Nice, cool to hear!

I have two favorite navigational applications that utilizes OSM-data: Organic Maps/CoMaps (there’s a lot of drama here that you can read up on if it interests you, but CoMaps was forked from Organic Maps after some mismanagement of funds was uncovered) for a clean, simple and quick navigation experience and OsmAnd~ for a very tailored experience that takes some time to get into, but gives you a way to set up different profiles for walking, hiking, cycling, public transport, driving etc. The premium version with a full feature set (~) can be purchased in Apple Store and Google Play Store, but is offered for free through F-Droid on Android.

I mentioned tasks.hotosm.org. Here is a cool writeup of the project which introduced me to it just some weeks ago, which was posted somewhere on Lemmy: https://sheets.works/data-viz/strangers-draw-maps

I also use StreetComplete to solve some outstanding questions about features in the neighborhoods I walk in, such as the quality of the road surfaces, whether a street is lit or not and speed limits. Organized as small tasks that show up as icons on the map. Kinda like a Pokémon Go-experience, as Wiz@midwest.social described it as. There’s another one called Every Door that is supposed to be better for adding information about points of interests (shops, restaurants, monuments, drinking fountains, etc. etc.). I have not tried that yet. I also have Verspucci installed that is a more full-fledged editor for Android, for when I want to make more detailed edits. A bit steeper learning curve. I have not used it that much yet, but I did update some very out-of-date restaurants in a city I visited earlier this Summer.

1. Moving my technological dependencies from big tech companies to self-hosted, open source solutions, running Linux on my machines etc.

2. Gardening on my balcony. I am growing tomatoes, broad beans, peppers (chilis, bell) and an assortment of salads and herbs. I am mostly self-sufficient on herbs, during growing season I am fully self-sufficient on salads. Pretty far from it on tomatoes and peppers, and especially on beans as they are not fruiting :(

3. In general getting more in touch with local flora. I’ve been photographing flowering plants in my neighborhood lately and identifying them, trying to learn what grows around here. Goal is to be quite well-versed in local flora, including what is edible (and how to use it) and not

4. Contributing to OpenStreetMap, both in my neighborhood and also through tasks.hotosm.org where I help trace missing buildings in disaster-struck places for first-responders to use (and in preparation for possible disasters in the future). This kind of collaborative project I find to be very solarpunky.

Living in a rented apartment, there is only so much I can make changes here. There was an initiative to install solar panels, but it was voted down for some reason - not being an owner, I am not involved in those discussions. Dream is to find a small house outside the city to expand my garden and to become as off-grid as possible.

Thanks! I’ll keep that in mind!

Oh, that is a very good tip - didn’t think of that. I did find what appeared to be an older pile during a “recon”, and found quite some worms there then. How long since the deworming treatment would you consider safe? They have a larger depot of manure around the corner, with fresher stuff.

I have a bunch of salads growing in some self-watering containers that is working well. Four different varieties, of which one is a spinach that is currently flowering and I’m going to collect the seed from, the other three I use for salads and as additional greens on bread. Other than that I have three different kinds of cherry tomatoes growing, two of them (Garderner’s Delight and Venus) are producing fruits and the last kind (Ildi) is flowering, but not yet any sign of fruiting.

I have a bunch of chilis and peppers, the chilis yielding a bunch of fruits and the peppers flowering, but no fruits yet (they were started from seed about a month and a half after the chilis).

I also have some fava beans coming up, but no where close to yielding any beans quite yet.

Will be cutting down my blackcurrant bush this week end. Can’t get rid of the spider mites. Also have them on my chilis, but they are more manageable there. No fun… :( No berries this year either, got the bush last year.

Indoors I have some borage growing as microgreens. Not the best taste in my opinion, better mixed in with a lot of other greens than as stand-alone garnish. Just finished of eating my tray of red cabbage microgreens, and will be setting a couple of new trays this week end. Got some other herbs coming: new batch of basil and cilantro, some thyme and rosemary (if I can get it growing this time, last time they were very difficult), some chives and some summer savory (never actually tested or knew about this until recently).

Will also be finally setting up my vermicomposter when I go out and fetch some worms. Got a horse farm nearby, and been tipped off by a biologist that horse manure (or at least close to where it is not so warm) is where it’s at for these guys! First time doing that.

Cheers - seems there are multiple things I could have done. I would rather avoid having to do a reprint, but it may be necessary.

Upon closer inspection, I think the geometry of the bottom part is designed in such as way that it comes out with a lot of cavities (it is slanted, requiring multiple steps). It could be that it will be very difficult print properly to begin with.

Oh no, don’t worry - it was a great suggestion, and I’ll check it out for myself, just asked in case you already knew :) Thanks!

I would have assumed that dentists do not use the same consumer-grade stuff you buy in your local shop. Do you know for sure that they do?

I personally would not consider superglue harmful enough to worry about plants seeping enough of it to affect the health of me eating the plant, and it’s not food grade. I’ve used it to fix cracked humidifier reservoirs in a greenhouse for example.

I would want to avoid something that leeches off into the water. That said, I am going to dilute it quite a lot since the stuff will be very concentrated. Super glue could be a little expensive for this though? I think coating the whole bed would take multiple small containers.

That being said, most epoxy resin dries food grade. I don’t think you’d have to search hard for a very well performing Resin with food grade search term swapped with dining surface or some frequent use that requires food grade.

I know very little about epoxy resin, but that is what I often see - but is it really basically the same stuff that is used to repair boats as people use for decorations? The safety data sheets for the components are always pretty rough, but they of course say nothing about the cured state.

Oh, that is an interesting idea that I hadn’t thought of. I might be able to buy it from a local beeskeeper, and I think I have a small amount lying around somewhere I could test with.

I am using PrusaSlicer. Not sure if that check box is present in that, or if it was added in OrcaSlicer or BambuSlicer.

I might’ve printed with only two walls, I will need to check tomorrow when I’m at the correct machine. And thanks for the video recommendation, I will be sure to check it out!

Didn’t think of aquariums. Would assume this should be food safe, since it will be in contact with environment of living things. Would you happen to know whether it has any good adhesion to PETG?

I might’ve printed with only two. But I’d like to avoid having to reprint, if possible, and instead fix it with some post-processing. I think the leakage is actually concentrated on certain points near the front leg slot, so it does not seem to generally seep through the entire bed.

If only traffic congestion could be solved by having fewer people rely on driving… oh well.

Personal: Choose FOSS first, and contribute some of your time and money towards projects that align with solarpunk ideals. Get into self-hosting and eventually perhaps community-hosting for local organizations or neighborhoods or someting like that. Find your local makerspace and meet up with tinkerers there and find common community projects to work on.

Work: At my work, my small team of devs are currently trying to break out of an otherwise heavily Microsoft-based ecosystem. So far we’ve gone from a general hostility towards FOSS to being allowed to run things on bare metal Linix servers instead of Azure, and I my request for a Linux laptop is approved (though still waiting on them to learn how to install Linux or something?). As part of a research project we are trying out FOSS alternatives to Microsoft products in hopes of creating interest and success stories. We are also in that project going to open source some of our internal development. I’ve also challenged my bosses on the heavy use of products from a single major tech company.

This looks pretty cool - I will want to look into this later.

Anyone familiar with this CERN license for open source hardware?

Great read, thank you for that! I’ve written down some of my thoughts. Feel free to point out if I’ve misunderstood you, or if there is something you think I am wrong about.

On 3D-printing

I believe you are onto something in terms of creating more things ourselves on-demand, and I do think local additive manufacturing will be more common in households down the line, and not reserved for hobbyists. I am in the process of selecting a 3D-printer for myself, and in that process I have also begun envisioning many use cases for it. However, I have some concerns over how this will actually play out:

1. While I am fairly tech savvy, and I have no doubts I can learn what I need to learn in order to design and produce what I need, I wonder what it would take for e.g. my mom to be comfortable with, and get utility from, 3D-printers. We have lived in a specialized society for so long that the vast majority of people are almost exclusively consumers, and do not create anything anymore and even the thought of doing things yourself can be daunting. You mention open source designs and being able to build further upon it, and while I love the idea, I think (for now and at least the short-term) that most people would be fully dependent on a large repository of available designs that can be printed as-is. This smells like yet another area where we would see the emergence of a tech behemoth with a firm monopolistic grip offering a fancy platform with all the bells and whistles, with the ensuing enshittification that is sure to follow: tech lock-in to certain brands and “ecosystems”, limitations to design inspection and modification, algorithmic manipulation to buy/print things we don’t really need, etc. How would we guard ourselves against this and make sure that people would be free to use it to their own benefit, and not end up in the same kind of platform hellscape that we’ve seen for social media platforms, online retailers etc. already?

2. On-demand printing would certainly reduce overproduction of certain goods, as big retailers wouldn’t need to keep large stocks to ensure availability. In certain industries, this overproduction is massive, and if it could be removed, it would be great. But do we not risk local overproduction? Say that 3D-printing of fabrics becomes viable do to at home, and at a low cost (comparable or lower to those horrible ultrafast fashion brands). What is to stop us from continuing the gross overconsumption that the average consumer engages with today? Especially if the dystopic vision of a tech behemoth running the show presented above comes into fruition. A new dress for every occasion, can’t be seen to wear the same outfit more than once, or else your status takes a hit. Failed prints could also generate a lot of unusable scrap. There would in any case need to be in place robust recycling procedures, preferably local. This would need to account for different materials, plastics, metals (and sorting by alloy), and it would need to handle removal of any contaminants that could affect the quality of the recycled product (dirt or other foreign material that has come from use, this is at least easier with scrap material from a failed print as it should not be dirty).

3. As you point out, this can’t work for everything. There are quite a lot of goods that require specialty production methods that cannot be replicated at home. I think manufacturing at some levels of complexity higher than what can be achieved with a home printer could probably be handled by community facilities with larger scale equipment and perhaps maintenance and operations staff. But more high-tech things, which my understanding of a solarpunk vision requires, such as photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, batteries and semiconductor components, requires large scale manufacturing. So that won’t disappear, but by their own use of additive manufacturing, their own supply chains could be shortened quite a lot by producing more components in-house. If your assumption that we remove the concern for profit, than there wouldn’t be any barrier to doing this, and I think that would be very beneficial.

Consequences for overproduction

What do you think can be done in regards to overproduction of goods? Should there be consequences for producing more than can be consumed? Do you think capitalism can be tamed in such a way?

I think yes, of course there should be consequences for producing more than can be consumed. The fact that there is none, other than whatever monetary losses they are impacted with from this wastefulness, which obviously is not enough to keep them from doing it, highlights one of the main problems with how capitalism works in our world: the real cost of transactions are seldom accounted for, which results in wastefulness and other poor choices from a sustainability point of view. Large-scale production often yields enormous economies of scale benefits, to the point where the marginal cost of production is barely anything. Doesn’t matter to them if they produce way more than they can sell, because it doesn’t cost them anything anyway. However, with high margins on sales, they might get a huge profit benefit from producing more in case it sells well. Leftovers we just dump in a river somewhere, not our problem anymore.

Can it be tamed however? In principle, more and smarter regulations would help. They would need to be widely agreed upon by several nations, as otherwise corporations could avoid the regulations by flagging out. In practice? I think we’re a long way from this being straight-forward. Corporate interests have way too much to say in politics, especially in the US, and before that problem is solved I think there is a limit to how efficient regulations can be. I also believe that it is difficult to get the required corporation across several countries for the kind of regulation that would be needed. I think EU does some good things here, although they sometimes miss the mark completely for the sake of compromise, and in some areas are chasing the completely wrong types of regulation that are detrimental and not beneficial to our society.