@pete@social.coop
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pete

@pete@social.coop

Stirchley, Birmingham UK. Member of loaf.coop. Keeper of rabbits. Middle-aged autistic diagnosis. Very interested in composting.

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pete, to zerowaste
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The Aerobic Digest 13 is out!

https://72.peteashton.com/the-aerobic-digest-13/

In this issue of my newsletter, a big move of the heaps into the shade begins, and a curious piece of plastic is found.

pete, to permaculture
@pete@social.coop avatar

Timelapse of me decanting a very wormy #compost heap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwn1JbvZ43g

8x speed. I started filling this heap in late December 2023, filled it by the start of March 2024, turned it on 10 April and in this video am decanting it on top of the previous batch so it can mature for a couple more months. And also free up the bay for the next heap.

#compostodon #permaculture

pete, to permaculture
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The Aerobic Digest is out!

In this month's composting newsletter: understanding the thermic phases, recording the sounds made by the bugs in the compost heap. Plus three songs about worms.

https://72.peteashton.com/the-aerobic-digest-12/

pete, to random
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I got involved in this thread from @adamgreenfield (which should be visible to all? I’m sketchy on how Masto permissions work) about how the Free Clinic model could work in the UK as the NHS fails. I pushed back, a lot, and I’m really interested as to why I had this reaction. I’m still processing but I think it’s a mix of “we have this, we just need to fix it” and a sort of leftist British exceptionalism, that free clinics only happen in other places. https://social.coop/@adamgreenfield/112203919606103205

adamgreenfield, to random
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

So here’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I live in the UK, where (as you may know) our National Health Service, the , is under severe strain. I believe a lot of that strain is intentional – designed to fracture the system so that it’s easy to privatize – but some of it is organic, and however it arises, it’s a real thing. With the need for access to care increasingly desperate, what I wonder is why people with healthcare skills are not setting up free clinics.

pete,
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@adamgreenfield I get a bit twitchy at things like “taking the heat off the NHS” because that’s the thin edge of the wedge. We need to fix and strengthen the NHS so it can absorb the heat. There’s been a few “go private if you can afford it to make room for those who can’t” and I really don’t like the long term implications. This isn’t what you’re suggesting, obviously, but I fear the same outcome.

pete,
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@adamgreenfield @passenger TBH, I thought you were talking about Ancient Greece, so no, I am quite ignorant. Plenty to follow up, as always!

pete,
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@adamgreenfield @passenger Looking forward to 9 July then!

pete, to random
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I often, justifiably, bitch about modern tech being shite, so it’s only right I share my delight at digging a ten year old GoPro out of the cupboard, getting it some new batteries from eBay and finding it works perfectly well. Even the phone pairing app, which has been “upgraded” with all manner of nonsense, still works with it.

There is hope.

pete,
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Of course, functioning tech will only get you so far. I thought I’d do a test video of me loading the compost bay today which resulted in 22 timelapse photos, none of which show anything interesting happening. Check the settings, m’dudes. Check the settings.

pete,
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There’s even evidence of me checking it’s working, but clearly not checking enough.

pete, to random
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Revisiting the Cat and Girl comic “On being listed in the court document of artists whose work was used to train Midjourney with 4,000 of my closest friends and Willem de Kooning”and as someone who’s been throwing stuff on the internet for a couple of decades and change, this pair of panels hit hard. https://catandgirl.com/4000-of-my-closest-friends/

pete, to random
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I hate typing on my phone.

23 years ago I had a Palm Pilot and bought a folding keyboard for it. It was amazing piece of engineering.

Eight years ago I saw a Bluetooth version - see pic - and bought it for my phone. It broke in months.

I keep looking and can find nothing like it, despite phones being ubiquitous and awful to type on. All existing folding keyboards are huge. I want one the size of my phone.

That ideally lasts longer than a month.

pete, to random
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New newsletter / blog post / blogsletterpost just published.

Blog posts I have not written

https://72.peteashton.com/blog-posts-i-have-not-written/

In which I publish the outline of nine essays I don’t have the energy to actually write properly because I just so very exhausted all the time these days.

pete, to random
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I was explaining #Dune to my friend Andy before we went to see it the other week and he got stuck on Paul being the “Kwisatz Haderach” but couldn’t hold the term in his head so asked me about the “Nick Nack Paddywhack” and now that’s stuck in my brain as canon forever.

pete, to random
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I’ve just realised that this sort of (perfectly reasonable) complaint seems to come from people with relatively large followings, who presumably will boost their posts a fair amount, which means their words appear in the streams of a lot of people who didn’t subscribe to them, so the chances of ending up in an otherwise delicately curated zone and prompting someone to go “WTF is this arsehole?” are closer to non-zero than, say, from the boosts the rest of us might get. https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/112153148835856116

pete,
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@compost Totally. One of my autistic traits is I find how humans figure out and navigate context-bare zones like this to be really fascinating. No-one is ever wrong. :)

pete,
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@compost My theory (and I have no evidence) is a lot of early Mastodon adopters are from groups that have struggled to fit into mainstream spaces, and this space worked for them in a very empowering way, so they’re extra protective of it now we’re all piling in. That doesn’t stop them being awful bores, but I’m happy to be empathetic to their needs (while I ignore them).

pete, to permaculture
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Hey hey ! Here's the Aerobic Digest - the third one this month, by golly - featuring a timelapse of me filling a heap with stinky food waste and rabbit excrement. Plus a video of a visit to a worm farm and some ponderings about the viability of municipal and community composting schemes.

https://the.aerobicdigest.email/p/building-a-heap-from-scratch

pete, to random
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Interesting that the thing that will push me to move my tiny composting newsletter off Substack is probably not their ethics or their business model but their god-awful writing interface. How do people who actually like writing deal with this nonsense?

(I decided to use Substack because I wanted to see how this newsletter revival thing worked from the mainstream side. If I ever decided to charge, and earn them money, I’ll move it elsewhere.)

pete, to permaculture
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Filled my bay nearly to the top today thanks to some gifted rabbit poop and food waste, plus my own backlogs of stuff, and attempted a timelapse video!

Here’s the low-res version. Subscribe to https://the.aerobicdigest.email/ to see it in better quality and a bit slower, with an explanation of what's going in there, coming as soon as I write it.

(Am I doing content marketing right?)

A timelapse of a compost bay being filled with a mix of hay, rabbit poop, food waste and shredded paper, filmed from above.

compost, to random
@compost@regenerate.social avatar

Very interesting article on the benefits of composting.

Also if they claim that weeds should not be composted, I strongly disagree with this statement.

Weeds are a fantastic source of greens when you only collect the leaves. If you make a conscious effort to drastically reduce your waste weeds will contribute to a healthy compost pile. Of course, don't collect the seeds.

https://www.tomsguide.com/home/5-benefits-of-composting-and-how-it-can-enrich-more-than-your-yard

pete,
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@compost @SkipHuffman Further to this, you can’t guarantee hot temps throughout the pile. If you can reduce seed content at the start it’ll help.

pete, to random
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I’m trying out Trello for our coop, on a recommendation. We need something for tracking rolling todo lists that repeat weekly / monthly / other-timscalely for jobs that are distributed across the coop to avoid silo-ing.

I’m veering between thinking Trello isn’t built for this, that’s it’s overkill for our needs, and that it’s a half-baked pile of shite.

Any tips? (I value stuff that actually works over stuff that is FOSS.)

pete, to random
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Landlord has a derelict building, community enterprise takes it on peppercorn rent, fixes it up and runs a pay-what-you-can restaurant employing feeding the community and employing 22 people. With the building now fixed up, landlord evicts community enterprise and sells building.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/22/radical-pay-what-you-can-restaurant-faces-eviction-from-mill-it-refurbished

This could be easily avoided if derelict and unused buildings were simply confiscated from landlords and given to the community. They should have no rights of ownership here.

pete,
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@jbenjamint @pwaring With Birmingham UK effectively bankrupt and threatening to sell all our community buildings (libraries, etc) people have been registering a lot of them as assets of community value. See https://savebirmingham.org/

pete, to random
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Viewing samples of ebooks is like going to a talk where the hosts waffle on for ages about administrative stuff you don’t care about and then there’s only time for the speaker to say “in this lecture I will be talking about…” and then it stops.

If you get me.

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