Peripheral Centers and Feminist Servers/TL;DR

This page documents the tl;dr project part of Peripheral_Centers_and_Feminist_Servers

tl;dr researches ways to make sense of the hidden labour that goes on in a feminist server through log files and unlogged effort / activity. 

In a seamless world, awareness of techno-social infrastructure surfaces only when it's not working. But when you upload a photo, install an application, move a file, a technology serves, works, labours to execute what you've asked of it.

Inaccessible files track this work as data. These files are inaccessible in two ways: they're hard to retrieve and hard to decipher. While these hidden files contain the not so hidden infrastructures of a server, they only manage to show a portion of it. After all, log files have a bias towards the technological ecology, prioritizing the labour of machines.

The actual infrastructure consists of much more: the people maintaining (rebooting, organizing, meeting) for the tech to work. A feminist data center acknowledges and fosters the infrastructure surrounding this technology; the physical labour, the decisions about shared spaces, the different knowledges that depend on each other for the network to exist.

Project description

[describe project matter of factly] [photos of project in varia during launch]

Motivation and evolution

[describe problem]

[initial idea]

[comments by Joseph and Manetta]

[updated idea]

Design process

[sketches go here]

[describe how sketches led to the following designs]

First digital mockup, version a

First digital mockup, version b

[describe 2024-03-13 meeting between Senka and Thijs that led to the following updated design]

cap

As the TL;DR can be previewed on an e-reader at varia, we'd like to test what we can do in terms of HTML/CSS/Javascript with the e-reader. A test page was created, that includes some scrollbars, some font stylings, some javascript scroll tracking, some animations, etc.

Template & annotations

The code has been merged and is now accessable via the GIT repo, and this (temp) URL. In the template, we've got the following variables, corresponding with commands. For each variable, there is a small if statement. If a variable is set, we show a level 1 annotation, visible when updating the slider.

last_user_added sudo journalctl _COMM=useradd -r -n 1 --output-fields=MESSAGE
users_created_today "sudo", "journalctl", "-S","today","_COMM=useradd","-r","-n","1","--output-fields=MESSAGE
list_active_services "sudo", "service", "--status-all"
list_groups getent group


since_last_boot  uptime -s
list_package_installs grep "install " /var/log/dpkg.log
list_package_upgrade grep "upgrade " /var/log/dpkg.log
list_package_remove grep "remove " /var/log/dpkg.log
device_info grep "Model" /proc/cpuinfo | awk -F: '{ print $2}'

debian_version cat /etc/debian_version
kernel_version uname -a
hostname hostname -i