Thank you!

The explanation I saw in another conversation was that certain settings (I think one-pedal driving?) for regenerative braking make it feel like you’re constantly switching between accelerating and braking with no in-between. Like as soon as you let off the accelerator the brakes come on, no ability to just glide along, so it feels very lurching. I love the idea of recovering power from regenerative braking so I guess if I get the chance to look for an electric car someday I’ll have to make sure it can be configured to just happen when I actually use the brake.

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.

Seems like local industry only wants to focus on ICE vehicles so there’s not much to protect

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.

I went ahead and copied the relevant sections here: https://pads.slrpnk.net/p/Buried_Treasure in case you’d (quite reasonably) rather avoid any google services. It includes a few sections I forgot to link in the doc originally.

Okay I managed to get the relevant sections copied into this file: https://pads.slrpnk.net/p/Buried_Treasure

I included a few sections I meant to include in that first page of the google doc but apparently forgot to.

Thanks! I appreciate it!

Thanks! Yes reforestation plays a big role - basically things are moving in stages but they’re deconstructing abandoned buildings to salvage as much as possible, then filling in any cellar holes and rewilding the lot. It’s a rural exurb so it was fairly sparsely settled even at its peak. New Hampshire wants to be trees so just leaving a clearing alone will generally grow a forest but I go into detail on succession species and how different site histories impact the regrowth. One section is pretty heavily based on a post about rough mounding from this community and I wrote about a project reintroducing eastern hemlock and talking about the Hemlock Wooley Adelgid.

It’s almost 200 pages with a lot of formatting for sections, text boxes, charts, etc, so I don’t think I can port the whole thing over, but I can certainly copy the sections that deal with phytoremediation, habitat restoration, etc for anyone who wants to read through (not sure how commenting works on etherpad). It’ll be published as a free PDF once I’m done but for the moment I’m so close to finished I’m kind of stuck with the google doc. But anything I can do to make sure it’s accurate will be worth it.

Okay, that makes more sense, thanks

If they’re not generating enough to backfeed even at peak, and they can detect when the power cuts off and deactivate until it comes back, is there an actual safety/legal issue?

The poor C-suite at that utility company already needs to find ever-increasing profits on a basically stable business model and now consumers can just precipitate electricity out thin air? That’s moving things in the wrong direction! Thank goodness they basically own our local government and shareholder value can be maintained.

The webcomic Black Squires

https://m.tapas.io/series/black-squires/info

In the US, bans on foreign cars which limit the number of ‘someone elses’ pretty dramatically.

Personally I also suspect a bit of collusion - they could sell it for less and undercut the competition but they all make more money if nobody cuts their price.

That’s awesome! Super impressed with with their leadership - last thing I’d heard was that it might have to be a wildcat strike when the government declared it illegal. Good for them sticking together

The belief in natural heirachies is baked into everything they do.

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!

Full agree - meat substitutions make this transition extremely easy, you can find a drop-in replacement for almost anything and essentially eat the same stuff you did before. I wrote a list of favorites a couple years ago, it’s pretty specific to local stores and I’ll admit I forgot some of these existed, maybe my local shops stopped carrying them? https://slrpnk.net/post/1614342. Some local restaurants make absolutely amazing fake meat in-house with seitan (can you tell I live in a big city?) and I’ve been meaning to find some good recipes for that.

Around here the grocery stores often split meat substitutes between the vegetables section and the freezer section. So if you can’t find something and it doesn’t have to be frozen, check if they jammed it in between bags of lettuce or something.

They would, but if I’m surreptitiously installing something to make a point, I’m not sure I want to start drilling into concrete. Maybe with a high vis vest during the workday.