Can we stop needlessly sharing Elmo’s deranged utterances? The topic of social media policy (much as anything else) is too important than to concern ourselves with his weird tweets.

Relevant 39c3 talk (but dealing with civilian sattelites): Don’t look up

For Germans (and anyone who cares about German politics), suffice it to know that Politico is Springer-Presse.

Some local libraries or ecological initiatives lend devices to measure electricity consumption at the power plug. In particular, this is useful to measure other appliances as well.

Specifically for computers, they probably have some means to tell you their own consumption, but they may not be accurate or complete and will most certainly omit any peripherals, e.g. external hard drives.

Well, on the other hand, it’s by far not always the case that the program one person is currently using is already the best choice for their use case. For example, in the process of degoogling, I’ve begun using a lot of programs that are actually better for me than the ones I previously used.

Of course there’s friction/effort involved in finding the best replacement, but there’s just no way around that if the goal is to get away from the defacto standards.

Actually this might make for a fun “propaganda” game: Set up a website where every person can mark, for each item on the list, whether they made the switch, so that in the end they receive a picture they can share on social media so as to engage in a low-key “competition” with their friends.