Installing Forgejo
Most of my open source work is on Github. It's been there for years — since long before Github was bought by Microsoft. Github has a lot of good features, not least that, following on from Freshmeat in the 1990s and Sourceforge in the 2000s, it has become the go-to place so look for interesting open source projects and libraries.
But I've never liked Microsoft as a company, and their use (without permission and in breach of the General Public License) of other people's software to train their AI bots has made them much more obviously obnoxious and their qualification for custodianship of the world's major open source repository at best questionable. Furthermore, developments in the political world suggest that dependence on US based corporates for anything is now actively unsafe.
Over the years I have experimented with a number of open source git web integrations, none of which has been very satisfactory. This week, largely because of the promise that it will soon have ActivityPub integration, I've been trying Forgejo; and I'm impressed.
Continue reading →Light Weight Web
This essay is likely to be revised, probably several times. It is tracked on archive.org, so that you'll be able to go back through versions. I'm not promising to do serious work on this proposal by myself, but if others are interested I think it may be worth pushing forward with.
Discussion of this proposal can be found here, and, if you wish to contribute, I'd recommend that in the first instance you post to that thread.
Updated: 25th February (three times); 26th February; 27th February.
Continue reading →Questions, and futures
Dumfries and Galloway Council, acting on direction from the Scottish Government, wants each community in the region to produce a document called a 'Local Place Plan' summarising its planning issues and priorities. Auchencairn has made no progress on this over at least two years. As incoming chair of the Community Council, I've set up a working group with representatives from other key civic society groups within the village, and started working on the plan. Because the deadline is now tight, we've had to work fast.
As part of this process, I've led the working group in preparing a questionnaire for villagers which explores questions which may be in contention within the village. This isn't 'my' questionnaire, it is a group effort; but it's fair to say I've led the effort.
Continue reading →Aviation-fuel and generating capacity
I wrote in my last piece on aviation fuel that I thought that electrolysing the amount of hydrogen needed to fuel the world's jetliner fleet would use more electricity than the world's entire generating capacity, but that I would have to run the numbers.
Well, now I have. It wouldn't. I was wrong. It would use just 19.25% of our entire current electricity production. Electrolysing and subsequently burning hydrogen is pretty inefficient, however; the round trip efficiency is only about 60%. Lithium ion batteries have much better round trip efficiency at around 95% (declining slightly over the life of the battery, but not much). So powering all our commercial air fleet with electricity from batteries would, at a first estimate, use only 12.3% of our current electricity production.
Continue reading →Lies, damned lies, and aviation fuel
Since my last post about aviation fuel last week, the commentariat, inspired by Rachel Reeves' gibberish about a third runway at Heathrow, has been engaging in a paean of magical thinking.
Wouldn't it be nice, say The Rest is Politics today, from Syria, to which they've flown, because of course they have, if we could make aviation fuel from waste? After all, the aviation industry say we can, so it must be true, mustn't it? Specifically, for example, GE Aerospace say
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