For the last week or two, I have been thinking whether there is a December blogging series I could take on, similar to how Advent of Code publishes a new coding challenge every day throughout Advent.
…
From now up until December 24th, I hope to write a blog post every day about a blog that I find interesting.

import os
import signal

os.kill(os.getppid(), signal.SIGHUP)

• This is really an update from last week, but I forgot to add it, so I'm putting it first week. After a bunch of small earthquakes we finally got around to anchoring our fridge to the wall so when the big one comes our fridge hopefully doesn't fall over and smash us.
• I finished the first iteration of Tanzawa Plugins. But while it's merged, it's not quite ready for general usage, yet. Some of trickery I do to dynamically enable plugins works on the development server, but errors when run via gunicorn. I'm not sure if it's the fiddling with migrations, fiddling with INSTALLED_APPS,  fiddling with url routes, or a combination of all the above, but it causes internal server errors and doesn't recover until I restart the process. Such is life when you're playing with fire internals. Maybe my next plugin will be a Sentry plugin 😆. 
• Plugins still aren't feature complete, though. I'd still like to be able to do things add cron jobs or have plugins schedule tasks, but that will require moving from gunicorn to uWSGI so I can keep inline with my "single process" goal. Oh, and I wrote some documentation about how to make custom plugins.
• All of this to say my site now has a /now. It's still a rough draft of what I wrote during my lunch break, but really happy to see it live and working.
• I've run habit and ran 3 times last week. Running 2 short runs during the week at lunch (when it's warmer outside) has made it easier to hit my goal. It takes a lot more gumption to go out and run when it's dark and 2c outside.
• My Darn Tough warranty replacement socks came! Due to stock issues they're not the same ones I sent in, but they're close (my replacement is a full calf, instead of a half-calf). The process was smooth, no questions asked, no fiddling.
• We were out at the park on the weekend and decided to take the train to the grandparents and pick something up. As the grandparents were on their way home from shopping right as we arrived at their station, so they offered to picked us up. And when we peered into the car we saw Leo's cousins in the car. We had no clue they were visiting (again). So naturally Leo decided he was staying at their house. Was nice to have another kid-free night ☺️.

Sushil Reddy, founder of the SunPedal project, is using his legs and the sun to prove that solar power and electric bikes are viable solutions for reducing fossil fuel use and helping to solve the climate crisis.

What a cool bike and a cool project. Hopefully they finish it safely. 🙏🏻

For decades, the development of information technology has been characterized by a very strong growth orientation, which is now coming to an end with the fading of Moore's Law and environmental change. Academic research in computing has only recently begun to wake up to the fact that there are limits to growth, and that a more fundamental paradigm shift is required to achieve sustainable computing; mere technical tinkering is not enough.

Growth-centricity has also dictated the development of digital esthetics, which will thus need to change as well. I suggest that the guidelines for this change should be sought in subcultures of computer art whose esthetic ideals are very different from the mainstream Maximalism and Virtualism – the self-serving glorification of the big and plentiful and the hiding of the technical basis of things. I have chosen demo art, chip music, pixel graphics and glitch art as examples of these subcultures. The ideals of "digitality" are also being challenged by post-digitality, so I will also look at these subcultures through this concept.

I will conclude with reflections on the possible impacts of environmental change on digital esthetics and computing more generally, and on the ways in which computer art subcultures could play a pioneering role in these developments.

1. Tagged with
2. computing
3. climate change