Mike Lynch @mikelynch@aus.social

Do I know anyone who has experience with the Django framework, and who is willing to do some paid consultation work for building an intranet at $dayjob?

every time I teach programming I am reminded how far away from like 99% of everyone else's daily experience when we talk about digital liberation: most people I teach from scratch have never seen monospaced text, and the concept of a "syntax" as a structured series of characters is entirely novel. we fight a losing fight by losing sight of that while discussing the esoteric parts underneath, and we fight an exclusionary fight by supposing that's not important.

Introducing Everything Open, the grassroots open technologies conference covering Linux, open source software, open hardware, open data and the communities around them. We look forward to welcoming everyone to Naarm (Melbourne), Australia in March 2023.

#everythingopen #opensource #opentechnology

https://2023.everythingopen.au/news/announcing-everything-open/

the immediate ancestor of european chess is the perso-arabic game of šaṭranj (شَطْرَنْج), which developed out the indian game of caturaṅga (चतुरङ्ग) probably around the 7th century ce, and crossed into sicily and al-andalus from the maghreb around the 10th century. the name of this game gives the name of chess in the ibero-romance languages eg spanish ajedrez, portuguese xadrez (from old portugues axadrez); typical of arabic loans into ibero-romance, the arabic definite article aš- has been reinterpreted as part of the word. the words in the germanic (english chess, german schach), italian (scacco), gallo-romance (french echeque, catalonian xec), and slavic languages (russian шахматы šakhmaty, polish szachy) instead come from the persian word šâh, 'king', in the expression šâh mât, literally '(the) king (is) amazed' but reinterpreted in arabic to mean 'the king is dead', whence also 'check' and 'checkmate'

Final image from DART