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Kubbutz - a digital rights movement

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  Members of the Kibbutz Ein Harod dance the Hora in 1936. (Photo: Israel Goverment Press Office) Our data (photos, chats, tables, emails, notes, posts etc.) is scattered across multiple service providers (Google, Facebook, Substack, Whatsapp, Microsoft etc.), locked in proprietary formats with limited accessibility, abused for targeted advertisement. Self hosting is the concept of having your own server machine running  awesome free software  providing you the online services you need. A notable example to substitute most of your Google environment (photos, drive, docs) is  Nextcloud  bundled with  Collabora Office . A big drawback for self hosting is maintaining your own server. Even if you host a virtual machine, eliminating the hardware headache, you still need to take care of security and updates. I don’t include backups in this list, as application backup can be dealt elsewhere and server backup is not very different from installing it from scratch. Being an online service provid
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3D City - An urban coral reef

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  Imagine being a tourist arriving by an underground train station to the busy heart of a big city, taking an elevator out and walking a nice stone paved uphill pedestrian street. 2~3 floors buildings, shops and offices, cafes, terraces, trees, bike lane. You reach the junction on the top of the hill, but instead of the hill top you are at a  saddle point : continue straight will take you down, but turning left or right will take you up. You take the turn and face the same options. This is not possible in the  Flatland  you come from. You look behind and see a distant mesh of streets, a bit like a medieval Italian town on a mountain. You look up and you and far above (tens and hundreds of meters) see hanging gardens above you covering the sunlight. The gardens hang from the streets bottoms and the sunlight is artificial. You are an ant exploring a bush, or more topologically correct, a coral reef. Matera, Italy Astonished, you come to a balcony on an edge of a garden formed around a ju
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Ethical Consumer App

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 Address global challenges one boycott at a time Financial sanctions are commonly accepted as an extremely effective geopolitical instrument (recent Russia events are the outlier confirming the rule). Seeing it from a different angle, financial sanctions are not other than consumer pressure. This instrument can and should be facilitated on an individual above-international level. What we need is an app that gives you a personalized score for a product based on your individual set of ideals. Global challenges like pandemics, AI, cloning and gene modification, climate change, meteors - they all should be addressed primarily through organized consumer pressure and global organizations. Greenpeace 1,2 and 3 will publish their consumer pressure recommendations against cities, countries, global companies - whoever - and the followers will update their consuming habits automatically. What are the specs of the app? It recognizes products by their code, picture, bill scan, brand. It assigns sc
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Origami Camper Van

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Camper Vans (Recreation Vehicles, Motor Homes) all suffer from a terrible tradeoff - convenience of living vs convenience of driving. A small van, that is not very different from a family car in size (think classic  Volkswagen T2 , the same width and length of Toyota Prius) is not much more than a bed and a table on wheels. Yet it is already providing some substantial benefits over a car + tent : Your take your mess with you, packing and unpacking time is minimized Your bed is much more comfortable, weather protection is far superior Some essential facilities like heating system, small gas stove, kitchen sink, fridge, light and music are installed in their places, one less thing to worry about A van is bigger than a private car, you can bring more people or more stuff or spend less time compacting stuff in You are much more secured during the night from people and other animals A bigger van (think supermarket delivery) will allow you to put a couple more bunk beds for kids, even more s
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