Author Archives: Brewster Kahle

My eBike Economics

I use an eBike to commute 2.5 miles to work most days. It is faster than driving and parking, and much cheaper than Uber/Lyft. A few details: Uber/Lyft costs $12 each way, so $5/mile Uber/Lyft takes 20 minutes: 10 minutes … Continue reading

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Grace Lurton Miller 1928-2023

My dear aunt. Her poem, 1961.

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New account on Mastodon

The Internet Archive set up a Mastodon instance, and I created an account on it. Feels like a fresh new day. @brewsterkahle@mastodon.archive.org Mastodon

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Pythonistas: Up for quick hack to test Dedup’ing 78rpm records using document clustering?

I think this could be a 1 day exploration at least to figure out if it will work, but it is beyond my python ability. Idea: OCR the labels of our 78rpm records, then take an image of a new … Continue reading

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Greenhouse that desalinates its own water: A Desalinating Greenhouse

An idea. Combine two things to solve a big problem: Solar Water Still and Greenhouse– greenhouse that runs on salt water. A “solar water still” is often a tent that has salt water at the base and captures the evaporated … Continue reading

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Imagining the Internet: Explaining our Digital Transition

Imagining the Internet: Explaining our Digital Transition was designed as a google doc, so that is the best way to view it. Imagining the Internet:  Explaining our Digital Transition A digital wave is upon us, changing our lives, our occupations, … Continue reading

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DPayments on the DWeb now possible? Math breakthrough

One of the goals of a new World Wide Web: the Decentralized Web was to help people make money by publishing on the web. There are approaches to this such as Coil, but the vision in the paper has not … Continue reading

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Hiring Americans is hard for distributed organizations: How the federal and state governments can Fix It

The Internet Archive has over 90 employees in the United States, but they reside in 17 different states and even more counties. While distributed workforces are becoming common, it has become so painful to deal with the federal, state, and … Continue reading

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Uber…. but Decentralized?

What would it take to make an app that would work like Uber, but without the corporate entity?  And without the high percentage that goes to Uber.  Hum…   Let’s take some of the needed parts… Hailing a driver: a … Continue reading

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Libraries vs Bookstores? No, False dichotomy. They are different Animals

There is a recent written attack on libraries that I find odd and somewhat dangerous– libraries overlap too much with new-book bookstores. At first I thought it was trolling, but I now believe it is sincere. More worrisome is that … Continue reading

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