critical engineer / educator / infrastructure activist / artist
I deploy and secure sovereign server infrastructure for defenders of human rights and the environment, and help them stay safe with best-practice information and operations security.
I also make and teach tech art, exhibiting internationally since the late 90's.
Bows, arrows & rainforest conservation when I can.
Pākehā, Tangata Tiriti, he/him, herbivore
| projects | https://julianoliver.com |
| infrastructure | https://nikau.io |
| resilience | https://wiki.collapsible.systems/ |
| home | Aotearoa New Zealand |
Perfect on-prem #selfhosting project for a rainy Friday night in winter: taking Ubuntu Server for a spin on a Dell r610 intercepted as e-waste en route to the graveyard. Diagnostics showed the only thing 'wrong' with it is a dead CMOS battery. For fun I installed the OS onto a fast USB stick while I find some SAS drives in RAID to throw at the project.
More of a vanilla Debian person myself, but great to see how far #Ubuntu Server has come, and that it still looks after legacy kit like this.
You can see the Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) pulses right here, a node near and one about 2km away.
An interesting aside is that CSS (in very wide use now, thanks to LoRa) is very similar to the communication technique used by bats and dolphins.
Missionaries have been secretly and illegally placing small devices on the lands of isolated indigenous peoples in the Amazon in an attempt to convert them to their faith
The 'In Touch' devices - made by a Baptist group in Atlanta, Georgia USA - play out passages of the Bible. Weatherproof and fitted with solar panel, they run indefinitely.
The devices have been found scattered throughout the Javari region, near Brazil's border with Peru.
A good read on the pervasive US-born 'platform class', outlining the ideologies and reductionism that drive the dissolving of public services and institutions into digital platforms - privately run and cranked up on automation.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/11/doge-silicon-valley-tech-utopia
Interesting to see that the University of Maryland and Nasa and ICANN are all running Root DNS servers here for us, out of the graciousness of their hearts.
Oh, wait there are none in Aotearoa New Zealand. All the IPs are US or - weirdly - Dutch...
EDIT: This oft' referenced site confuses. It should clearly show the world's actual 13 Root DNS servers, then their numerous instances clearly marked. Would make it a useful research and teaching tool.
Mānawatia a #Matariki, Matariki mā Puanga!
Hope we might get a glimpse of the cluster over the nights following, but it is winter and rainforests are cloud factories, so expectations are, errm, tempered.
Anyone remember these? Debian-based GNU/Linux OS developed by Nokia (Maemo), decent keyboard, nice little shell environment. Found mine in a box, cleaned & gave them a charge.
Both boot, a century later.
Looking back, the N900 would have to be my favourite handheld of the era. Nokia were truly onto something with these, a reasonably brave attempt to add a 3rd OS to the smartphone mix. A risk they took and lost.
Regardless, for some of us, the N900 was closer to the future we wanted.
