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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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!
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
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.