Following on from my last post on “Sustainability in tech”, and spurred by a recent circular economy podcast I listened to, I've been thinking about new environmentally-conscious economic models of production and consumption, and the trade-offs that come with them.

I'm not a very good environmentalist. Sure, I don't own a car – but that is as much an urban lifestyle choice as anything else. I recycle and compost – but the local council does the hard work there, giving me the bags and collecting it. We have re-useable nappies – but use them alongside disposable ones.

Back in “My Linux journey” blogpost, I mentioned I'd bought a dedicated Linux machine to have fun on – the Star Labs Star Lite Mk II “labtop” is a bit of a curiosity but for a £350 deal seemed like a no-brainer. 11.6” screen but with a glass, premium feel. Small, sleek form factor but solid and heavier than expected! Low powered CPU to fit but 8GB RAM. These sort of modern netbooks usually pack a small amount of flash memory but this has a comparatively huge 240GB SSD, speedy enough but not as quick as top-end devices.

Reading other people's blogs on “Read Write.as” and “100 Days to Offload” feels like a mix of voyeurism, a search for inspiration, and through time, an emergent sense of being part of a virtual community. Right now I'm particularly enjoying seeing linkages pop up between blogs. Here are a few examples:

Towards the end of last year I started thinking about getting a new smartphone. My Samsung A3 (2016) was nearly 3 years old, the battery was struggling to get through a day, and apps were becoming too slow. However, I felt an innate rejection of many principles the smartphone industry held dear. Its business model clashed with my desire for sustainability and privacy.

I may add a search bar at some point but for now, you can also navigate posts according to hashtags, grouped below in a way that makes sense to me and evolving as I post more. Expect a mixed bag. Some of the posts will feature the tagged topic as the central focus of the post, others will merely touch on it. If you'd prefer to scroll through a timeline of posts, head to my Archive.

I guess it started at some point in the late '80s (or maybe early '90s) with painstakingly typing in lines of BASIC on a ZX Spectrum +3, for the dubious reward of a simple Pong style game. I was a curious child, always wanting to know things. Typing all that code didn't lead me to a lifetime at the command line or a shadowy teenage life as a hacker but it was my first experience of looking beyond the standard Graphic User Interface (GUI) kindly presented to the world by mainstream computing.