That’s a huge improvement!

I’m having trouble with the scale - could you do a scaffold with two ladders and some planks, maybe across a corner?

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.

This is an awesome outlook, thank you for all your work on this design!

Looking over my bookshelves and trying to remember what I’ve read so this’ll be kinda eclectic.

Harry Harrison’s the Jupiter Plague probably hits some of what you’re looking for. It’s not my favorite of everything he wrote, but he wrote so much that that’d be a pretty stiff competition anyway.

There’s a book called Space Doctor which I obviously bought for the title (by Lee Correy). It’s about setting up the first medical center in space, on a new orbital construction platform, and all the challenges they run into with zero gravity trauma surgery, contamination, radiation, vacuum injury, etc. The high frontier medicine and logistical stuff was very interesting, probably because the author was a medical doctor. Unfortunately that stuff shares the book with a love story which is bad even for older scifi (I was gonna say 60s scifi but it turns out it was published in the 80s).

Actually it looks like that’s all I’ve got. I’ll edit if I find any others!

I’m honestly not against using Facebook to actually do some good if you already have an account - there’s something to be said for using the places people where people are already hanging out. But if you don’t have one, it’s definitely not worth making one.

Freecycle has local sites for different locations, there might be one for your community. And Buy Nothing has been trying to move off Facebook (to an app, unfortunately - I don’t like apps) so that might also be an option. Both host the right kind of community for this kind of project.

One other thing I’ve had some luck with is just putting up paper flyers. I try to look for the places where people already congregate or where lots of staples and thumbtacks indicate that other folks felt it was a good spot for flyers.

Have you looked at Reticulum at all? I know it’s not a drop-in replacement but it can also do messaging over LoRa and it sounds like it’s a bit more resilient than Meshtastic’s flood protocol. Also more complicated though.

I’m only just getting into this stuff, so I’m basically wondering how they compare for someone with more experience using LoRa devices. Does it seem workable?

I’ve read the least about Meshcore so far - it looked like a corporate alternative to Meshtastic but I might not have given it enough consideration.

It’s also worth noting that while resellers can be annoying they can also fit a useful role in a network whose job is to keep stuff out of the landfill. When I’m giving away something nice through Buy Nothing I might prioritize people who also give stuff away, or at least seem to participate in good faith but there’s been times when I had acquired some niche ewaste normal people don’t need that I was happy to give it to a guy who would almost definitely sell it on ebay because that was the only likely way it’d find a home (and if it nets a retired guy in town $20 that seems okay).

At the Swap Shop where I sometimes help out, we can’t afford to be as choosey, but volunteers generally know who the resellers are and when they show up. We often put new or nice stuff out throughout the whole time we’re open rather than just upfront so other folks have a chance to get it, and often set things aside for specific people when we know they’re looking for something. We also have a limit on how many items people can take per week.

Generally it’s less of a problem than it probably sounds like. Some volunteers get annoyed by people taking tons of stuff, but I’ve seen the piles of stuff that still goes into the waste stream because we don’t have room for it.

In the end of the day I think it’s a bit of a headspace thing - the worry/anger that someone will game the system can make you miss the sheer amount of good it can do even with a few jerks in the mix.

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.

Yeah this seems like a good example of using privilege (in this case being famous) constructively.

Oh nice! Someone reached out awhile ago asking to use it, I bet it’s the same folks! Very cool!

That’s a really clever answer to the ringer light! I should definitely be able to piece something together from there.

It also hadn’t occurred to me to just tap the phone itself for the voltmeter (though it feels a little less authentic than doing the line between them, somehow). It’s very good to know about the voltage tolerance - I’ll see what I can find!

Thank you very much for your help, I really appreciate it!

It’s an incredibly useful skillset in my opinion (though I’ll admit the saying about everything looking like a nail when all you have is a hammer probably rings truer than I’d like to admit). One of my main hobbies is scavenging furniture on trash day and fixing it up to practice furniture restoration. We got a ton of the stuff in our place that way. Sometimes I fix nice stuff I don’t need and give it away on my local Buy Nothing page just to keep it out of the landfill.

I also turn replacement handles for knives and spatulas and other kitchen stuff on the lathe, and help out with carpentry projects for friends and relatives.

The big cost is space for tools and lumber. Where I am at least, tools aren’t especially hard to come by secondhand so most of mine are hand-me-downs or purchased at consignment shops. Older tools are almost always better quality than newer stuff, except for safety, where some of the new ones have much better designs or features. I find most of my lumber through Buy Nothing or trash day - haven’t bought any for years now.

Doing woodworking when I can get the time - there’s nothing like a spinning chunk of wood or whirring bandsaw blade to narrow your thoughts down to just one topic. I have a hard time quieting my mind but that works pretty well. Probably about as close to zen as I get.

Creative stuff, writing/editing a solarpunk TTRPG campaign guide when my mind is in the right place, doing the art for it with a podcast on in the background when it isn’t and I want to be distracted. Chipping away at these projects feels good. I can end the day thinking about what I got done and planning next steps.

A bit of volunteering gets me out and into the company of folks I get along with.

Thanks, this was an unusually decent interaction all around

Fair enough. Personally I’m skeptical that there is a “passive corrective method” for individuals to fix problems in either system (maybe a socialist can identify one for us). There aren’t many passive solutions at all.

The way to fix these problems in either system is through regulation, governance, and collective action. People just buying other products hasn’t worked to correct the flaws in capitalism, regulation has, so you might as well go straight to that either way.

It’s to peoples’ best interest to choose a better product if they:

1. even know there’s a problem in the first place. Corporations have a long history of covering up faults in their products, sometimes for decades, before independent tests or reporting reveal them (during which time they’re outcompeting more legitimate competition on price).
2. competing products exist. Monopolies are a natural outgrowth of unregulated markets. It’s always more profitable not to have to compete so endless mergers are a threat which have to be regulated but frequently arent. It’s also much easier for an entrenched institution to crush or buy out new startups before they can become a problem. Add in collusion where companies that compete on paper secretly agree not to undercut each others prices and you end up with a market where there is no real competition and no need for costly innovation. And though regulatory capture may not exist in a truly unregulated free market, we certainly see it in real life, where superior foreign products can be outright banned from a market, the entrenched industry’s products made artificially cheap through subsidies, and new safety laws kept off the books to protect the corporate bottom line.
3. the competing product is actually superior. We frequently see a race to the bottom effect where most people consistently choose the cheapest product available (often because wages have been stagnant for generations and they’re poor enough that they legitimately can’t afford better) and better, safer, more ethical products are simply priced out of the market, whereupon the companies making them either start cutting corners themselves or go out of business. And we can refer back to point one where just because one product has been revealed to be unsafe doesn’t guarantee that the competitor hasn’t managed to hide an unknown hazard in theirs.

Asking regular people, many of whom are perpetually overworked and exhausted, to extensively research every product that’s made it to market (and to overcome marketing, illegal concealment of hazards, and collusion) strikes me as a kind of Just World Falicy thing, where the ‘opportunity’ to simply buy a better product becomes a chance to blame people for the bad things that happen to them. They should simply have bought a test kit and figured out that there was lead contamination in their baby formula. They should have studied auto accident statistics from the last five years to notice that that particular model routinely explodes in a fireball with the doors jammed. What did they expect buying something without doing their own research?

They also ignore that companies will cheerfully skimp on safety to save a buck and then spend far more than they saved fighting legal battles against the government to prevent or delay relevant regulations, against their own customers (or their next of kin) who have been harmed by their products, and against any kind of criminal prosecution. They’ll also spend millions on marketing to minimize awareness or the severity of the problem and to actively increase sales of the dangerous product. It’s not exactly an environment designed for fair and informed decision making.

Speaking of unfair, the history of monopolies, market collusion, and the race to the bottom have given us plenty of examples of companies removing that choice of product quality from the board entirely. If the people making the unsafe or unethical thing buy out all the competition and eliminate or cheapen the former competition’s products until the have the same problems, there’s no choice. If the competition look at the market and realize they can also take unsafe shortcuts and remain competitive, there’s no choice.

There’s a long history of rich people framing exploitation as the freedom to choose to accept a dangerous product or job or place to live. After all, if people are poor and desperate and propagandized enough there’ll always be someone to make that choice. And the lower they drive the quality of life, the more people will have to choose the same. But it’s not about saving you money. They’re not doing you a favor. It’s about saving money for themselves and framing things so you thank them for it.

That seems like it would work quite well! Especially if the patio screen guarantees other critters won’t try to come in.

Not sure what tools you have access to but If you have a table saw you can cut a notch into the wood for the plexi before you assemble the frame.