JacobCoffinWrites

JacobCoffinWrites, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Very cool! Sorry to join so late but I’ll check out the discord and see if there’s anywhere I can help.

JacobCoffinWrites, 6 months ago

Building a community here on Lemmy might also be a good option for creating a backlog of resources, discussions, and finding others. I find reddits/forums easier to search than chat programs - though I have no trouble with discord.

JacobCoffinWrites, 6 months ago

I like the twine wrapping!

JacobCoffinWrites, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

A lot of my project time is going towards the holidays now, but I’m making one present and ornaments out of salvaged lumber.

I’m also working on another photobash which I’m hoping to finish up this week. Then I can get back to simpler, smaller-scope scenes - planning to focus a few on different stages of a library economy next.

Edit: oh! Also learning how to jailbreak old EOL Chromebooks so they can run brunch, or a Linux OS. It’s well documented, I just need to learn what to do.

JacobCoffinWrites, 6 months ago

TBH this is some really basic wiring stuff. You identify three differently colored wires, match them to three terminals, and tighten three screws. The same attachment system is in every outlet and light switch in your house.

JacobCoffinWrites, 6 months ago

The art could definitely be more punk, which would bring it more in line with some of the fiction and much of the IRL stuff. Much of the current art is sort of generically ecoutopian. I think a lot of that is from concept artists who don’t know what else to call a megacity with touches of green, and AI art fed off the same stuff. I’d love to see more punk, diy, and reuse elements in solarpunk art.

JacobCoffinWrites, 6 months ago

I guess my photobashes would fall under rooted

JacobCoffinWrites, 6 months ago

That’s interesting and kind of disappointing to hear - I mostly know of Esperanto thanks to Harry Harrison who loved it enough to write it into his books and add ads about it to the last pages.

JacobCoffinWrites, 6 months ago

https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/ed7dc015-08da-4133-baa5-04d454c7e8e6.webp

The transcription isn’t great - unfortunately, improving on one of the current big open source speech to text programs is a bit beyond my capabilities. To be fair, it’s not much worse than a handful of commercial products I’ve seen

JacobCoffinWrites, 6 months ago

Very cool! I’ll admit I did much less research than usual when I picked spchcat, and I wouldn’t be against trying a different STT tool. spchat works quite easily, but it seems to be cutting off early, though I’m not sure if that’s a product of the software or the limitations of the Pi3B, or some configuration I missed.

JacobCoffinWrites, 6 months ago

When I was a kid, a buddy and I would pick through the scrap metal pile at the town dump for forging/blacksmithing material. Most of the guys working there would just kind of ignore us, but the old timer who ran the place would start yelling if he noticed and we’d have to scram. Nothing ever came of it, luckily. I would have explained that we were really bad at forging so most of the metal rods and lawnmower blades etc were going to end up back there eventually.

Things are a bit better where I am now. A friend volunteers at the dump and they’ve let him set aside TV’s to test and give away, and if he catches people when they drop off computers, he can ask if they want it to get reused, otherwise the dump’s secure destruction guarantee means he has to let it get sent for recycling. Unfortunately he doesn’t have time to pull hard drives or anything like that.

I wish for a society where that kind of reuse was the norm. Where items that work or can be fixed get set aside, organized, and cleaned up, and that that used stuff was people’s default when they need something. Reuse infrastructure on a huge, corporate/municipal scale. For now I just help him divert computers to people who can use them, and dig stuff out of corporate ewaste I have access to to give away.

JacobCoffinWrites, 6 months ago

I think my ideal world would have some kind of cataloguing stage where items are posted to solarpunk eBay. Perhaps they’re dropped off at local collection points and landfill swap shops, workers sort them and identify their condition (or maybe people provide some of that info when they drop their stuff off?). Perhaps some stuff that can’t be used locally is transported to regional distribution centers. People are able to search that catalog, place orders, and maybe have stuff shipped to those collection centers for pickup. Maybe combine the distribution centers with in-house workshops, or maybe private repair co-ops there’d could take in broken stuff as stock. Hopefully a strong culture of offering stuff up Buy Nothing -style would take some of the strain off that industry, but I could see almost any stage of that being pretty fulfilling work honestly

JacobCoffinWrites, 6 months ago

Yeah I kind of wonder if a lot of the stuff about them breaking when left empty is that they won’t be suitable as a swimming pool anymore, rather than that they become a death trap. And if you don’t value the idea of a swimming pool, or it’s already so broken it would need expensive overhauls or replacement, then a walipini with a cracked foundation isn’t really a big deal.

But it comes up in every discussion I’ve found about empty pools, so I’d want to identify any precautions or mitigations to include before I start the sketch

JacobCoffinWrites, 6 months ago

That’s a good consideration and something I haven’t seen brought up with regards to walipinis (didn’t think of it either, though I had read up on the risk awhile back for a postapoclyptic story I was working on about a guy who hunts for old bunkers and safe houses). Nature abhors a vacuum and it likes to fill them with water, mold, and heavier-than-air gasses. Luckily, greenhouses require a certain amount of ventilation, but I doubt most are configured properly for heavier-than-air stuff. Thanks!

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

Yeah, as long as it’s all made from secondhand tech and I have some real control over it (preferably using open source for everything) I could see doing a bit of that.

Even just expanding on this could be nice - my grandparents used to have an intercom from the kitchen to the workshop. I couldn’t get their machines to work at our place (they’re some sort of magic old technology that sends data over the AC wiring, but our workshop and kitchen aren’t on the same circuit and we have lots of noise from adaptors) but some quick video call software could be nice for when one of us is down there - even better if it’s LAN only.

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

This is really cool! Thanks for the recommendation!

I forgot to mention, I’ve also been scanning my grandmother’s old super-local cookbooks page-by-page, creating PDFs, and running them through text rec so they’re searchable. I put the ebook versions on this thing too.

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

That’s a good point! I’ll unplug it when we’re not using it for now and will keep an eye on it.

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

Good to know, I unplugged it after a similar comment and will plug it in when we’re using it. Might eventually set up a timer or something, but to be honest, it doesn’t need to be on except when we’re cooking. Makes sense just to plug it in then.

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

I have no idea if my process will be useful to you but I’m happy to share it. For me, this was kind of an archival effort - decades ago these cookbooks were made in limited runs as fundraisers, put together by womens’ groups in the village. Everyone contributed recipes and the names of family friends and relatives are on many of the pages. Plus all her notes, edits, and the additional recipes tucked into the pages. Unfortunately the paper itself was absolutely thrashed and the book as a whole was more of a pile of loose papers than a usable cookbook. I wanted to make sure I could preserve it, so I scanned each page by hand on my old printer/scanner - it’s actually pretty easy to get a rhythm going while watching a show. Good for when you’re mentally tired and don’t want to do complex tasks. I scanned them in pretty high-rez because I was trying to preserve the character of the book.

I rotated and occasionally transformed each image/page until most of the text was level, and piled them all, in order, as layers, into GIMP. I found a good ratio/size for the pages and made sure all the scans were centered inside it. Now and then, as I added and leveled pages, I’d crop them to save data.

Once they were all in, I exported it as a PDF, and used Adobe acrobat (a friend had the pro version and let me use it) to do their text-rec thing, where it looks the same but now you can highlight and search. It’s not perfect - it relies a lot on text boxes to get the layout to match what they did with a typewriter decades ago, but I’m happy with it. I don’t know how well it’d work if you want a lightweight file for your devices.

I hope that helps

JacobCoffinWrites, 6 months ago

I’d been thinking about replacing the OS with a supported open source one anyways. I’ll check out the xda forums and see what I can do, it’ll be good practice for if I ever want to do the same with my phone.

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

What a cool design!

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

That’s a good point! I suppose a makerspace might be an example of a non-lending tool library (like, you have to go there to use the tools) though I’m sure some do lend stuff out as well

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Fixing ewaste computers and giving them away. Finding furniture on trash day, fixing it up (sanding, staining, urethaning) and giving it away. Helping my neighbor clean out his house and putting the stuff on our local Buy Nothing -type group so it doesn’t go to waste. He also was interested in turning his lawn into a garden and our landlord won’t let us change ours, so we teamed up with our neighbor - this year we built a (I think) nice-looking raised bed full of perennials for the bees, and planted a fruit tree. Next year we’re going to do the back yard and possibly add a water feature hopefully driven by a used solar panel. We’ll see.

Edit: I don’t know if making art counts as praxis but I’ve also been making solarpunk art: …wordpress.com/postcards-from-a-solarpunk-future/

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

100%! IRL I’m super active on my local Everything is Free page. In addition to giving regular stuff away, I fix up furniture I find on trash day, and computers and electronics from ewaste, and give them away on there. I posted a couple furniture projects over on /c/zerowaste, and am currently trying to hand off a mid century desk, and working on a park bench and a pair of bar stools. I’ve also made some progress convincing my relatives that there’s a different between garbage and just stuff they don’t want - a bunch of them have started setting stuff aside until I can collect it, and my SO has actually made similar progress at her work, where her coworkers have made sure working unwanted stuff gets diverted to her to pass on to our community

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

Good to have a better name for it. Any aspects of it you’d like to see see in a picture? Or any details you think I should include in the scenes I’m planning? I’d like to do one of a warehouse/workshop, one of items being picked up, though I’m much less certain on details for that one so far, and perhaps one of an abandoned house or McMansion (an impractical distance from the more centralized, less-car-based society) being disassembled for parts, items being carried out and packed up for reuse. You’ve probably thought about the logistics further than I have - anything in particular to get right, or any additional scenes to show?

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

That’s a cool idea for new production! I picture new stuff mass produced by this society to be standardized, repairable, and somewhat clunky to facilitate the first two. Appliances with more exposed bolts, perhaps some motors exposed the way old tools are set up, where it’s easy to swap one standard motor for another with four bolts and a belt. I figure if you want super sleek consumer stuff, maybe a phone glued into a glass shell or a washing machine you need special tools to disassemble, you might look to items left over from the previous way of doing things. Or you might go to a smaller workshop making custom or specific products. When I was outlining a story the other day, I had an engineer type bemoaning how messy this society is, that the cultural need to find a niche for every still-working piece of machinery rather than throw it out basically means they’ll never truly be free of imperial units and will work with mixed tools for generations, until the last old world engine or turbine finally dies and gets melted down. As for customization, I could see the standardized stuff being offered in a kind of bare bones version, the way the default raspberry pi has no case and no peripherals. Especially with tech I could see a lot of people assembling their own creative cases and layouts to fit their needs and express themselves.

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

In fact, I have an example from my own worldbuilding from the repurposed parking garage awhile back.

I talked about the 1910s-looking streetcar and how this is actually the more modern, standardized design. I liked the idea that back in the early days of rebuilding society and doing things differently, the first generation of streetcars here were genuinely a community project, that the city/public transit folks settled on some specifications and devoted their limited budget and manufacturing to producing standardized bases, (basically the bottom frame, wheels, motors, controls, and pantograph rig) and that volunteers built the carriages out of whatever they had access to. Each streetcar would be a unique, craft-built contraption, sort of ‘public transit by way of Weekend Wasteland.’ All kinds of crazy streetcars made from campers, boats, old school buses, whatever people had access to. City safety inspectors and a committee of local people with an emphasis on the disabled, would review each one and specify any necessary changes. This got them a fleet of ready streetcars quickly, allowing them to start providing services and prove the concept while more slowly manufacturing standardized ones to replace the most problematic of the home-built machines.

I also mentioned the slow standardization would be somewhat contentious within a community that took pride in building it’s own infrastructure, and in the art-like variety. They might chafe at standardization and formalization, like it’s a sign that society is stratifying again. Though the convenience of a more reliable transit network might help balance it out. As a nod to the artistic spirit and history of the fleet, the new vehicles are painted uniquely by members of the community.

A parade or other shot of a bunch of the old craft built streetcars is on my list to do some day.

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

There’s nothing new here - the tools already exist. What I’m talking about is a difference in scope and priority. Our current society prioritizes the extraction of raw materials, the production of new items, and swiftly sweeps used items into landfills and incinerators so you can buy it again new. So it can be produced again. Some of it ends up on Buy Nothing -type groups, secondhand stores, eBay craigslist, etc. it gets caught and cycled around for a bit. But any given day you drive to a store to buy something there’s a decent chance someone is throwing it away because they’re tired of it taking up space in their home. The new one you buy is unnecessary if the older one still works.

The difference I’m talking about is that the hypothetical society isn’t extracting as much, it’s not producing as much. Reuse is the default, and almost nothing falls through the cracks.

I’m trying to figure out what that society looks like, and yeah, hopefully the answer, from an experience and convenience standpoint, is ‘very much the same.’

Edit: TBH, the criticism I expected was that this would be an impractical way to replace a huge chunk of manufacturing, mining, logging, and other industries in the world. That it’d be too big a change to get enough buy-in, or that the wealth of existing stuff wouldn’t be sufficient to meet even a reduced demand. I really didn’t expect to hear from someone who thinks we’re already doing it.

If craigslist etc (REstore would probably be the closest example to the kind of system I’m talking about IMHO) were already catching all of society’s unneeded working or fixable items, I suspect we wouldn’t be seeing landfills overfilling to their current extent, or crisis around what to do with ewaste and ‘recyclable’ materials. Heck our lives might have been less impacted when supply chains got disrupted since we’d already have a robust system for cycling around existing products.

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

Our apartment was once described by a friend as “cozy postapocalyptic”. My SO collects plants and has filled the place with a couple hundred at this point. Plants cover some tables, spiderplants and pitcher plants cascade from our refrigerator and high shelves. That, combined with our tendency to pot them in whatever old containers fit, from buckets, to cans, to take-out dishes, probably set some of the ‘reclaimed by nature’ tone. The rest is in the way we get our furniture - about half nice old antiques we found on trash day and fixed up, and half old office furniture with modern that industrial look. It clashes a little bit it’s all mixed into comfortable clutter so I don’t think it looks bad. We’re just not really magazine-cover, house-with-a-theme people. Neither of us has bought furniture new in years, though we sometimes make it from scratch out of secondhand lumber.

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

I was into cyberpunk before I got interested in solarpunk and am much better read in cyberpunk fiction. That said, I think at least as genres, they’re two sides of the same coin. Cyberpunk is full of warnings, hopefully solarpunk is full of solutions.

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

I finished the sound recorder build for now, might return to it in another week. Got a midcentury desk, a park bench, and two old bar stools I’m restoring to give away. I need to fabricate replacement curved boards for the back of the bench, and I don’t have any oak in the right dimensions, so this week’s project will probably be the desk. I just need to get the top on it, predrill all the holes, and get in touch with the people who’ll be taking it. For the bench, I need to get in touch with some relatives, pick through their wood piles. For the barstools, I need to sand the rest of the finish off and figure out what I’m going to replace the seats (currently torn orange vinyl and the cheapest plywood I’ve ever seen) with. Maybe big slices of tree, or just some carved seats.

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

Thank you!! Once she felt the case and found the button, and I explained that it was the only one and how to use it, she was very happy. Surprised it could send emails and all with just one button press, but happy.

The code is very hacked together so I’m praying it holds up while running constantly for the next couple weeks. I just realized yesterday morning that I didn’t set any kind of limit on how long it’ll try to record. But I can always make improvements as we go.

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

Thank you! I really appreciate it

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

It’s just set up with Raspberry Pi OS Lite - when I was working on it in my apartment, I was SSH-ing into it, but I never set up anything to control it at her place. That would definitely be a great next step, but I genuinely hadn’t thought about it until now.

JacobCoffinWrites, 7 months ago

Thank you! For a few years now, while trying to help her with her diminishing vision, I’ve been amazed at how hard it is to find electronics that work well for older folks with poor vision. Whether it’s an extra-loud, large-button phone with 15 extra buttons for her to get mixed up with, a supposedly-made-for-old-people answering machine with several menu buttons that interrupt its function, or a coffee maker that requires you to hit one button, load the coffee pod, then hit three more buttons, all in the correct order, unless water is low, in which case you refill it then do them in a different order. Easy for most people to get used to, but hard when you received it after going blind.

I feel like all this stuff needs like, two interfaces. The one she uses which needs to be simple and tactile, and the one designed for a tech-savvy relative or neighbor to configure for them. But it’s all built on basic consumer products with tons of modes and settings, and they don’t want to remove features, and they can’t count on that relative existing, so they split the difference. And they don’t think about how easy it is to accidentally brush the tiny volume slider all the way down and not hear your phone for days.

As for this thing, if I lived with her and could tend to it, I’d say it should be exactly what she wanted. Unfortunately it’ll have to fend for itself for weeks at a time, and any error or crash could erode her confidence in it. I tried to make it resilient and to think about all the ways it could get messed up short of someone dumping tea over the top of it, but we’ll find out how well I did over the next few days. Once I add the next step from the spy device, the transcription (which I ran out of time to add) I’ll try to have it fail in stages - ideally it records, transcribes, and emails out the audio file and the transcription. If transcription fails, it’ll still send out the audio file. If email fails, it still records to the device.

JacobCoffinWrites, 8 months ago

This seems like it would remove one of the barriers for entry from installing solar panels

JacobCoffinWrites, 8 months ago

Ah, I’d had this impression from other conversations that batteries were half the cost of getting into solar, but perhaps that was for going off grid altogether (in which case I’d imagine the power company would want their battery back)

JacobCoffinWrites, 8 months ago

Seconding this. I’ve had a lot of questions about how a solarpunk society would handle genuinely dangerous people (I know not everyone listed in the question is dangerous exactly, but focussing on the ‘malicious people’ part). But haven’t made it very far in the fundamental philosophy stuff regarding prison abolition, anarchism, etc yet.

In the small bit of solarpunk fiction I’ve read and discussions I’ve seen, I’ve felt a bit like the genre/community sort of sidesteped questions around the use and preventions of violence and how to handle individuals and groups who want to cause harm (with the exception of Walkaway, and Terraformers for opposing organizations). I know the underlying philosophies and movements like anarchism have been around for a long time and have answers, but I’ve been struggling with the texts I’ve tried so far.

I suppose I’m pessimistic enough to see bad times ahead - scarcity of airable land, water, and society-derived stuff like medicines - and to expect that any more solarpunk societies would only build themselves up in space made mostly after our current systems break enough not to oppose them. With that kind of postapocalyptic bent in mind, it’s tempting to picture something like the old west or early colonial societies’ answers to these questions. I think solarpunk offers an excellent opportunity to showcase better answers.

JacobCoffinWrites, 8 months ago

I’ll definitely dig into this. At first glance it looks like at this distance the easiest way to represent it would be as rows of trees with crops in between, but I’ll do more research. Thanks for recommending this, I wouldn’t have thought of it otherwise!

JacobCoffinWrites, 8 months ago

In a world with many fewer cars, where bikes would have more room on the road, I kind of wonder if people would go further - what kind of new pedal-powered or hybrid contraptions would they build? Cargo bikes seem very effective, would there be a benefit to cargo tricycles or four wheeled cart things?

JacobCoffinWrites, 8 months ago

Thanks! I included bikes in the first two solarpunk photobashes I did, and definitely plan to add them to future scenes (though I’m not sure they’ll show up in this one as it’s a pretty distant zoom on most of the scene). I’ll definitely include a long cargo bike next time, I love seeing all the different versions people use around here.