October 12, 2020
Interesting Things on the Internet: October 12th 2020
- Unions, smoke alarms, and lifting the boats. Developer James Smith explains the excellent reasons why he's joined a union. How Cities Can Make the Most of a Pandemic Winter. "As winter approaches in North America and Europe, cities should be thinking about how to encourage and enable people to spend as much time outdoors as possible to help keep everyone sane and safe from Covid-19." As the old saying goes, there's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes. Despite the weather being foul on Saturday, I had a lovely walk round the city because I could dress for it.
- Making The Case For Small Spaces. Ostensibly about small music venues, but true of the sort of places that all manner of interesting ventures get started. Small, cheap to use/run spaces are vital.
- Real Businesses. "so let’s be clear, if your pitch deck has an “exit strategy” slide you are pitching a lifestyle business." Nice way of thinking about startups from indie.vc's Bryce Roberts.
- Magical thinking and maintenance. Rachel Coldicutt on Serco's Test and Trace use-of-Excel debacle. We need better training of, and tools for, Government (in this case) folk using/relying upon data. And more calling out of the bullshit marketing hype of data "platform" companies like Palantir.
- This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic. It’s not R.. Zeynep Tufekci with a measured look at clustering and how that affects the spread of Covid-19.
- How to Make Biomass Energy Sustainable Again. Grow more trees everywhere, not just in forests!
- Using Government IT to Teach and Build Public Infrastructure. Bianca Wylie making the excellent point that we need to expand everyone's horizons on what sort of technology we could build. "I’m more convinced than ever that the general public is not super aware of the opportunity that exists to build non-consumer or non-commercial technology. Public technology." Reminds me of my blog post trying to pin down a term for that.
- Zuboff’s Cycle of Dispossession. More good writing from Bianca Wylie, this time about how tech corporations capture more of society.
This blog post is on the personal blog of Adrian McEwen. If you want to explore the site a bit further, it might be worth having a look at the most recent entries or look through the archives or categories over on the left.
If you want to hire my company to help you with the Internet of Things then get in touch. If you want to learn more about the Internet of Things, then buy my book Designing the Internet of Things (amazon.co.uk amazon.com).