Notices by Simon Brooke (simon_brooke@mastodon.scot), page 3

OK, this is genuinely scary. It's a picture of me, aged 5. It was taken in 1960. It was scanned and uploaded to Google Photos in 2002. No one has told Google where it was taken. But the map, bottom right, is correct.

Obviously, in 1960, my father's pre-war Exakta camera did not have GPS. Could you identify, from that picture, exactly where it was taken?

Google can.

“They won’t imprison us all, they know if they fill the prisons with activists, we will overpower them from within. So flood the damn streets in your millions. Shut down these factories in your thousands! They can never arrest the resistance in our smiles. We will use the shards of our broken hearts to spear the system of injustice.” -- Qesser Zuhrah

#SayHerNamee
#PalestineAction
#Gaza

https://prisonersforpalestine.org/prisoner/qesser-zuhrah/

@VeroniqueB99 and once again, with #AltText4You.

"The woman, who did not want her name published for safety reasons, added: 'This is not about us. We were beaten for 15 minutes. Palestinians here endure this violence every day, every hour, a thousand-fold.' ...

Activists say that violent incidents have become an almost daily occurrence. Attacks have included settler mobs breaking into homes and beating villagers, stealing 200 sheep, two cars and destroying solar panels"

#Terrorism
#Zionism
#Palestine

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/01/italian-canadian-volunteers-beaten-robbed-israeli-settlers-west-bank

"Arduino wasn’t valuable because it was just a microcontroller company. It was valuable because it was a commons. And you can’t apply enterprise legal frameworks to a commons without destroying it"

You also can't buy a #commons, at least without destroying it as a commons. The key point about a commons is that it isn't property.

#Arduino

https://www.molecularist.com/2025/11/did-qualcomm-kill-arduino-for-good.html

"A new investigation of Elon #Musk’s X by Sky News found that every account set up by reporters, 'no matter their political orientation, was fed a glut of rightwing content', much of which was extreme. The experts it consulted believe this pattern could have resulted only from an algorithm engineered for this purpose, and that 'an algorithmic bias must be decided by senior people at the channel'" -- George Monbiot

Anyone still on X is deliberately supporting #Fascism.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/14/climate-crisis-communication-super-rich

What's horrifying about this graph is that we're emitting CO2 from fossil hydrocarbons NOW at four times the rate we were when I was a child, and twice the rate we were in 1972, when we already knew that #ClimateChange was an existential problem.

Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/13/world-still-on-track-for-catastrophic-26c-temperature-rise-report-finds?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-gb

#ClimateEmergency

@amszmidt @vindarel there were indeed at the time attempts to make new key binding schemes for #Emacs to make it play nice with then-new key binding conventions, but the Emacs ecosystem was by that time so large that there were always horrible incinsistencies somewhere, so that as far as I'm aware there was never a comprehensive, consistent, key-binding scheme which was did not hopelessly violate user expectations somewhere.

@amszmidt @ringtailringo@mastodon.social @vindarel It's also fair to say that before the Mac became established -- in the mid 1980s -- there was no reason to prefer one set of key bindings to another. But as we increasingly came to use Emacs on systems where Ctrl-C meant `copy` and Ctrl-S meant `save`, #Emacs sticking to an older set of bindings which did not conform to these (newer) conventions just become a layer of cognitive nuisance which greatly reduced its utility. >>>

@amszmidt @vindarel I used #Emacs on VT100s and equivalents, and it was fine. I used Emacs under TWM, where every damned app seemed to use different bindings, and it was no worse than anything else. But by the time we got to OSF/Motif (1989) a default set of core keybindings had emerged, and almost all applications adopted it.

Leaving #Emacs as an outlier.

It did not need to be this way.

@vindarel No, #Emacs' pathological user hostility is not a feature. Yes, forty years ago I did use Emacs for almost everything. Forty years ago, there wasn't anything better. Now, almost everything is better. Almost everything uses consistent key bindings, at least for common functions. Almost everything has easily discoverable commands. Almost everything has consistent theming.

Emacs could have moved with the times, but it hasn't.

Gaza Verified is a very useful scheme (led by @aral and @joynewacc -- many thanks to them) which gives us confidence that the people we are helping are truly in #Gaza and truly in need; but I don't yet have ways of assessing where need is most urgent.

The people I am helping are among the most articulate, know western languages, have phones. There must be others who lack these benefits, whose need is greater; but I don't know how to reach them.

Those who follow me may be feeling overwhelmed by the number of appeals for help from people in #Gaza that I'm reposting.

I am sorry; I feel overwhelmed myself. I cannot help most of these people. My resources are very limited. I can't tell you whether one person's need is more urgent than another's.

But this need is real and desperate. Bombs are still falling; aid is still being blocked.

Please help if you can.

>>>

@aral @joynewacc @casey @aseelfromgz

Thank you all for the work you have done!

Well, trust me to put a mortice right through not one but two big knots. However, today's joints are much better than Monday's!

This is the first end frame of the new workshop sort of done. I'm thinking about whether to add diagonal braces. I really should, the would make the building a lot stronger.

It's widely reported that #China has been building out huge amounts of #solar photovoltaic generation, and of course that is a big contributor to slowing #ClimateChange. But what I discovered to my surprise this week is that China is also #Reforesting faster than almost anywhere else on Earth, which is an equally important contributor, and also contributes positively to the #Oxygen cycle.

https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation

@yogthos

"However, by 2015, support for independence stood at 52% among those on the left, compared with just 24% among those on the right – a difference of 28 points... In our most recent survey in 2024, those on the left were 34 points more likely than those on the right to say that Scotland should become an independent country"

#ScottishIndependence
#ScotPol

And this is why the #SNP should stop chasing right wing votes!

https://natcen.ac.uk/publications/scottish-social-attitudes-25-years-devolution-scotland

@LillyHerself The Scottish Government has always had the power to reform local government taxation, in any way it liked; but hasn't done so. We could have a #WealthTax; we don't. We could have more progressive #PropertyTax; we don't. They would have to have been local taxes, but we could have them.

We've done shockingly little on #LandReform. We're lagging way behind our own goals on decarbonisation. We have not defended #TransRights against the recent UK assault.

Need I go on?

@hellomiakoda unfortunately, having fecal material (specifically of other people, especially close relatives) in your food is pretty much the only way to develop and sustain a healthy gut biome.

Over-cleanliness is the root of a lot of disease (but under-cleanliness is the root of a lot of other disease, so the balance isn't easy).

It's not that our politicians don't know what's needed to slow #ClimateChange. It's that they don't care.

Their two priorities are

1. winning the next election, under the UK's absurdly dysfunctional, archaic and undemocratic system;

2. pleasing the big donors, who include the #FossilFuel industry, the car industry, and the armaments industry.

They do not care what happens ten years ahead: five is as far as they can see.

#ClimateEmergency
#Corruption

https://theconversation.com/we-surveyed-british-mps-most-dont-know-how-urgent-climate-action-is-266703