Keith Whyte @keith@tic-ac.org

It's becoming increasingly clear to me that Reflect Orbital's fucking stupid giant mirror satellite, with absolutely NOTHING useful to offer, which will cause countless safety issues, ecological disasters, and destroy the night sky, is going to launch.

A bunch of astronomers and I have sent out a fact sheet about them to a bunch of journalists, but very few are going to write about this. So, let me try posting it all here.

Here's what I know about Reflect Orbital and all the downsides:

For 15 years, F-Droid has been the antidote to Google Play: no trackers, no ads, just open source apps. Now, Google wants to kill it.

Under the guise of "security", Google is forcing devs to register, pay, and surrender control. F-Droid can’t comply without betraying its principles. Thousands of apps could vanish overnight.

Fight back: demand sideloading rights, pressure regulators/Parliament, and defend one of the safe harbors for ethical tech.

https://f-droid.org/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html

@marcprux @fdroidorg

Old enough to remember when #YouTube was NOT Google, and was obscure enough we had to send direct links, because the usual wantonly dumb people with a (windows) computer and an (AOL) internet account did not know how to find it with a simple search.

This is a sub toot about people disparaging #PeerTube / #MakerTube and other #FOSS media streaming venues, for being relatively small, and still obscure.

@sundogplanets Maybe you already saw this article in Earth and Sky about Starlink space junk reentries every day. It quoted your Mastodon posts.

https://earthsky.org/human-world/1-to-2-starlink-satellites-falling-back-to-earth-each-day/

Still liking not using LLMs or genAI, in any aspect of my research, engineering or creative practices. Continuing to get high on interesting problems, developing myself in the process of solving them, or even not solving them and being augmented/extended/refined by insights along the way.

I don't see 'AI' tooling as empowerment. Quite the opposite.

Very pleased to have been a part of this project - a great collaboration.

My contribution, an article, was specifically on helping chart a pathway for climate-facing organisations to shift from big tech platforms to self-hosted and sovereign infrastructure.

You can download the book free, or pre-order in print.

https://tacticaltech.org/replaybook/

#climate #selfhosting #infrastructure

I only just now just discovered this site:
https://explainshell.com/
which along with this one https://regex101.com/ which I've used for some time have to be among the most useful resources out there for #sysadmin and #programming.

I am reminded of that old #Einstein attributed quote about not trying to remember everything when it can be looked up -
I certainly find that as I'm getting less #young I don't remember all the possible options to ffmpeg anymore. 😄

#linux #regex getting #older

here is a thing I have been working on for many months --->>>>>>

https://wwwobble.org/

👾👾👾Wobble Web visual && code editor for making small websites👾👾👾

It is still very much in progress, but I would love to hear from you if you try it out or have ideas! I will reply to this thread with more details :)