These are cheap (£30) mini computers that run Linux and will make a good second computer for children (for example), a media player in another room, or a data server. It might save people buying another laptop and it means you can reuse the peripherals of older PCs (screen, mouse etc). Read more

A solution to the absence of high-speed wireless networks across some developing countries and increasingly appearing in the form of WiFi based community networks in numerous countries in Europe, building a low-tech internet could have benefits for all. With excerpts from an original Low-tech Magazine article by Kris De Decker, we explore how a less resource-intensive and more energy-efficient… Continue reading Resilient networks: building a low-tech internet Read more

In response to the pervasive reach of the global agro-industrial complex, growing numbers of farmers across the world are coming together as co-operative organisations to promote and protect small-scale organic food production and environmental stewardship. We take a look below at some of the groups promoting open source agriculture with farmer driven technologies, spearheaded by the… Continue reading Farm Hack : growing innovative open-source agriculture Read more

Lowimpact.org is an organisation that was founded by two people in 2001 because of concerns about ecological damage and what that might mean for the future of humanity. The focus has always been on individual lifestyle change Read more

This is the first of two articles examining the non-corporate sector, and its advantages for ecology, democracy, communities and individuals. Here’s a checklist of the benefits of reducing the reach of the corporate sector, but first, let’s work out what kind of organisations comprise the non-corporate sector. Read more

This is the last in a series of articles to help you to jettison Windows and corporate software generally. Read more

This is the latest in a series of articles intended to help you become Windows- and corporate-software-free. Read more

Remember the previous two blog articles about switching to open source / free software? The first was about switching to free / open source programmes whilst still using Windows, and the second was about downloading the Linux operating system onto a datastick so that you can play with it and familiarise yourself with it, but… Continue reading Low-impact & the city 9: learning to use Linux Read more

I was back recently in my old stomping ground of Bicester in Oxfordshire – it was not a happy visit. Read more

A while ago I blogged about the various open source programmes I’m using. I’m absolutely non-techie when it comes to IT. I have no interest in the technical underpinning of what I want to do with my computer, and this makes it difficult for technical people to explain things to me. Read more

There’s a weekend conference coming up that you might be interested in. It’s called ‘Land for What?’ and it’s taking place over the weekend of November 12 and 13. Read more

I’ve found that learning about how to change to open source software can be difficult for non-techies. Yes, you can easily find the websites that contain the information you need, but it’s almost never written in a style that non-techies can understand. Read more

Here’s a living example of a ‘lean’ economy (outlined by David Fleming in our last blog post), and how you can help to preserve it. The ‘unlean’ economy is encroaching onto the territory of the Kichwa and Sapara communities in the Ecuadorean Amazon, in the form of large oil corporations, and will destroy their communities, as… Continue reading Reimagining progress: what we can learn about ‘lean thinking’ from indigenous communities Read more

I attended the launch of two books at Daunt Bookshop in Chelsea on Wednesday evening. David Fleming died in 2010, and now his friend Shaun Chamberlin has edited his magnum opus, Lean Logic, and Chelsea Green have published it. Read more

This is a farm-based education organisation.  Our story is the ‘shieling’ – a tradition where folk went up to the hills with the livestock. The shieling is a traditional practice of moving up to the high ground or moorland with livestock, to live there for the summer. Read more

We received an email recently with these sentences: ‘This idea of those evil corporations is mistaken because we are all involved in society and economy. There is no us and them we are all part of it and need to take responsibility for that.’ Read more

I don’t believe that any ethnic group anywhere in the world can truthfully claim that they have never carried out atrocities against another group. Every nation has been victim and perpetrator at some time. Read more

I have a special interest in this book. As a young man in the 1980s I’d read Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa (Swahili for “togetherness”, “unity” or “familyhood”). I was inspired by his vision of a co-operative, non-hierarchical society based on sustainable villages Read more

There are lots of ideas for changing the world – from voting to demonstrations, petitions, lifestyle change, incremental change, revolutionary change, or more of the same, only harder. The problem with many of them is that they are either ineffective or not implementable. Read more

Nationalising something doesn’t then mean that it’s owned by ‘the people’ – i.e. by us. That would only be true if states weren’t controlled by the corporate sector. Read more