Sundays are for waking up late
for making tea at 12pm because I woke up late
for spending 5 minutes finding the christian playlist
We need that peace that comes from that category of music
Sundays are for putting the phone on airplane mode
going through my saved links, to find the short interesting ones
reading while taking screenshots to later post on WhatsApp status
no I don’t think its virtue signalling, that I read a lot
Sundays are for wondering what should I eat
calling a friend to ask if they have had lunch
then going to find eating spot somewhere, something Middle Eastern
for wondering if I should go paint, of course I should
Sundays are for finding an interesting documentary
then wonder at the shit hole that the world is
wonder about my place in this world
deciding I won’t let the world change me, hahahaha
Sundays are for sleep eluding me
of course I woke up late
what did I expect
back to reading the pile of books on my tableFound some data on sea level changes in relation to temperate increase in the coastal cities of Durban, Cape Town, Lagos, Mombasa and Dar es Salaam. I was able to create a visualization of this data as seen below.
Note this data is from 2017, should I find any recent data I will be able to update. For a more interactive view please click https://www.datawrapper.de/_/9vfPX/
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decentralization
Decentralization sounds like a great idea. Technically, yes but it brings about a whole lot of issues. Back in the day computing was expensive and communicating meant running your own infrastructure. For communities they had to set up their own forum softwares and have some volunteer run the servers to host the forums.
We got into an era where there hasn’t been a need to run your own servers as infrastructure became cheaper to buy, social media became a thing, hosting platforms and many other developments. The advertisement business model made it easy for folks to connect and communicate as platforms sold their engagement to companies in the form of ads. Ads model means the platform need to understand the users and this obviously brought about a lot of privacy issues.
For some this centralization is the problem. To some extent I agree with this argument since you cannot tell a privately owned company what to do and without regulation they don’t really need to listen to you. The easy solution is to say lets just decentralize. The issue with decentralization is we are heading back to a time when you need to have some technical experience to run social platforms. For a community to keep engaging or do some any over the internet thing they need to buy and maintain infrastructure.
Decentralization would mean a whole lot of non-technical folks will need to find learn or jump onto some server. Apart from inclusion there emerges digital security and surveillance issues. Running a server would mean you need to be technical plus also need to be able to maintain & regularly update it. This opens up a whole lot of people to government surveillance as it’s easy to not properly follow server security measures.
When you come from communities whose first access to the internet was Facebook you would understand how running own servers and asking folks to install apps or only use a browser to communicate would be difficult to sell.
The other issue is that not everyone can afford to get off platforms they have spent a lot of time building engagement and have curved an audience for themselves. For most it’s hard to take time learn something new especially when it’s a little technical.
This post doesn’t mean I don’t support or think decentralization can be a solution to a number of issues but I think we need to think of social issues like inclusion & existing threats like growing government surveillance. Decentralization is a great first step fighting use of personal data to sell ads and censorship that’s becoming common among the big social media platforms.
Image at the top is prototype of datacenter demoed by Ethio telecom during Internet Governance Forum in Ethiopia.
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VPNs chat with Ivy
My friend Ivy runs Wavu Network. We did a Twitter space discussing Virtual Private Networks just before the August 2022 Kenya elections.
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsSet a reminder for my upcoming Space!
— Wavu_Network (@WavuNetwork) August 4, 2022
Featuring @zerodebs https://t.co/8MNZiLd19f
Here is the audio link to the discussion we had
I am trying out a thing, sketching. The main goal for this is to get me to calm down for a few minutes in a day.
Here are some of the sketches inspired by other people
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can one, two or we?
can one live
can one be satisfied
can one just be
can one desire less
can one be alone
can two just co-exist
can two just love
can two just be
without the need to conform
to society’s expectations
can we just love one another
can we just be there for each other
can we just be kind to each other
can we just see each other as humans
can we just be for each other
NOTE: This has lived on my notes app for a long time & thought I should just publish it. context is that this was written in a hotel room, tired from a whole day of conferencing.
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14.05.2022
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Digital Literacy & Taxes
I have spent years working around digital literacy. I’ve had the privilege to support Pwani Teknowgalz’s work through Africa Code Week, Mombasa Girls in STEM, Google CS Clubs, CodeHack, Coders at American Spaces & many other programs. Through these programs we were able to get a lot of young ones excited about technology and the impact it can have in their lives, from simple Google search to find information, use of social media to boost your business, use of tools like canva.com to make stunning graphics. Some of these programs helped students get excited about science and mathematics subjects resulting in their exams score going up. There are those who got into careers like social media marketing, website and graphic design. It’s always amazing to see how one to two hour sessions can have an impact on one’s life.
The internet has enabled us to be able to go to remote places and do digital literacy sessions. There are areas where internet coverage was very low but we were able to make it work. Internet access is a huge challenge with regards to getting folks to participate in the digital economy. There are places where you only have a single mobile network provider because the others have not invested in getting those locations covered by their network. One is subjected to a single choice of network provider, in most cases you find this single provider charges a lot or has no internet bundle offers that are pocket friendly.
Besides internet access, devices are another challenge. In one program I supported we used the tablets that were supplied to schools by the government through the ICT Authority in the Ministry of ICT. Some of these tablets had not left the boxes they came with. The availability of these tablets was a huge plus. The challenge now is access to the devices outside the school.
The one challenge with digital literacy programs is sustainability of the trainings. Will the attendees be able to continue learning/practising when we leave? With the introduction of data and airtime taxes it will get harder for most to invest in learning through the internet and to access information. Beyond digital literacy there are a lot of young people who are self-employed through the different services they offer over the internet. When you cannot have people afford internet access it becomes harder for potential customers to see the importance of digital for their businesses. This increased taxation is implemented at a very wrong time, we are still in the covid-19 pandemic.
In a previous post, I wrote about how technology can play an important role in our country, this increase in taxation will make that difficult. The increase will grow the digital divide not allowing many to afford internet access. This is the time for open spaces and hubs that have funding or access to subsidized internet to play a critical role in providing this vital access.
Bonus is a video of Kelvin driving us to a school in Malindi
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Tea with a view
When deploying to Heroku and use a database it creates the DATABASE_URL environment variable for you that you can connect your application with.
With python you can access this using the os module as follow:
os.environ.get('DATABASE_URL')
Though you might need to access the different details like; database name, user and password. Here is how I get to access this details, in this example I am using ClearDB, MySQL host provider.
import os
if os.environ.get('CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL'):
db_url = os.environ['CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL']
mysql_database = db_url.split('/')[3]
mysql_user = db_url.split('//')[1].split(':')[0]
mysql_password = db_url.split('@')[0].split(':')[2]
mysql_host = db_url.split('@')[1].split('/')[0]
else:
mysql_database = ""
mysql_user = ""
mysql_password = ""
mysql_host = "localhost"
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britone mwasaru 