Someone should make a variant of Khan Academy with the same content (which is under Creative Commons) but no non-libre software, call it 4khan, and list the "4 essential khans" (you khan run the program as you wish for any purpose, etc.) on the homepage

Happy 2024! The Eco-Libre project published our 2023 Annual Report for last year.

Eco-Libre is a volunteer-run project that designs libre hardware for sustainable communities.

Eco-Libre's mission is to research, develop, document, teach, build, and distribute open-source hardware and software that sustainably enfranchises communities' human rights.

• Eco-Libre's mission statement

We aim to provide clear documentation to build low-cost machines, tools, and infrastructure for people all over the world who wish to live in sustainable communities with others.

Executive Summary

• Eco-Libre was founded June 24, 2023
• Begun searching for land in Ecuador
• Four projects created on GitHub
• Currently 2 active contributors
• 2024 priority is finding land and R&D on Life-Line

Michael Altfield registered the domain-name eco-libre.org on June 24th, 2023, a few weeks after arriving to Ecuador.

Over the next 6 months, Eco-Libre committed research and designs to our GitHub org for four projects (licensed CC BY-SA) which address some of the essential requirements for a new community's basic human needs: clean water, shelter, electricity, and ecological processing of waste. By releasing these designs under a libre license, it allows for other communities to build their own infrastructure with minimal effort, and it encourages collaboration on standardized design concepts.

As Eco-Libre's projects mature, we will build experimental prototypes in our own community. To that end, Michael is currently traveling around Ecuador by bicycle in-search of land to found Eco-Libre's first physical site.

In December, Eco-Libre was joined by Jack Nugent, who has since committed contributions to the Eco-Libre Life-Line project.

The priority focus for Michael in 2024 is to determine the best region in Ecuador to buy land where Eco-Libre can physically iterate on projects.

The priority focus for Jack in 2024 is to finish the research, design, and documentation of the Eco-Libre Life-Line project.

Projects

Eco-Libre was founded this year (in 2023). In our first 6 months, we've begun work on four libre hardware projects. All of them are currently in the early research stages.

Eco-Libre Launch-Nest

The Eco-Libre Launch-Nest was our first project. The concept is to build a small-footprint, high-occupancy structure for sustainable living of 30-people.

Eco-Libre Launch-Nest 2023.09

The rooftop has sufficient space for 72 solar panels (2 meter x 1 meter) and 3 parabolic solar concentrators (16 square meter).

The structure is six-stories above-ground, which is the recommended maximum height of a confined masonry structure in an earthquake zone. It also has a basement.

The building is designed with external, enclosed, firewalled staircases on either end. These are symmetrical and designed such that the building design can be rotated around a center courtyard to have four Eco-Libre Launch-Nest structures that share the same stairwells.

Currently only basic, incomplete architectural design-work has been done in CAD. Before a structural analysis can be assessed (eg to determine the location of columns), further work needs to be done on finishing the placement of windows, doors, and dividing walls.

Eco-Libre Life-Line

The Eco-Libre Life-Line project is a series of components making up an infrastructure to deliver a clean water pipeline to a community. This includes:

Eco-Libre Life-Line 2023.12

1. Collection of raw surface water (eg from a stream)
2. Removal of large organic debris & sediments
3. Removal of small particles
4. Removal of harmful bacteria & parasites
5. Clean water storage

Michael started the Life-Line project after visiting a number of communities who had constant issues with their water systems breaking or failing to provide clean water. The goal is to design a low-cost, self-cleaning pipeline of systems that require minimal human intervention (max routine maintenance twice per year).

This year we have half-finished the "intake" component in CAD, which consists of building a weir in a stream that funnels turbulent water onto a downward-sloped HDPE barrel with a fine-mesh screen atop it. This design exploits the energy in falling turbulent water to clean the intake screen, and it prevents the intake from being clogged by organic debris during heavy rainfall.

Special thanks to Jack Nugent, who joined Eco-Libre in 2023 and has contributed to research, design, and documentation of the Eco-Libre Life-Line project.

The goal in 2024 is to finish the "intake" component in CAD and also to design the "settling tank", "pre-filter", and "sand filter" components in CAD.

Eco-Libre Genesis-Booth

How do you sustainably begin to build a community on land without electricity and without any structures?

The Eco-Libre Genesis-Booth is a simple storage shed with >1 kW of PV solar panels on the roof. This is the first structure to be built when jumpstarting a new off-grid community. It provides the power, storage, and outdoor workshop space needed to build-out the community.

Eco-Libre Genesis-Booth 2023.06

This year we've made a simple footprint for the Genesis-Booth in CAD that's 4 meters x 2 meters -- just large enough to fit 4 solar panels (2 meters x 1 meter each). Further work is needed in CAD, but this year we also delved into making a framework for our documentation.

The Eco-Libre documentation is written in reST, generated by Sphinx, and (currently) hosted by GitHub. This is an exceptionally flexible continuous documentation solution that allows for versioned documentation matching versioned releases, works well with git, can be exported to many different flexible formats, and can be extended with custom directives written in python.

The highest priority for the Genesis-Booth is to finish this documentation as a template for other projects. Ideally this should be designed in such a way that information about Eco-Libre in general is seamlessly added to all project's documentations in a reusable way.

Eco-LIbre Treasure Tower

The Eco-Libre Treasure-Tower project is a 7 meter x 6 meter structure for storing and processing a community's waste, most importantly their food & fecal compost.

Eco-Libre Treasure-Tower 2023.07

This structure is 6-stories high and barrier-free, with a wrap-around ramp. All but the top-floor have three doors:

1. Access door for maintenance
2. Deposit Closet
3. Deposit Closet

Each deposit closet contains facilities for the collection of human urine and feces and is slightly staggered in elevation so the user's deposits fall by gravity into their designated collection areas for processing.

Separately from compost, this structure also serves as a storage area for recyclable waste materials, such as metal.

This year a first-draft design of the structure has been designed in CAD, but it's very premature.

Next, a second design prototype (where the two deposit closet entrances are on the same side) should be drafted in CAD and compared to the existing design.

Contribute to Eco-Libre

If you'd like to help Eco-Libre reach our mission to enfranchise sustainable communities' human rights with libre hardware, please contact us to get involved :)

Join Us
eco-libre.org/join

Cheers,
The Eco-Libre Team
https://www.eco-libre.org/

re-publicado de: https://lemmy.ml/post/10400577

re-publicado de: https://lemmy.ml/post/10399959

Hey guys, the Fedora shill is back again to invite you all to this year's Creative Freedom Summit, that will be hosted from 23-25 Jan.

It's a really nice event hosted by our Design Team for those that are interested in FOSS creative tools, like Inkscape, GIMP, Krita, Blender and more, as you'll be able to learn directly from its creators and or specialists in those tools.

It'll be all hosted using FOSS tools as well (Jitsi for the speakers, PeerTube for the event stream + Matrix for the live chat), check it out!

Also, for those that haven't seen last year's event, all of the talks are available on Fedora's YouTube channel and on the event's PeerTube channel!

I am trying to understand an idea that Richard Stallman proposed to promote music "in the age of computer networking." This is from an article titled Ending the War on Sharing: https://stallman.org/articles/end-war-on-sharing.html

We could support musical artists with public funds distributed directly to them in proportion to the cube root of their popularity. Using the cube root means that if superstar A is 1000 times as popular as skilled artist B, A will get 10 times as much of the tax funds as B. This way of dividing the money is an efficient way to promote a broad diversity of music.

The law should ensure that record companies cannot confiscate these funds from the artists, since experience shows they will try. To speak of "compensating" the "rights holder" is a veiled way of proposing to give most of the money to the record companies in the name of the artists.

These funds could come from the general budget, or from a special tax on something vaguely correlated with listening to music, such as blank disks or Internet connectivity. Either way would do the job.

What I'm having trouble understanding is whether the artist (musicians in this case) is getting paid per-listen, or if they are getting paid as a percentage of the total fund.

Is the idea that if an artist was responsible for 8% of the songs played on a platform, they would get 2% of the funding?

Has anyone else read about this idea? I wish it had been explained a bit better.

EDIT: I emailed RMS and he replied. Here is how the cube root system would work. I have labeled the quotes for clarity:

RMS: I am assuming a program managed by the state, which measures the popularity of each musician and distributes a certain pool of money among them.

auomaticdoor75: Let's use a very simple example: let's say there's a treasury that will pay out $10,000 to three different artists. Artist A was responsible for 67% of the songs played on the platform, Artist B was responsible for 20% of the songs played, and Artist C was responsible for 13% of the songs played. Using your cube-root idea, how much money would each artist receive?

RMS: The cube roots are 0.8750340239643772, 0.584803579016074, 0.5065797363612384 Add them and you get 1.9664173393416897.

The A gets (/ 0.8750340239643772 1.9664173393416897) = 0.444988968749288 of the total.

B gets (/ 0.584803579016074 1.9664173393416897) = 0.29739545482845087 of the total.

C gets (/ 0.5065797363612384 1.9664173393416897) = 0.2576155764222611 of the total.

I do not say that the cube root is the perfect function to use. It gives an example of how such a system can work. A different function might be better.

So, it seems like you find the cube root of each person's percentage of the web traffic, divided by the sum of all the cube roots. The resulting quotient is that person's share of the treasury.

Hello,

Looking to see what new tools and stuff that are libre people are using today. Are there any drm free tele health options out there?

Hi all,

I want to try to learn Spanish on my own, right now I barely know anything. Asking in the libre culture community because I know a common answer is duolingo but I don't want to install an app store other than f-droid.

See also ESP Wiki's entry on Martin Goetz.

I was wondering what lore universes exist where stories and games could take place in.

First ones that came to mind are The Battle of Wesnoth and Pepper & Carrot.

Though can anybody think of any further?

Public domain is also valid, but it has to pd world wide and I’m not sure what that would mean. Authors definitely need to at least dead since 1943, but I don’t know if there were any countries that had more than death+80 (Spain, Colombia and Equatorial Guinea).

Public Domain Background Tracks

https://923000.blogspot.com/2023/09/public-domain-background-tracks.html

FOSDEM24!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2437745

also on r/programming

A while ago I made an app for tracking baby activities because I became a parent and was horrified at how many permissions the existing apps required and how much tracking they contained. Both the app and the server are open source.

This is a web-app which also has an Android version in the Play Store (F-Droid didn't accept it because they don't feel like web-apps should be welcome in their store). On iPhones it can be installed as a PWA to the home screen.

Features:

• No tracking whatsoever
• End-to-end encrypted, no personal information is stored on the server unencrypted
• Track baby's feeding, diaper changes, breast pumping and sleeping (more to come)

Links:

• https://baby-journal.app - the PWA itself
• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.baby_journal.twa - the Play Store Android wrapper
• https://github.com/RikudouSage/BabyJournalApi - the server source code
• https://github.com/RikudouSage/BabyJournalUi - the PWA source code

https://web.archive.org/web/20230624163406/https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/

https://web.archive.org/web/20230624001806/https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/

yay we are all terrorists
direct Odysee link