I write science fiction, draw, paint, photobash, do woodworking, and dabble in 2d videogames design. Big fan of reducing waste, and of building community
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.
There are some interesting oven designs that use rooftop solar collectors (mirrored troughs with a tube of transfer fluid running through them) connected to normal-ish form factors ovens downstairs. It’s basically the same setup for solar steam generators (if you run a business that uses a lot of steam). The only problem is it’s a direct use of the heat without much storage (from what I remember) so you can’t really start baking before sunup.
There are also some cool designs for direct solar that point a reflector dish into a hole in a wall (the inside of the hole is the inside of an oven in the kitchen). Tamara solar kitchen has one but there are lots of similar versions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Editing to add this link from another comment because I had no idea that (of course) there’s organized opposition by entrenched interests to prevent anything for the public good https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/06/dark-roof-lobby-white-reflective-roofs-laws-lobbying-urban-heat-islands/
I don’t think the current roofs are painted black - they’re naturally black because roofing tar and asphalt shingles are black by default (a lot of sheet metal roofing is too but you can at least get that in most colors). So it’s not a matter of swapping out paint but adding something new. It also adds a new maintenance cost - keeping the white roof clean/maintained. Paint flakes off, tarps etc wear and become tattered, dirt and pollen collect on the surface. None of this is a dealbreaker by any means but our society seems to run on defaults and there’s a lot of inertia in construction and a lot of pressure on builders to keep materials costs down (even if doing so costs the owners or occupants more in the long run).
I hope this continues to take off because it really is a big improvement.
Such a great project!
Sounds like ‘installed’ might be overselling it a little unfortunately - given that jerks carried them off. There are a few types of epoxy that could help. Pretty sure even JB Weld will stick wood to concrete. And they make some amazing specialist adhesives. It won’t stop the city but might delay the NIMBYs for a day or two. (Especially if they’re as old as I am and they throw their back out trying to pick it up the first time).
Honestly a utility vehicle that isn’t a surveillance box is like all I want from an electric vehicle
The genre name might not be common knowledge (and I’m not sure that’s the case) but cyberpunk aesthetics and themes and plot points have infiltrated so much of modern science fiction that cyberpunk communities frequently have trouble drawing a line around genre works vs mainstream scifi. And this is after companies and brand marketing “picked it too early” and made it a joke in the 90s. It just sort of kept going quietly, looked more and more prescient, and in the end, it had suffused through so many imaginations and works that it kind of was the mainstream.
I’m not sure the same thing will happen with solarpunk but given the way cyberpunk seems to have acclimatized us to our current distopia, I sort of hope solarpunk can do something similar. Maybe wear the rough edges and propaganda fears off building a society that actually looks out for its people and the habitats they live in.
Hi! I’m not sure I see the link but I’d love to check it out! (The post title just links to the image)
Super cool that these are actually happening! I read about them a lot while researching modern sail ships but it’s hard to tell if new tech like this is really happening until they build it.
No worries! And good luck!
Throwing in a little odd advice for the secondhand scene - even if the shops are bad, I’ve had some good luck with estate sales and cleanouts (where a family or realtor basically opens the home to anyone who’ll cary stuff away and save them the trouble and cost of throwing it out). It can feel kinda bad, picking through stuff in that context, but we’ve saved a bunch of nice old tools and kitchen stuff that way, and the houses generally have everything else you might need for a house. Personally I think the best BIFL stuff is old and made before they really perfected enshitifying their products.
The cleanouts I’ve been to we found through postings on our local free groups (which I also really recommend) or word of mouth, but I used to know some folks who went to them professionally, looking for merchandise for their own businesses, so they must be advertised somewhere normal people would find them too.
That makes sense to me - the word yacht might be implying too much a certain use case (it’s the name of a class of vessel but I think it also says ‘rich people toy’ on first impression). But house boats have been around for a long time and when they’re someone’s primary residence they sometimes represent a cheaper model of living, not unlike a mobile home. An airship houseboat is an interesting idea, I think it showed up at the end of Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway.
Technology and materials sciences have come a long way since the 1940s. For example, we can probably skip sealing the gasbag with solid rocket fuel. Hydrogen gets better lift than helium, it’s not a limited resource with higher-priority medical uses, and doesn’t require petroleum-style drilling. It’s flammable, as we saw in the past, but with modern engineering, modern materials, non-conductive pressure vessels, emergency release valves, no ignition sources or sparks in proximity, it seems like it can be done pretty safely.
Until recently, I think, modern aviation had been admirably safety-focussed, in everything from engineering to operation. I’m not a fan of the airline industry and especially Boeing’s recent shortcuts, but I think solarpunk is very much about picking and choosing which parts of our society to keep and which to reexamine to see if they can be done better. Aviation safety is one of those things our society does know how to do well, and that seems very much worth keeping to me. Overall I trust aviation engineers to find ways to do hydrogen airships safely.
GraphineOS seems to set the benchmark for secure de-googled android phones and has a very short list of supported devices. I think I’d suggest starting with one of those, and once support eventually drops, if you’re comfortable with a reduced security capability, looking to lineageOS or similar. I think if Graphine supports a phone, it’s pretty much guaranteed to have support on the more general OSs.
For a while I looked at ruggedized smartphones (some with removable batteries!) that were supported by lineageOS and others. I didn’t find one I was convinced would hold up as long as I wanted, and I had security concerns so I ended up getting a decent secondhand phone with guaranteed security support for a few years and putting it in a good case.
Sometimes I check in on various raspberry pi smartphone projects. I love the idea and think it’d probably be able to last the longest (or be turned into something else after an upgrade) but I don’t think any feel reliable enough to me yet.
This is awesome news! Thanks for letting me know! I’ve been waiting to see these sails get real world use