I write science fiction, draw, paint, photobash, do woodworking, and dabble in 2d videogames design. Big fan of reducing waste, and of building community
The big display screens made for corporations are supposed to be high quality TV hardware minus the ‘smart’ features - if you can find a used one without burn-in. But I don’t know specifics for makes or brands, sorry. I get my TVs from ewaste so the goal there is mostly just to limp it along while ignoring whatever problem caused the original owner to throw it away.
There are some interesting oven designs that use rooftop solar collectors (mirrored troughs with a tube of transfer fluid running through them) connected to normal-ish form factors ovens downstairs. It’s basically the same setup for solar steam generators (if you run a business that uses a lot of steam). The only problem is it’s a direct use of the heat without much storage (from what I remember) so you can’t really start baking before sunup.
There are also some cool designs for direct solar that point a reflector dish into a hole in a wall (the inside of the hole is the inside of an oven in the kitchen). Tamara solar kitchen has one but there are lots of similar versions.
This sounds rad, which protocol/meshnet system are you using?
I’ve got two-ish projects that might count: I’ve been reading up on Reticulum mesh networking, particularly with LoRa nodes. I like the idea of that kind of network, but have no idea what amount of activity I’ll find nearby despite living in a pretty big city. I’m still at the stage of figuring out what to get and how I’d like to use it.
I’m also looking at setting up a Gemini server (the gopher-based web alternative protocol thing, not google’s dumb LLM) but I’m a bit skittish about anything that puts a hole into my home network, especially a service made by such a small group because I don’t know what kind of security holes might have been missed (I’m certainly not likely to spot them). Ideally I could set it up through Reticulum, so it’d be air gapped from my regular network, and it appears that someone has made that work, but I think it’d only be accessible to other folks on Reticulum and I’m not sure if that’d be worth it at first. We’ll see!
My active project at the moment probably barely counts because I’m going full analog. I’ve got two antique Leich 901 crank telephones (like an actual crank, not a dial. Turning it generates AC and rings all the phones on the network).
I plan to use them to rig an intercom between the kitchen and workshop. This’ll involve some woodworking as I’m making a nice box for the talk battery for one, and a display board with a voltmeter and two plexiglass-covered cutouts for displaying the wiring and batteries for the workshop end.
I got them all wired up with some really ugly splices and was impressed - they can ring each other and the sound quality is quite good when talking, no repairs needed! Attaching them together is rock simple, just a few wires, plug and play. But my plan is to wire in some old rj11 phone jacks to the display board and battery box so they can (mis)use standard phone cables to talk to each other. In fact I’m hoping to use some of the old wiring already in place in my apartment.
Okay, that makes more sense, thanks
If they’re not generating enough to backfeed even at peak, and they can detect when the power cuts off and deactivate until it comes back, is there an actual safety/legal issue?
The poor C-suite at that utility company already needs to find ever-increasing profits on a basically stable business model and now consumers can just precipitate electricity out thin air? That’s moving things in the wrong direction! Thank goodness they basically own our local government and shareholder value can be maintained.
Lore might be a good candidate - one narrator relaying stories from history that are dark or spooky in one way or another. It’s quite fun and well-produced.
Be warned that he approaches history from a folklore standpoint and will sort of tell you the spooky story version of what happened and how it impacts modern day pop culture - so if you compare one of his (fairly short) episodes on a well-docunented famous murder or something to a deep-dive series or book on the subject it will be missing information.
Super cool that these are actually happening! I read about them a lot while researching modern sail ships but it’s hard to tell if new tech like this is really happening until they build it.
No worries! And good luck!
Throwing in a little odd advice for the secondhand scene - even if the shops are bad, I’ve had some good luck with estate sales and cleanouts (where a family or realtor basically opens the home to anyone who’ll cary stuff away and save them the trouble and cost of throwing it out). It can feel kinda bad, picking through stuff in that context, but we’ve saved a bunch of nice old tools and kitchen stuff that way, and the houses generally have everything else you might need for a house. Personally I think the best BIFL stuff is old and made before they really perfected enshitifying their products.
The cleanouts I’ve been to we found through postings on our local free groups (which I also really recommend) or word of mouth, but I used to know some folks who went to them professionally, looking for merchandise for their own businesses, so they must be advertised somewhere normal people would find them too.
That makes sense to me - the word yacht might be implying too much a certain use case (it’s the name of a class of vessel but I think it also says ‘rich people toy’ on first impression). But house boats have been around for a long time and when they’re someone’s primary residence they sometimes represent a cheaper model of living, not unlike a mobile home. An airship houseboat is an interesting idea, I think it showed up at the end of Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway.
Technology and materials sciences have come a long way since the 1940s. For example, we can probably skip sealing the gasbag with solid rocket fuel. Hydrogen gets better lift than helium, it’s not a limited resource with higher-priority medical uses, and doesn’t require petroleum-style drilling. It’s flammable, as we saw in the past, but with modern engineering, modern materials, non-conductive pressure vessels, emergency release valves, no ignition sources or sparks in proximity, it seems like it can be done pretty safely.
Until recently, I think, modern aviation had been admirably safety-focussed, in everything from engineering to operation. I’m not a fan of the airline industry and especially Boeing’s recent shortcuts, but I think solarpunk is very much about picking and choosing which parts of our society to keep and which to reexamine to see if they can be done better. Aviation safety is one of those things our society does know how to do well, and that seems very much worth keeping to me. Overall I trust aviation engineers to find ways to do hydrogen airships safely.
GraphineOS seems to set the benchmark for secure de-googled android phones and has a very short list of supported devices. I think I’d suggest starting with one of those, and once support eventually drops, if you’re comfortable with a reduced security capability, looking to lineageOS or similar. I think if Graphine supports a phone, it’s pretty much guaranteed to have support on the more general OSs.
For a while I looked at ruggedized smartphones (some with removable batteries!) that were supported by lineageOS and others. I didn’t find one I was convinced would hold up as long as I wanted, and I had security concerns so I ended up getting a decent secondhand phone with guaranteed security support for a few years and putting it in a good case.
Sometimes I check in on various raspberry pi smartphone projects. I love the idea and think it’d probably be able to last the longest (or be turned into something else after an upgrade) but I don’t think any feel reliable enough to me yet.
Nice! I’ll check that out!
Thanks, that makes sense on both topics, they’re definitely going on the list!
That’s a good list, thank you! I have a couple questions you might be able to answer:
Could you elaborate on the relays? I don’t know anything about them yet (in their intended use or alternatives). Though I am reading up on them.
I know there’s a some benefit in running 12v appliances (intended for campers) with solar panel setups because you don’t have to convert from DC to AC then back to DC at the appliance. Would that work for just using a car’s AC unit to cool a room, or are they built too specific to a car or not efficient enough to justify the work?
Thank you!!
That reminds me - inside the rubber squeegee part is a long thin strip of good quality spring steel. Lockpicking folks like it for making tools, diy gun folks sometimes use them to make the extractor. I honestly don’t know what to use the rest of the wiper for.
This is a great list with a bunch of stuff I wouldn’t have thought of - the transmission reuse is a cool idea!
I think some LED headlights are goood for growing plants. I remember some local news panic piece from years ago about how criminals were stealing headlights for their grow ops. A quick search online confirmed they work fine (probably not worth stealing though) and this post I think suggested a couple other car parts alternative uses I’ll have to go back and get later: https://www.rollitup.org/t/is-it-possible-to-convert-a-headlamp-into-a-grow-light.496815/
Thanks again!
This is awesome news! Thanks for letting me know! I’ve been waiting to see these sails get real world use