iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026

But please, kick in. The baseline of $5 is the kind of thing that keeps the lights on. @waltbaldwin keeps us up to date. His post here describes the incredibly simple process of contributing: mastodon.energy/@waltbaldwin/117390… Thanks again Walt! @waltbaldwin #energymastodon

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026

I kept saying to myself "I must donate to this most excellent radio station, if only in recognition of the ways this man has made my enjoyment of music better". I never did though, and eventually, he went off the air. In 2020, Steve signed off for good […]

mastodon.energy

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026

I'm going to write about the necessity of contribution today. A brief anecdote before I start though. Some years ago, I stumbled upon a streaming radio station out of California called Radio Nigel. This was an exception station, playing 80s music. Really excellent choices in diverse material […]

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

If you’ve been in public transport any time in the last few years, you’ve probably experienced the phenomenon of a person loudly playing their phone on speaker. While this is unquestionably rude, let’s take a step back. Apple dropped the 3.5mm Jack in 2016. For a while your only choice from the […]

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

@waltbaldwin does a great job of running Mastodon.energy. This is a top quality site and just like the work of @chrisnelder , is worth paying actual money for. If you’re a regular, please chip in. It’s a small amount and the value is disproportionately great.

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

And another thing (dear lord I am ranty today) -- Fedora and Linux has had delta-rpms for ages. How about just applying deltas? Yes, I know it's grown-up engineering and recognizes the need for resource efficiency and introduces complexity and needs testing. Welp, sorry can't do that, too hard […]

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

Also to be clear, I use Doppler to play music, not remove it. For those language maniacs like me who read posts for grammer (sic) and delight in malapropisms.

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

To be clear, the update needs 18Gb of space temporarily, after which we'll be left with perhaps 10Gb free, or more. All grown-up OS-es have a version of the "update will change size on disk from x Gb to y Gb, temporary storage needed for install is z Gb"

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

It's a bit rich, having Apple tout the ability to offload apps, but to install this massively bloated OS update (a separate topic), I somehow have to yield more than a quarter of my storage for a temporary installation? How trivial would it be to just implement a "move large app blobs to cloud […]

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

Struggling with an iOS update. Phone has ~15 of 64Gb free. Update needs 18Gb. No easy way to free another 3Gb, apart from removing music, for which I use Doppler, which is excellent. #doppler If my photos are mirrored to the "cloud" then why can't I have my app data mirrored? (rhetorical). If […]

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

RE: tutoteket.no/@forteller/11729102023… Great work over at crowdsupply.com on an open source/repairable printer. An obviously useful device, simple and maintainable. When you look at the design, you can see how hard incumbent printer manufacturers have been working at lock-in […]

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Børge @forteller.tutoteket.no.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

For the first time in my life I'm actually interested in a printer! I still don't need one, so I can't imagine buying it, but if you need a printer, then this open source, DRM-free, repairable printer should be on the top of your list […]

tutoteket.no

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

I have a new Windows 11 laptop. (Long story, no choice, long time Fedora user have dozens of Linux machines, decades of sysadmin experience) I find myself needing to create a number of directories. I search various search engines for the shortcut key. All results are garbage. I ask ChatGPT […]

mastodon.energy

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Michael Burchert @michaelburchert.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

More here: bsky.app/profile/mich...

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Michael Burchert @michaelburchert.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

"The global building stock is set to roughly double by 2060. The materials we choose now, across millions of buildings, will determine whether the built environment becomes a part of the climate solution or continues to be one of its largest contributors. " 2

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

@mhoye @gnomon Perhaps the best part is that he recognized that ELF has internal implementations of common constructs that map on to SQL idioms, then develops the idea to a logical completeness where all of user land could be one executable. There are genuine opportunities there. Very […]

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Dan Fixes Coin-Ops @ifixcoinops.retro.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/04/2026

I got 8 solar panels today, gonna go back for the others tomorrow. The panels were in the woods. Just, like, big piles of them in the woods. Full of rain and leaves and twigs and creatures. I mean I guess it makes sense and I don't know what I expected, these machines are weatherproof […]

retro.social

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Michael Burchert @michaelburchert.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

shall we try to share this, let's see what happens

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Chris Nelder 🤘 @chrisnelder.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 08/08/2026

RE: mastodon.green/@JustinGerdes/117061… Excellent curation here of the many recent successful efforts to stymie Trump's war on the energy transition. If you don't already subscribe to Justin's newsletter, you should!

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Michael Burchert @michaelburchert.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

My favorite product at the moment. An agricultural by-product is transformed in Europe into a high-performance insulation material using a simple mattress sewing machine from China. Fossil, linear economy hates this trick.

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Michael Burchert @michaelburchert.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

... bsky.app/profile/mich...

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 01/08/2026

Regretfully i have had to switch to requiring follow requests. Some new followers have been using my open follow setting to flood my timeline. If you’re a like-minded soul, you’ll have no problem with this I feel.

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026

@drs1969 not sure on exact efficiency numbers but @BurchertMichael has done a great job of publishing projects (European especially) that show the practical reality of straw in production construction. It’s efficient, for sure. When you’re very efficient, it’s ok to not be perfectly PH because […]

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026

@drs1969 the straw Building guys are going that way. Whole panels just ready to go. Often trucked in.

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drs1969 (David Smith) 🇬🇧 @drs1969.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026

@jonshell amen. Prebuild the houses in factories and assemble them on site... faster with better QC and less snagging etc. Built to a better spec. New houses should be assembled like cars are. As a principle anyway.

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026

@drs1969 @EarthOrgUK and perhaps mandate plaster, wood and straw instead of foam and fiberglass? But your point is right on the money. Why allow new builds that incur a debt we did not need to incur? I would argue that petrol cars are the same.

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drs1969 (David Smith) 🇬🇧 @drs1969.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026

@EarthOrgUK Agree. I am struggling with the framing of the conversation as it pertains to the technology. I'd love the govt to turn around to the house builders and say "you want planning permission? Full roof solar; properly sized and installed heat pump climate control; battery storage AND […]

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026

For those of you critiquing my basic mathematics skills by claiming that the outage time was in fact 14.44 - (12.00-11.55), which is 3.00 hours, I should point out I was using the Non-Euclidean Temporal Displacement formula, which better captures the subjective truth of how it feels to be […]

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026

There has been a lot of chirping from the peanut gallery recently about Algebra being of no use in everyday life. I'm here to show you otherwise. Take today's power outage for example. To calculate the length of the power outage, we write a simple equation in x: x = current_time - […]

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026

Power outage today. Came back from walking Chico the dog at noon. House was strangely quiet. Thinking nothing of it I go to get the dog’s lunch out of the fridge. Turn on the light … nothing. Check the microwave clock - blank. Open the fridge - dark. Slowly realize no power. Power comes back […]

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 25/07/2026

@EdwinG related - always loved me some PXEboot. Back in the sysadmin days had a vast fleet of net booting LBX (low-bandwidth X) terminals. So elegant. (So easy to break by misconfigurstion!) Always wanted to dabble in iSCSI.

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 25/07/2026

@elfburgerman @stefano right there. This is crux of it. Make the foundational services a public good. Like police, fire, emergency and in most civilized nations, water, medical and social safety net. Cloud services are now a foundational good. If companies want to sell you a subscription […]

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Elf Burgerman @elfburgerman.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/05/2026

@stefano The problem is that people don't realise that that cloud being owned by a private company is a problem. We need our digital infrastructure to be a common (just like our physical infrastructure, education and journalism, healthcare, and security guard). We need our society to be social.

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2026

Just wanted to put in a good word for the folks at Oglaf, who write some of the smartest comic social commentary I've ever seen. Grown-up stuff though, so if you're a prude maybe just keep strolling. But so, so clever. Be sure to read the tooltips. www.oglaf.com

oglaf.com

Disengagement

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2026

@HayiWena great job on citizen engagement and civic responsibility. Town meetings really bring out the ignorant ones with poorly informed axes to grind. Getting forward movement in backward towns requires more effort than most people realize. It’s just so hard.

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Michael Burchert @michaelburchert.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Quick reminder that airtight, insulated buildings – which are often fitted with filtration systems – offer protection against smoke from forest fires fuelled by the burning of fossil fuels. The old world isn’t coming back. This can be retrofitted together with a heat pump, windows and insulation.

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Michael Burchert @michaelburchert.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

We can make building great again, it's all here right now.

jumbo straw bales on a truck in harvest season

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 18/07/2026

Then we lost RSS feeds (although RSS doesn't need Google to aggregate because ideas find receptive minds) The problem with LLMs is that they have aggressively sought routes to that lost content. It's now accessible through carefully crafted prompts. This is a disaster in so many ways -- we've […]

mastodon.energy

Original post on mastodon.energy

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 18/07/2026

Partly this is general enshittification of search. We know the search companies have monetized search and in doing so, throttled our access to information. We lost UseNet when GoogleGroups hoovered up that content and choked it off. (Yes I know UseNet lives on, but it's super niche and the […]

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 18/07/2026

Amongst the many challenges with the deterioration of traditional web search is the problem of loss of access to usable references. Where we were once able to collect a useful sampling of data and with that, do analysis and synthesis, today we're presented with garbage. In the past, the […]

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2026

@michaelburchert.bsky.social I wonder why they had to use the plastic weave? Perhaps because the panel is quite thin? There are plastics that are reversible and they tend to be weaker than PET and other non-reversibles but maybe that wouldn't matter in this case if all that it's being used for […]

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 05/07/2026

@chrisnelder While not an American, I played the Spirit of 76 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_76_… pinball and collected the bicentennial stamps. It was a big deal everywhere.

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Spirit of 76 (pinball) - Wikipedia

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 04/07/2026

@chrisnelder Just finished the #TransitionShow South Africa mini series. Phenomenal job of unraveling the chaos to craft a coherent narrative. You nailed it with “when you scratch the surface you realize how complex basically any issue in SA is” and you correctly saw that everything is warped […]

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James Gifford @giffordjames.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 27/06/2026

Well, this is big news!!! "We have completely virtually unwrapped and read PHerc. 1667 — the scroll the Vesuvius Challenge community knows as Scroll 4 — without ever touching its pages. It is the first Herculaneum papyrus to be digitally unrolled and read in full, end to end" […]

mas.to

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