One night in the life of a bowl of dog food

A black and white nighttime photo of a hedgehog near a bowl of dog food.

I put a camera out last night with some of the dog’s unwanted food (high quality, expensive stuff, turns out she’s happy with cheaper). Anyway, others appreciated it, and it was great to see one of our spiky buddies around.

Bye bye, Google

A herring gull in flight away from the camera, the blurred image of the sea in the background with sunlight reflecting from it.

I sent my first email with Gmail on 24 December 2004. Big day. That was when Gmail was a beta, and you had to get an invitation to use it. Ooh, look at him. Gmail account. Almost 22 years and 46,000 emails (and that’s just the ones I kept) later, I’m winding my Gmail account …

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Opting out of the enshittification

A graphic showing a hand holding a smartphone. The smartphone is slowly shattering into pieces from the bottom.

A great video this from the Norwegian Consumer Council on enshittification. They’ve also released a report on enshittification and how to resist it, and written to Norwegian, EU, UK and US authorities on reversing the trend. Enshittification, a term first coined by Cory Doctorow, is the gradual process where online platforms draw users in by …

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Binary thinking, collapse and food systems

A white light switch on a white wall. Photo by Isabella Fischer on Unsplash.

There’s a disturbing trend towards thinking of systemic collapse as being the inevitable and even necessary precursor to a more ideal future. It’s all coming down. Empires must fall. Only that way can we usher in better things. We must make good ruins, as Dougald Hine put it. Chris Smaje imagines cities emptying out in …

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All the small things

A very small door snail on a tree.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost;for want of a shoe the horse was lost;and for want of a horse the rider was lost,being overtaken and slain by the enemy,all for want of care about a horse-shoe nail. Traditional proverb Can you get repetitive strain injury from non-stop facepalming, or brain damage from …

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