit like a Linktree/link in bio page, but better than one of those closed platforms). Beyond that, I also host some Fediverse examples such as my own Postmarks instance, and a gallery of examples of Mastodon embeds; and also pages that add resources to my recent talks. With Fastly, I can also run things on my own domains, and make sure that things are cached and perform well.

[ if you’re curious about the sorts of things I’ve been building or working on from a code and web perspective, I’ve also spruced up my GitHub bio, and I have a more general gallery page on GitHub that has links to the source and deployments of different projects – some of which are links to those Glitch apps above ]

Thank you for the stickerage, Glitch friends! And, congratulations on the new Fastly Developer Platform! I’m looking forward to continuing to use your cool technologies 👍🏻

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#100DaysToOffload #Coding #developerExperience #developerRelations #devrel #fastly #glitch #stickers #Technology #webapps

I use a lot of apps, and, I love my iPhone.

BUT

I really love the Web.

A few things lately reminded me of what a great and – so far – durable, open set of of technologies the Web is based on.

You can build such cool stuff on the Web! There are whole sites dedicated to collecting together other sites of cool things you can do with the web – see Single Serving Sites, or Neal.fun. And remember, there is no page fold. If you’re itching to build, I wrote about Glitch a few weeks ago, if you want somewhere to try new things.

The writing trigger today was largely prompted by reading the latest edition of Tedium, specifically, commenting on the Patreon situation with the App Store.

[…] it is also reflective of a mistake the company made many years ago: To allow people to support patrons directly through its app. Patreon did not need to do this. It was just a website at first, and for all the good things that can be said about the company, fact is they built on shaky land. To go to my earlier metaphor: They built their foundation on quicksand, perhaps without realizing it, though the broken glass wasn’t thrown in just yet. […] That shaky land isn’t the web, and if Patreon had stayed there, this would not be an issue. It’s the mobile app ecosystem, which honestly treats everyone poorly whether they want to admit it or not.

Ernie @ Tedium

In turn, Ernie links to John Gruber’s assessment of the situation, which is also worth reading.

Look at that – hyperlinks between content published freely on open platforms, that can be read, studied, accessed around the world, and discussed, all within minutes and hours of publication. Mind blowing! Thank you, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!

I spend a bunch on apps, and in apps, and with Apple, directly and indirectly. They have a good ecosystem, it is all convenient (but spendy) to me as a consumer… but, I don’t think this whole situation with them milking creators and creatives is OK at all. The trouble is, that the lines are all kinds of blurry here – if they carved out a new category and set of rules around apps that sell subscriptions for creators that had, say, a zero or just a lower fee than other categories, then you’ll get into situations where others try to find ways into that category to avoid the higher fees.

Plus, of course, with the state of capitalism and big tech, we increasingly don’t own what we buy (per Kelly Gallagher Sims’ excellent Ownership in the Rental Age post; I also again highly recommend Cory Doctorow’s books, Chokepoint Capitalism, and The Internet Con)

I use closed platforms, and I use open platforms.

The closed ones make me increasingly sad and frustrated.

The open ones can take more tinkering and effort, but I get a lot back from them. They need sustaining. They don’t come for free. They need us to contribute, and to find ways to pay to support the creators and makers and builders and engineers.

If you like creative, quirky online sites, you should subscribe to Naive Weekly. I’m still enjoying things I found in it last month.

Now, I’m off to continue exploring… everything.

Long live The Web!

PS the winners of the Tiny Awards 2024 are announced at the weekend… 👀

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#Blaugust2024 #100DaysToOffload #appStores #Apple #capitalism #chokepointCapitalism #coryDoctorow #enshittification #openSource #openTechnology #rentSeeking #Technology #web

Andy Piper

2024-07-24 18:12:13

Today, I received some fun post from some lovely people in New York City.

Those in the know, may recognise these stickers as the logos of Glitch and Fastly.

I’ve been using Glitch to write and host web apps for quite a few years now – it is super helpful when working in a role like developer relations, needing to rapidly spin up demos, examples, or to demonstrate new features. A couple of years ago, Glitch came together with Fastly, and in the past couple of months their new developer platform vision really started to come together.

If you haven’t been keeping up with what they have been up to, and were not able to be at their recent special developer event in NYC (don’t worry, I couldn’t get there either), there’s a helpful ~6 minute video that summarises the announcements. I’m particularly interested and excited about this because I know and respect the folks involved – Anil Dash, Jenn Schiffer, Hannah Aubry, many others across their teams – and I know that they get and they care about developer experience, Open Source, and the free and open web. I’m talking about the big stuff, the infrastructure, the stuff that needs to invisibly just work in order for the web to run; and also the smaller things, the quirky indie little pieces, the fun and new experiences, helping people to learn to code and to be creative. It’s no exaggeration to say that Fastly’s Fast Forward program is a massive supporter of Open Source, open standards and the Fediverse. All of these things are reasons why I love Glitch & Fastly.

I’ve been running my main profile links page on Glitch in Bio for several years now (it’s a bit like a Linktree/link in bio page, but better than one of those closed platforms). Beyond that, I also host some Fediverse examples such as my own Postmarks instance, and a gallery of examples of Mastodon embeds; and also pages that add resources to my recent talks. With Fastly, I can also run things on my own domains, and make sure that things are cached and perform well.

[ if you’re curious about the sorts of things I’ve been building or working on from a code and web perspective, I’ve also spruced up my GitHub bio, and I have a more general gallery page on GitHub that has links to the source and deployments of different projects – some of which are links to those Glitch apps above ]

Thank you for the stickerage, Glitch friends! And, congratulations on the new Fastly Developer Platform! I’m looking forward to continuing to use your cool technologies 👍🏻

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#100DaysToOffload #Coding #developerExperience #developerRelations #devrel #fastly #glitch #stickers #Technology #webapps

Talk Resources - Where is the Art?

Resources page for Andy Piper's talk on the history of Computer Art, pen plotters, and more. Explore further with links to exhibitions, contemporary artists, tools, and reading materials.

^{Andy Piper}

Over the past week, there’s been a noticeable shift away from X in the UK, and it feels long overdue. According to Bluesky’s PR, the platform has seen a surge in new users and activity from the UK. I’ve personally noticed more people finding my profiles on both Threads and on Bluesky, and I’ve seen a significant number of “I just deleted my X account” posts on Threads. However, due to the algorithm, these posts often appear in bursts, sometimes delayed by a day or two.

My friend Neville Hobson wrote a piece today titled “Finally, the Unravelling of X,” where he discusses this migration, the reasons behind it, and the pros and cons of choosing between Bluesky and Threads. Neville touches on the idea of a “more respectful, decentralized web,” (to quote him on the Fediverse), and even highlights something I said on Threads yesterday. In response to a question about where politicians should go in a post-X world, I suggested that governments should own their own social platforms:

I wanted to expand on what I meant by a “sovereign owned/operated Mastodon instance” for the UK Parliament, and why I believe this is important.

One of the major tensions between Big Tech and national governments over the past 15 years has revolved around platform ownership and control. The European Union has even labeled several tech companies as “gatekeepers” in the Digital Markets Act. This term is telling—these companies essentially gatekeep the digital rights, data, and access of national citizens.

If governments are concerned about the dominance of privately-owned online platforms, they have a responsibility to run and own their own. At FOSDEM in Brussels this February, we noticed growing interest in Fediverse platforms and technologies like Mastodon from several national governments and the EU itself. Many of these institutions are already running their own social media instances and actively encouraging their politicians to use them. In the EU, there’s no reason to switch to Threads since Meta has restricted the platform’s availability in the bloc. Moreover, Threads doesn’t allow users to run their own instances, unlike Mastodon or even Bluesky, which, while less common, does technically support setting up a external ATProto instance (I don’t think that’s really happening though? happy to be informed and to learn otherwise – I’ll readily admit that it has not been at the centre of my attention).

For years, governments, newsrooms, and other organisations have protested the idea that private companies should control and limit their messages. A logical response would be for these entities to run their own instances of software like Mastodon—or any Fediverse-compatible, ActivityPub-based service. This would allow them to own their content, domain, and user verification, ensuring greater control and independence.

The UK is lagging behind in this area. While the EU has embraced Mastodon, and in the US, many organisations have moved to Threads, the UK has yet to take similar steps. For example, I follow @POTUS@threads.net and @whitehouse@threads.net from my Mastodon account, because they’ve enabled Fediverse sharing. Even though Threads is owned and operated by Meta, it’s positive that their content can reach into the wider Fediverse. Ideally, Threads will eventually fully integrate with the ActivityPub network, offering a two-way interaction and allowing for account, network, and maybe content portability—hence why I said, “in principle, with federated social accounts, the location does not matter so much, as long as they can be discovered and followed.” Owning the network and identity allows for broader discoverability and avoids corporate chokeholds.

As an aside: the EU has been a strong supporter of free software, Open Source, and open standards. My colleagues in the Mastodon team have signed an open letter in support of the Next Generation Internet (NGI) programs, urging the EU not to cut these investments. I fully support this stance.

There are challenges to this approach:

• Running digital services requires consistent investment and maintenance.
• Discovery isn’t always straightforward, and organisations seek reach and measurement—areas where Fediverse platforms currently fall short.
• Deciding who qualifies for an account on a sovereign platform is tricky. While it makes sense for current MPs to have official accounts on a national Fediverse server, it’s harder to justify the inclusion of political parties or other entities on the same platform. This is an area where we need to improve data and account portability as the Fediverse grows.

These are important discussions that we need to be having. Politicians and the media should advocate for greater decentralisation and digital sovereignty to protect the freedom of democratic institutions.

Oh, and of course – these organisations should also fully embrace, invest in, and protect the open web.

Update 16/08/2024 – my friend Stefan Bohacek reminded me that he put together a useful resource on this same topic several months ago, Fediverse: an overview for government agencies. Well worth sending to your representatives, or sharing with your network if asked.

Update 27/08/2024 – the conversation continues in episode #425 of the For Immediate Release podcast (discussion starts around 13 min into the show). I appreciate Neville and Shel talking about my post here. Take a listen, if you want to hear how they expanded on and debated this idea – available wherever you get your podcasts.

Update 09/09/2024 – I wrote a second piece expanding on this and listing existing governments that are already in the Fediverse.

Update 13/09/2024 – I was reminded of this piece from IFTAS, Open Social for the Common Good, that is also excellent on this topic.

Finally – if you’re leaving X – congratulations – don’t look back.

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#Blaugust2024 #100DaysToOffload #425 #activitypub #bluesky #DMA #eu #europeanUnion #federation #fediverse #freedom #government #journalism #media #meta #NGI #parliament #press #socialMedia #socialWeb #threads #unitedKingdom #web

Andy Piper

2024-08-14 22:12:24

I use a lot of apps, and, I love my iPhone.

BUT

I really love the Web.

A few things lately reminded me of what a great and – so far – durable, open set of of technologies the Web is based on.

You can build such cool stuff on the Web! There are whole sites dedicated to collecting together other sites of cool things you can do with the web – see Single Serving Sites, or Neal.fun. And remember, there is no page fold. If you’re itching to build, I wrote about Glitch a few weeks ago, if you want somewhere to try new things.

The writing trigger today was largely prompted by reading the latest edition of Tedium, specifically, commenting on the Patreon situation with the App Store.

[…] it is also reflective of a mistake the company made many years ago: To allow people to support patrons directly through its app. Patreon did not need to do this. It was just a website at first, and for all the good things that can be said about the company, fact is they built on shaky land. To go to my earlier metaphor: They built their foundation on quicksand, perhaps without realizing it, though the broken glass wasn’t thrown in just yet. […] That shaky land isn’t the web, and if Patreon had stayed there, this would not be an issue. It’s the mobile app ecosystem, which honestly treats everyone poorly whether they want to admit it or not.

Ernie @ Tedium

In turn, Ernie links to John Gruber’s assessment of the situation, which is also worth reading.

Look at that – hyperlinks between content published freely on open platforms, that can be read, studied, accessed around the world, and discussed, all within minutes and hours of publication. Mind blowing! Thank you, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!

I spend a bunch on apps, and in apps, and with Apple, directly and indirectly. They have a good ecosystem, it is all convenient (but spendy) to me as a consumer… but, I don’t think this whole situation with them milking creators and creatives is OK at all. The trouble is, that the lines are all kinds of blurry here – if they carved out a new category and set of rules around apps that sell subscriptions for creators that had, say, a zero or just a lower fee than other categories, then you’ll get into situations where others try to find ways into that category to avoid the higher fees.

Plus, of course, with the state of capitalism and big tech, we increasingly don’t own what we buy (per Kelly Gallagher Sims’ excellent Ownership in the Rental Age post; I also again highly recommend Cory Doctorow’s books, Chokepoint Capitalism, and The Internet Con)

I use closed platforms, and I use open platforms.

The closed ones make me increasingly sad and frustrated.

The open ones can take more tinkering and effort, but I get a lot back from them. They need sustaining. They don’t come for free. They need us to contribute, and to find ways to pay to support the creators and makers and builders and engineers.

If you like creative, quirky online sites, you should subscribe to Naive Weekly. I’m still enjoying things I found in it last month.

Now, I’m off to continue exploring… everything.

Long live The Web!

---

PS the winners of the Tiny Awards 2024 are announced at the weekend… 👀

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#Blaugust2024 #100DaysToOffload #appStores #Apple #capitalism #chokepointCapitalism #coryDoctorow #enshittification #openSource #openTechnology #rentSeeking #Technology #web

Better Call a Website

Internet Phone Book, Crawl Space, PBS of the Internet and more :)

^{Kristoffer (Naive Weekly)}