The Fool on the Hill

The Fool on the Hill

Installing Forgejo

By Simon Brooke || 8 March 2025

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.

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Light Weight Web

By Simon Brooke || 24 February 2025

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.

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Questions, and futures

By Simon Brooke || 19 February 2025

Questions, and futures

Graph produced from my personal run of the Place Standard Tool

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.

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Aviation-fuel and generating capacity

By Simon Brooke || 9 February 2025

Aviation-fuel and generating capacity

Several bicycles being carried on a sailing ship

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.

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Lies, damned lies, and aviation fuel

By Simon Brooke || 6 February 2025

Lies, damned lies, and aviation fuel

Shit pouring out of a sewage works into a river

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.

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