Sustainable Tech

I put this together to help me understand how fluctuating emissions from the electrical grid and outdoor temperature impact the environmental performance of a heat pump compared to a natural gas furnace.

Would love feedback!

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/15774903

No need to circumvent anti-consumer mechanisms and risk bricking. This router is liberated by design.

MAFF (a shit-show, unsustained)

Firefox used to have an in-house format called MAFF (Mozilla Archive File Format), which boiled down to a zip file that had HTML and a tree of media. I saved several web pages that way. It worked well. Then Mozilla dropped the ball and completely abandoned their own format. WTF. Did not even give people a MAFF→mhtml conversion tool. Just abandoned people while failing to realize the meaning and purpose of archival. Now Firefox today has no replacement. No MHTML. Choices are:

• HTML only
• HTML complete (but not as a single file but a tree of files)

MHTML (shit-show due to non-portable browser-dependency)

Chromium-based browsers can save a whole complete web page to a single MHTML file. Seems like a good move but then if you open Chromium-generated MHTML files in Firefox, you just get an ascii text dump of the contents which resembles a fake email header, MIME, and encoded (probably base64). So that’s a show-stopper.

exceptionally portable approach: A plugin adds a right-click option called “Save page WE” (available in both Firefox and Chromium). That extension produces an MHTML file that both Chromium and Firefox can open.

PDF (lossy)

Saving or printing a web page to PDF mostly guarantees that the content and representation can reasonably be reproduced well into the future. The problem is that PDF inherently forces the content to be arranged on a fixed width that matches a physical paper geometry (A4, US letter, etc). So you lose some data. You lose information about how to re-render it on different devices with different widths. You might save on A4 paper then later need to print it to US letter paper, which is a bit sloppy and messy.

PDF+MHTML hybrid

First use Firefox with the “Save page WE” plugin to produce an MHTML file. But relying on this alone is foolish considering how unstable HTML specs are even still today in 2024 with a duopoly of browser makers doing whatever the fuck they want - abusing their power. So you should also print the webpage to a PDF file. The PDF will ensure you have a reliable way to reproduce the content in the future. Then embed the MHTML file in the PDF (because PDF is a container format). Use this command:

$ pdfattach webpage.pdf webpage.mhtml webpage_with_HTML.pdf

The PDF will just work as you expect a PDF to, but you also have the option to extract the MHTML file using pdfdetach webpage_with_HTML.pdf if the need arises to re-render the content on a different device.

The downside is duplication. Every image is has one copy stored in the MTHML file and another copy separately stored in the PDF next to it. So it’s shitty from a storage space standpoint. The other downside is plugin dependency. Mozilla has proven browser extensions are unsustainable when they kicked some of them out of their protectionist official repository and made it painful for exiled projects to reach their users. Also the mere fact that plugins are less likely to be maintained than a browser builtin function.

We need to evolve

What we need is a way to save the webpage as a sprawled out tree of files the way Firefox does, then a way to stuff that whole tree of files into a PDF, while also producing a PDF vector graphic that references those other embedded images. I think it’s theoretically possible but no tool exists like this. PDF has no concept of directories AFAIK, so the HTML tree would likely have to be flattened before stuffing into the PDF.

Other approaches I have overlooked? I’m not up to speed on all the ereader formats but I think they are made for variable widths. So saving a webpage to an ereader format of some kind might be more sensible than PDF, if possible.

(update) The goals

1. Capture the webpage as a static snapshot in time which requires no network to render. Must have a simple and stable format whereby future viewers are unlikely to change their treatment of the archive. PDF comes close to this.
2. Record the raw original web content in a non-lossy way. This is to enable us to re-render the content on different devices with different widths. Future-proofness of the raw content is likely impossible because we cannot stop the unstable web standards from changing. But capturing a timestamp and web browser user-agent string would facilitate installation of the original browser. A snapshot of audio, video, and the code (JavaScript) which makes the page dynamic is also needed both for forensic purposes (suitable for court) and for being able to faithfully reproduce the dynamic elements if needed. This is to faithfully capture what’s more of an application than a document. wget -m possibly satisfies this. But perhaps tricky to capture 3rd party JS without recursing too far on other links.
3. A raw code-free (thus partially lossy) snapshot for offline rendering is also needed if goal 1 leads to a width-constrained format. Save page WE and WebScrapBook apparently satisfies this.

PDF satisfies goal 1; wget satisfies goal 2; maff/mhtml satisfies goal 3. There is likely no single format that does all of the above, AFAIK. But I still need to explore these suggestions.

cross-posted from: https://floss.social/users/be4foss/statuses/112332015705832479

You don't need a new computer for up-to-date software ... just the right software!

Come to #Umweltfestival 2024 in #Berlin to learn about the role of independent #FreeSoftware in the sustainable use of hardware.

🗓️ Sunday 28 April, 11-19h
📍 Straße des 17. Juni (Brandenburg Gate)

#KDEEco together with #FSFE (@fsfe) and Bits & Bäume (@bitsundbaeume_berlin) will be there! Some in the #GNOME and #postmarketOS community may be joining as well :)

@kde

#KDE #BMUV #UBA #GermanEnvAgency #OpenSource

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/3036509

There is apparently a printer that can use spent coffee or tea leaves to print. I love this idea but I would not buy a printer when so many are being thrown away. I pull them out of dumpsters with intent to repair them. So the question is, can they be hacked to work with coffee or tea?

Canon actually disclosed how to hack their cartridges as a consequence of a semiconductor shortage due to coronavirus. So this suggests #Canon could be a candidate for this hack. Has anyone tried it? How precisely do we have to match the viscosity of homemade ink to the original ink?

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1958803

The article argues that some federal government intervention earlier during WWII jump-started the tech innovations we saw from the 1950s to 1970s.

It also talks about how the Internet seems to be the only really new game-changing innovation since the 80s and seeks to explain why this is the case.

Among other things, of course, such as the nature of "tech clusters" such as Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas.

Low tech magazine

In a bid to reduce global electronic waste, Fairphone has created a smartphone that owners can repair themselves. What makes its technology so sustainable?

Apple stunned the world when it came out in support of California’s right-to-repair law. But software locks and other obstacles seem to signal that the fight is far from over.

Using solar panels without backup infrastructure makes renewable energy production much more affordable, efficient and sustainable.

Turn your bike into an electric bike.

Fairphone shows it's possible for companies to support devices longer than three years. Now it trickles up.

Repost from OSnews.

FWIW, I don't agree just because of the screen but it's still better than anything on the market today.

Lol. Just buy a Seiko.

A little bigger, eight years of support, ability to repair when things break. Still no headphone jack and the AMOLED display is a regression. Expensive but doesn't use slave labor so that's good. I'll stick with the FP4

An open source, repairable blender.

An airpods pro case with a replaceable battery and USB-C charging.

The G42 continues Nokia’s quest to make at-home smartphone repairs simple, accessible and affordable