Paul Fawkesley: Engineer, founder, maker 🛠

Smartphone Free Childhood are running a campaign to write to your MP.

A year ago I started counting how many alcohol units I was drinking.

Original image: Andrew Whitton, Wilderness Festival Notes-to-self and links from a wonderful weekend in Cornbury Park.

Sunshine, strawberries and stupid AI 4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment Last year, ninety-six per cent of the global demand for new electricity was met by renewables Poland—long a leading coal-mining nation—saw renewable power outstrip coal…

Electrifying everything, AI agents and internet resiliency.

I use the heroku command-line most days.

In June we switched to a fully variable electricity tariff, Octopus Agile.

If you don’t know it, Wilderness Festival is as much about talks and debates as it is music (as well as arts, food, wellness and more…) There’s a packed programme with some really good stuff.

In June 2024, Plug Me In (Heat) installed our Vaillant heat pump.

On 24-27th May 2024 we returned to Hay-on-Wye for one of our favourite festivals.

Today we visited Calderstones Park, part of the Mersey Forest.

Today I installed Syncthing on my Synology DS115 NAS running DSM 7.

Today we visited Otterspool Park, part of the Mersey Forest.

To prepare for the arrival of our new Viking triple glazed windows, we took the openings back to brick.

Our Retrofit Assessment identified high carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels all around the house.

Notes and links from a wonderful weekend in Cornbury Park.

I finally got around to replacing our draughty, single glazed front door.

I’m on a mission to stop burning fossil fuels.

Di, Oli, Paul F, Alan, Paul B, Harley and Jon gave testimonies at trial on Wednesday.

Di, Oli, Alan, Paul, Harley, Jon and I gave testimonies at trial on Wednesday.

This site is built with Hugo, a static site generator.

In September 2021 we installed a solar diverter called iBoost as a measure to reduce our gas consumption.

A suggestion to NHS Blood and Transplant management from a blood donor of 17 years, a hypothesis on increasing blood stocks, and an approach to start testing it right now.

Short version Ian and I run two free services to help PGP users: Expirybot — sends emails 3 days before keys expire with simple instructions on how to extend the key.

Here’s a follow-up of why putting camera-enabled smart TVs in the bedroom might be a bad idea At Liverpool Makefest on Saturday I gave a talk about keeping smart homes private.

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses — My favourite line: “If you hope some day to look back on your career and feel that it has contributed to the growth of a good and free society, you need

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week Face recognition with OpenCV, Python, and deep learning — It’s getting easier and easier.

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week How I became Leonardo da Vinci on the Blockchain — Verisart are presumably better at raising venture capital than understanding the problem of art fraud.

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week Behind the Messy, Expensive Split Between Facebook and WhatsApp’s Founders — Forsaking $1.3 billion by resigning from Facebook is what I’d call putting your money where your mouth is.

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week Wi-Fi EasyMesh — Wi-Fi Alliance have released a specification for mesh networks.

Notes on philosophy from a field in Hay on Wye We went to How the Light Gets In, a lovely philosophy festival that co-locates with the Hay Literary Festival.

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week Getting Google to ban our entire company while on the toilet — If this is true, the activity of one team member can bring down a whole organisation’s G-Suite account.

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week Completely Silent Computer — This gave me a pang of nostalgia, remembering my teen years building computers for friends and family.

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week A Recycled IP Address Caused Me to Pirate 390,000 Books by Accident — Don’t leave old subdomain A records kicking around, lest your IP gets recycled.

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week Signal » Blog » Amazon threatens to suspend Signal’s AWS account over censorship circumvention — Two weeks ago I wrote about Google blocking domain fronting, a censorship circumvention technique.

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week How vulture capitalists ate Toys ‘R’ Us — Devastating.

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week Russian hackers targeting millions of devices around the world, US and UK warn — Unsurprising, but it’s unusual to hear this sort of statement from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). astralship.o…

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week World After Capital — Fascinating glimpse of the future.

Respect your users' choice for privacy — disable Google Analytics for people using Do Not Track.

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week SpaceX can’t broadcast Earth images because of a murky license — Apparently it requires a “commercial remote sensing licence” to transmit video from space back to Earth.

I thought carefully about the best and worst bits of my previous jobs to work out what I really love doing.

This week I’ve laid some good groundwork for Expirybot and had fun playing part-time security researcher.

I’ve started PGP-signing Expirybot’s outgoing emails, but in the process had to build a web service to handle unsubscribes, bounces, complaints and invalid domains.

This time last week I wrote about experiencing Writer’s Block, and how I was struggling to face the idea of making anything.

Your device’s MAC address can be used to track you across the WiFi networks you connect to.

Today I’m experiencing something seriously strange for me - I can’t face the idea of building!

A month ago I started a side project to try and make the world a little easier for PGP users.

Here’s a long-overdue write up of an interesting thing I stumbled across back in 2013.