Movim is awesome! PoVoq put a bunch of work into getting it set up and linked with Lemmy so if you have an account here, you can just start using the microblogging platform too! I use WordPress for my art and writing and Movim for my making-and-fixing-type projects, and I mostly prefer Movim - the interface is nice, it’s free, doesn’t spatter everything I write with gross ads, and it’s not corporate. I’d very much recommend it.

Thanks! I pulled it from one of the more popular solarpunk flags. Out of all the ones I’ve seen, many of which feature the sun-and-gear motif in some configuration, it’s my favorite symbol for the movement; It’s very simple and visually clear, and easy to render with one color.

A stack of ewaste laptops I’m fixing up to give away, and this jailbroken Chromebook I reinstalled with Alpine Linux which has become my writing computer whenever I’m out and about.

Man I wish our trains ran anywhere near that constantly. They stop the public transit around midnight in my city, but that doesn’t stop it from being tremendously useful during the rest of the time. You learn to plan for it, and advocate for improvements whenever you can

Just wanted to say I really like this idea, especially as mixed with local mesh networks. I agree with the point about storage, and mostly I’m just really looking forward to reading about some of these services, and seeing what this could look like in the future.

Good luck!

Thanks!! I’ll check it out!

I’m kinda glad I don’t have time at the moment to get obsessed with a new topic (though it’s lurking in my future now) - this is really cool. I used to mess around with RTLSDR stuff, this looks like it’ll scratch the same itch and possibly be more useful. Meshnets seem like a wonderful solarpunk technology and I really look forward to seeing where this’ll go.

I’m glad they’re moving forwards with this, hopefully it helps prove the concept and builds some more trust. I’d love to see what the technology looks like after the industry’s been going for a decade or two

Plus there’s some really cool potential in moving bulky cargo (like windmill parts) overland where you’d otherwise have to cut down trees, take down power lines, and remove other obstacles around highways or train tracks. Plus the ability to act as a flying crane has some cool potential in stuff like delivering modular hospitals and other aid to disaster areas.

That’s kinda amazing. I’m impressed by the number and variety of heat sources, and the way they’re all kinds tangled together. Also the range of technologies used in the construction and heating. Thank you for sharing all this!

I’m definitely interested, for what it’s worth. I’ve lived in some old houses with head-scratching design choices (though mostly around the wiring) so I sympathize

Very cool! You could definitely take one of those down a bike path. We had volunteers where I was, but I hadn’t thought about the benefits of the density of cities - you could have a way bigger volunteer brigade, and they would be much closer to hand

That kind of hits the center on why I’m asking about this stuff - I feel like a lot of the proposed solutions and visions of the future I see around often feel like they came from one person’s mind and they either didn’t know about the ways they would impact people, or they didn’t care. I know how little I know about city planning and just the various ways other people interact with the world around them, so I figure if I spot something that seems unrealistic or like it’d cause problems, there’s probably even more that someone with different experiences or skillsets would find. Luckily it’s all fictional at the moment, but I don’t want solarpunk as a genre or my projects in particular to feel like something that would be forced on someone.

It’s also a big part of why I ask these questions. I think any future worth having would be consensus-driven, so art of it should be too. I don’t currently have any plans to do scenes of fire disasters, but I’ll do others of city streets, and I want to take this stuff into account.

I also like the point you made about execution, when a project gets to that point, being much faster. I feel like big projects tend to get rammed through the approvals process around here, and any discussion section seems sort of cursory, like the developers and engineers and city/town officials have already decided what they’re going to do and as long as its legal, they’re just gonna go right ahead. Having the slow process of getting buy-in all around happen in the planning phase hopefully would be cheaper than getting sued every time you start breaking ground somewhere. It requires a more actively-involved community so people don’t get surprised finding out that something’s already been approved, but that would be an improvement all around too.

Thank you, these are some really good ideas! I hadn’t considered ‘derivable on emergency’ designs, and I actually kinda dig that one in particular - I think it’d be a good fit for fiction, it’d make for a pretty intense scene. Plus you can still do community gardens or bee gardens as long as people remember to keep anything obstructing clear of the zone. Emergencies should outweigh vegetables etc.

I do like the idea of buildings that can handle their own evacuations and even fire suppression in some cases, though I try to focus on retrofits and older buildings being reused in my own projects, so that would have to be cobbled on in some cases. Still, it’d make a lot of sense as a building requirement if everyone is voting to repurpose the streets around it for parks or ponds or something.

I really like the autonomous stretcher vehicles - those are cool. I kinda want to do a scene of an emergency at some point now. You don’t see much solarpunk art of the bad days. Using some sort of oversized cargo drone to fly a hose into position, the way they currently position them from ladder trucks, could be interesting. Plus smaller ones for scouting, possibly. The snake firehoses are cool, I’m interested to see what they can do with them as the technology continues.

I agree with weighing tech against its costs and that there’s some really cool potential there. Thanks again!

On an old raspberry pi 3b, a copy of a blog by one of my favorite writers (the original is long gone and was never archived, I happened to grab a copy with wget when it came back up briefly) so I can read it when I’m on my home network. And a pi hole dns adblocker.

I’m hoping to set up some kind of media system for streaming eventually, but we currently use a PS4 as our media center and it doesn’t look like our options for compatibe apps are great.

I’d definitely like to get a local Mealie instance going in the next year

This is a great concept - it would actually fit my use case for my home printer (use rarely, don’t need it to be perfect) pretty well.

That said, it looks like form factor will be a challenge - the RITI example has tall hoppers sticking out the top, so we’d need printers with similar form factor so it could be cut up.

The firmware would probably have to be replaced so it can manage the different ‘ink’ (different viscosity than stock firmware would expect, etc).

Considering some of the crazy hacks people have pulled off, I don’t doubt it can be done. But the scope (hardware and software mods in one project) probably puts it out of my reach

Radiant heat using pumped hot fluid (I think usually a water antifreeze mix in a closed system) in tubes attached to the underside of the floor, seems like the closest, safer mix. Could be reasonably solarpunk if the source of heat is good