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
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
- Decided to take minutes!
- Discussion of the content of Margo's upcoming screening: she would like to fill the extra time with other submissions from the group / historical works.
- Updates on Joe's screaming computer project: running a local LLM screams the loudest so far.
- (Obligatory Algorave/Algorythms chat)
- Tom explained his work with housing campaigns: aggregating data from (laborious) FOI requests, the potential for "useful art" in combating housing crises.
- (Obligatory grep jokes)
- Nick explained his capstone project as part of the UCL Public History Master's, and shared his highlights from the history of the LINC project. Stay tuned for his exhibition this September!
- Updates on the printer hacking project: everyone seems keen to try making our own inks...
- Retro-computing chat. Mat picked up a Macintosh SE to refurbish, but doesn't have access to his tools for the foreseeable future.
- The National Museum of Computing vs. The Centre for Computing History: fight.
Tags: notes
Community Notes
Today we tried out collective note-taking using a tiny air-gapped server brought by Izzy. Thank you everyone for taking part in the experiment!
<3 Happy Hacking
- Daniel
we solved the niceness problem! i got on nikos's jellyfin server, and we tested out the setnet note taking program. which you can see now! and i found out what a syscall was. what a lovely day!
Testing testing! Tom P
anyone who wants to add things to the usb potluck please locate the tiny usb stick and ignore my corrupted files - rory
notes.setsocial works in classilla on a mac os 9.0.4 (released in 2000)
🦭🦭🦭
we chatted a little about different version control systems, like jj and what it means to 'build on solid ground'
we demoed this community note taking service for the first time!
- may
Lol Internet.
By my semantic physique Jah know me well built.
𓂸 𓂹 𓂺
and {i} sat
for some time
thinking of all
the ways
to describe
how {i} feel,
and now {im} swallowed
by the grass
around me;
} } ( ] ]
] } { { ]
] [ ] { ]
2==323=4345=44=329952
&&$($@(*$#*$(@* $*$@(*$
$*(@$($@ [ nikos ] ^%^&*@$*(*($
*$@($*(@$*(@$&$^%*&$@$#*@)$)$
@*$**$($*(@*$($&%&^*@&^)(#@*^^@*)(^#@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.
Tools
- 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
Nick wrote up notes he had whilst cycling back from The Hague about what permacomputing is not / and anti-manifesto. More on this soon..
Tags: notes
Permacomputing schedule/structure notes
Thank you for everyone who took part in the discussion in the new permacomputing schedule/structure! I think it was a really valuable session and we plan to trial it from 16th November, starting with small breakout sessions, and then have another discussion after one rota to see how we feel about it.
Notes from the discussion
- Should we run a wildcard session? E.g. for discussions like this, or anything else we want to run. When should it be?
- What we can do is dependent on how many people show up, this is why we initially had the breakout sessions.
- How much knowledge do people need for a workshop? Previous workshops have sometimes required some knowledge to fully appreciate the content which doesn't get communicated. Is there some way to show that ahead of time, e.g. a classification system? Or perhaps every one who runs a workshop must supply 3 links (e.g. from Wikipedia) for enough reading to get you started.
- Workshops are a useful structure to demonstrate tech in a practical fashion.
- Should we schedule in a governance meeting like this one? If so, how often? (I think every 3 months was suggested)
- What about onboarding onto e.g. the CryptPad? The Signal group chat sort of ended up eclipsing this. Maybe this should be the job of one of the facilitators
- Permacomputing is not a computer club or tech meetup.
- What about the work required for presenting at a tech crit? Will we always have enough people to show things off?
- In response: most of the time tech crit presentations have always filled a session. We can also have cultural methods to show people you don't need to prepare too much.
- To facilitate actual criticism/feedback at the tech crit/show-and-tell, have presenters think about their own questions, e.g. what kind of criticism are they looking for? Where should they take their project next?
- Calendar: having the sessions be opaque and unstructured until the day can be daunting to newcomers: e.g. they think they might be walking in on a private event.
- Is there anything we should stop doing?
- The SET room we are using can be noisy, and will likely be until the weather warms up, which makes workshops particularly difficult.
- Should we have hard lines, e.g. no AI in workshops/show-and-tell? It is usually a landmine for good discussion in these contexts.
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: https://hackaday.com/2024/09/28/man-in-the-middle-pcb-unlocks-hp-ink-cartridges/
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 leaflet.pub 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.