RoboGroMo

yeah, i really hope we see better systems emerge for using energy at peek times or sharing power locally so that we can start moving away from the grid.

would be a great place to cook, and to relax while other people cook. love the kitchen garden in the kitchen.

thanks, i'll check who's doing their social media at the moment and reach out

would be a real shame to see Open Source Ecology go, it's a great project - would be happy to help by removing spam and keeping an eye on things, i'm not affiliated with them but could post any news updates i see and possibly reach out to Marcin to see if anyone on the team wants to take an active role.

That's really cool, would be a really impressive thing to see in operation.

Love the write up too, like the idea of it working at a different pace - maybe it's designed in a way that it's got a section that's filled up with broken and sorted scrap that feeds in whenever it's hot enough to run - that way most the work would likely be done on cloudy days, after it's run for a few days they come in and refill the giant hoppers with scrap and when that's done they go take all the bars or forms it's made - probably like one of those huge industrial ones that have the conveyor belt of moulds that get filled then roll along something just long enough that they're cool enough to dump out when it gets to the end and inverts dropping it into a huge pile as the mold goes round to get refilled.

and yaeh totally agree about the street cars, something i really love about solar punk is that thing of using whatever works for a locality rather than the current global trend of one-size fits all. It would be great being able to travel and actually see different things again, like nearer the equator you'll see more sun based stuff and up here at 50N we'll have some mostly associated with summer activities and a lot more wind power, in arid regions they'll prefer processes that don't require or can't tolerate much water where as here we'll build under the assumption that for most the year eveything's damp. it certainly would be a more interesting world. I think localized industry is the key, especially a model when things are designed on a global scale through open source collaboration but selected and assembled locally to fit with the culture, tastes, requirements and available resources of the area.

yeah, i also really like the idea of algae grown biomas or electronically captured carbon being used for materials for cars, boars, etc - open source cars could have core components designed to last pretty much forever with components that have a shorter life such as body panels and interiors made from bio-plastics, e-plastics, even more traditional materials like wood and ceramics which are still fantastic materials when used in the right place and could come from coppiced trees and managed woodland.

there's a lot of culture war stuff, they generally don't vocally support the Tories but maga don't really support the gop only trump and anything that isn't 'woke' - this sort of move is i presume designed as a nod to those alex jones types that think climate change is just an excuse to install a one world government, exactly the people who voted us out of the EU because of some vague notion of sovereignty.

oh that's really cool, would be a such a low impact way of making biochar that when you add it to the soil it'd probably actually be atmospheric carbon negative so essentially free carbon-capture - on a tiny scale but if it was how everyone did it then that's one thing pushing in the right direction instead of the wrong direction.

and interesting about the electromagnetic pumping, i don't think it's especially hard to engineer compared to stuff that's readily available in a dozen different colours so i guess there's just no perceived market for it - i'll have to read up and see if there are any DIY projects, being able to move liquid salt around would be really useful in a lot of heat transfer applications.

oh nice that sounds really cool, i'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

use of different types of solar where appropriate, we always see PV but solar thermal and bio-solar have some great uses - tanks of algae can be really good for various uses; nutrition for people and animals food and medicine ingredients such as carrageenan and agar, building materials from cellulose, biofules, bioplastic, wastewater treatment, fertilizer as well as potential future uses like being used in biodegradable electronics, as sensor materials (https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/50395) and for more advanced chemistry such as genetically engineered algae making cleaning solutions (great for cleaning solar panels), fuel for cutting tools, and of course alcohol and drug molecules (both medicinal and recreational)

Cody's Lab has some fascinating videos about his diy algae project, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64cEmjtwRgw might be useful as a visual reference, but basically they're tubes or tanks that sit in the sun or partial shade and grow algae.

people having a cookout on something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cooker or using a larger one to do things like fire ceramics (to maintain and regulate temperature over the duration you'd probably want something like molten salt feeding into a refractory chamber, by controlling the flow rate and mirror focus you could get very good temperature balance) there was a great video with a guy i think in the Nevada desert who had an array which he was using to melt metal and sand casting, this would be a great way to recycle heavy infrastructure from todays society - maybe a scrapyard with mirror arrays used to recycle old cars into useful new tools, the mirrors don't need to be perfectly reflective so could simply be sheets of metal made from the scrap and polished with a windmill powered grinding plate -- the only difficult thing is getting them all to line up, this could be complex tracking gears, digital sensor and motor based systems or a slightly cleverer solution using passive solar tracking where a windowed section of the mirror surface is linked to hydrolytic containers and thermal expansion causes it to realign when one side goes dark - i've seen diy people make them that work pretty well but they're still far from perfect even the expensive industrial ones

i can't remember the details because i'm poor but they manage other peoples money so a lot of people who care about the environment have money in a 401k or something which means blackrock control the shares they own and vote in shareholder meetings for whatever's best for rich people - there's a way to be more proactive by registering your ownership yourself but i have no idea what it involves.

it's not entirely irrational though, if you're convinced you're in a frying pan and doom is imminent then it can feel like your only option is to jump out into the fire - and maybe it will work out better, maybe we'd land on a recently added log and spring to safety... personally i'm more about doing some parcour out the pan and along and the wooden handle or jumping onto the hand holding the spatula and burning through the flesh of the beast that got us into this dire situation.

By that i of course mean developing a powerful open-source movement and an educated community which is able to transition to better ways of living without hurting anyone, it's harder and far more complex but something we absolutely must strive for.