I airdried skins of oranges, blood oranges, pommogrenades and lemon and dehydrated skins of red and yellow apples. That makes a very flavorful pot pourri that I placed in a reused sealed bad to make it into a one-hundred percent zero waste gift.

publication croisée depuis : https://lemmy.world/post/48861413 > Scrappiest of scrap wood projects. > >  > > The proportions are odd, but it's designed to fit under the landing of the stairs going into the garage. Makes a good use of an otherwise awkward space. Like everything else in the shop, it's on casters to allow for easy movement and cleaning around. > > Most of this wood was from the big lifting tower I used to get the dust collector motor into place. > > >

Like the title says I am trying the boycott the US thing hard, so I have gotten rid of a lot of services. After my iPhone and iPad give out I will be looking into alternatives my homepods are going to need to find another forever home sooner or later. Anywho that brings me to why I am posting here. A few months ago my place decided to flood and damage a lot of things I have just been hoarding! So I will get to start with a much cleaner slate of things, I get to decide what is coming back into my place and what is coming back or being replaced. It just really clicked for me that this was going to help me embrace this lifestyle some more. I wanted to share it with the community on the book of Faces, but I do not use it anymore and I was not going to go through the effort to download the app sign in and mention it in the group I was in. Only to then decide to uninstall the app and not see any comments or anything. So I thought Lemmy, I already have a Lemmy account that I use why not post it here. I may not get the same dopamine hit but at least I will hopefully get some. Tl:dr: Best way to clean out crap from your place is have you single floor suite flood, and Facebook is no good.

I editorialized the article title, and I realize the article is a year old. But I only just found out about this buy out yesterday. I have been using Wild's refillable deodorant for over 2 years. It has been great not throwing away a huge chunk of plastic, and instead tossing a small bit of cardboard into the compost. But now they are part of a mega corp. I got my wife and daughter switched over recently, and my wife has been using their chapstick too. My daughter found [Fussy](https://www.getfussy.com/) as an alternative. I saw a [video](https://youtube.com/shorts/0Gc-vTrM9z0) showing that Fussy's refills fit into Wild's cases. I will be making the switch as soon as I run out of my current stock of Wild refills.

Expansion foam is like superglue with air bubbles. You spray stuff and it works wonders for gap filling and insulation. But the big cans of the stuff often self-seal after the first use because the foam sitting in the outlet hardens. You can use the stuff once and then the rest of the can must be tossed. Chemical waste treatment centers have a special device to safely discharge discarded cans of aerosols. They strap a discarded can to a machine that punctures the can from the side. The contents rush out into a barrel. Can’t we be smarter? Consider how pros have a pistol for expansion foam. There is a special interface between the pistol and the can that it’s made for. Of course those pistols are useless on the cans that are not made for them. In principle, I don’t see why there couldn’t be a generic pistol that works on any canister. It would have a spike kind of like the scooper-like needles they use on blood donors, but stronger of course. It could have a vice that punctures the can with the spike. The strap-on pistol would be able to salvage the contents of self-sealed expansion foam cans.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/38855728 > Hi all. I'm an extremely colorful person and fashion means a lot to me and my mental health, so of course figuring out how to be bright and fashionable but still solarpunk is very important to me! I was playing around earlier and made myself this little hair clip. > > - The purple flat part is an old bottle cap painted with nail polish > - The bow is made from ribbon that I've had for ten or fifteen years by now > - The clip is an old one I had laying around > - The beads and string are from an old half-used kit I found online. > > I think reusing materials rather than buying new is very solarpunk and those of us who enjoy fashion can simultaneously avoid fast fashion and overconsumption while not limiting ourselves to only natural earth tones! > > The only part of this I don't feel good about is the hot glue, which I object to both on the basis of quality and on the basis of it being essentially plastic and I had to use a lot of it. I'll be figuring out something better for my next attempt. I think a little dab of super glue would work fine for attaching the bow, and I think I could punch a small hole in the bottle cap to attach the strings rather than gluing them, but I'm not sure how to attach the clip. If you have any ideas, please share!

Found laptops on the street fully abused and often smashed to bits. Recently pulled a 160gb SSD out of one. That’s worth keeping, as well as the RAM, often. TV tuners/media players: they sometimes have internal hard drives. I recently pulled a 320gb 2½″ HDD out of one. Even though that’s likely too small to serve as someone’s laptop system, anything bigger than 120gb is big enough to store a copy of the whole Debian system including all apps (5 blu-rays merged these days). All DC powered electronics: it’s useful to cannabalize the female barrel connector. There are many universal PSUs with a collection of male tips, but never female tips. The female tips are useful for making your own barrel adapters, instead of cutting and soldering your OEM PSUs.

First off, homemade napalm is in no way illegal, nor does it explode. You've watched too many Vietnam movies. What it *does* do is burn. Forever. More on campfires to come. Put a couple of fingers of unleaded in a pickle (wide mouthed) jar, stuff waste Styrofoam in it. You can jam the contents of a 40" TV packaging in a quart jar. That's it, that easy. Keep cramming the foam in until you get a taffy consistency. Too much and it's too hard to dig out with a stick. Too little and it slips off your stick. I keep a jar at my campsite and one in the house for starting our little fire pit. A golf ball chunk will start soaking wet kindling. PRO TIP: Spread the goo on a cookie pan, 1.4" thick, let it dry in the summer sun, cut into little pieces with scissors, put it in a little plastic box (that you had saved already, right?). Now you can pack it out with no mess, no smell! Never goes bad, as far as I know, can't be too dry.

Article in French. Feel free to use a transaltor. A french speaking zero waste community has opened : [!zero_dechet@jlai.lu](https://jlai.lu/c/zero_dechet)

One of my hobbies is restoring/building furniture in a zero waste kind of mindset, where all my materials are either from EIF or found on garbage day. Ideally the only waste is my own hours/calories and the electricity (though I do pay the local company for what they assure us is all green energy). If it’s okay with the instance, I’d love to share some of them here. (I think they’ll fit better here than in DIY as I’m not really giving the kind of thorough steps necessary to build one yourself) I’m fairly active on my local Everything is Free page, which has been awesome. It’s a wonderful community dedicated to helping each other and reducing waste, and my first real step towards meeting my actual community since moving to this city (besides meeting my neighbors in the building and next door). Awhile back someone posted an In Search Of for a saddle stand. They rented a horse but owned a saddle and apparently you can’t store them flat. They had a sewing machine case they were using for it, but were looking for a towel rack or similar that would look a little nicer. I have a decent little wood shop in the basement of our apartment, and have hoarded a lot of lumber (and more lumber shows up on EIF every day) so I offered to just build one to her specifications. It was a really fun project, she was super friendly and flexible about the design/timeline, which worked out well because it took me a little over six months to make it – though most of that was time spent waiting for suitable materials to show up. A quick search of the internet showed two types of stands I thought I could make – pedestal ones, and traditional ones with flat sides on either end. Flat sides were definitely more practical, as you can add a shelf to store things underneath, but they would have required 1”x12”s or something equivalent, which I didn’t have. So I decided to focus on the top and wait to see what showed up. The slats are cut from old oak floorboards I pulled from a dumpster when a local furniture maker/finish carpenter was retiring and cleaning out his workshop. We got talking and he gave me some nice stuff as well, including some thin slats of some exotic hardwoods neither of us could identify. The hardwoods and oak floorboards I ripped to the final size using a tablesaw and plainer. The project went on hold for lack of time and materials for awhile, until a neighbor threw away a nice pedestal table. They had disassembled the thing, including stripping all the hardware that normally hinged and supported the two leafs, so I didn’t feel too bad about taking its base right before the garbage truck got there (I took the top too, and plan to use it as well but I’ll get to that at the end) I was then able to work out a design for the stand using the pedestal. I drew up two endcaps and cut them from some beautiful oak cabinet wood the furniture maker had given me (getting both endcaps out of the piece was tricky). Then, to support all the slats, I cut two smaller versions of the same shape from scraps of an ikea bookshelf I’d used in building an arcade cabinet (a different, more ambitious zero-waste project). The smaller pieces were pine, which wouldn’t match the oak base in grain, but it wouldn’t matter because they’d be hidden by the bigger endcaps and the slats on the tops/sides. I assembled these pieces, stained them to match the base as closely as I could get it using stains I already had (mostly golden oak I already had, but also some very old stains from my grandparents’ basement which hadn’t been brought to the dump yet, and which helped get the different woods to match) and urethaned it with gloss polyurethane. To support the upper part I took the last piece of a very warped 2”x”6, I’ve been slowly using up, sanded it until it was roughly square, and drilled holes so I could use the table’s original bolts to attach it to the stand. (I stained it as well). I leveled it the rest of the way and made sure the endcaps would cover it entirely by cutting a notch into either end. Then I set the top part on it, and drove six screws up through the bottom of that into either endcap. It’s not my biggest zero waste woodworking project, but I think it came out well, and they were really happy when they came to get it which was nice.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/9263490 > Pictured: three glass bottles in a row. On the left, it's a full bottle of soy sauce. In the middle, it's an empty bottle with the label removed. On the right, it's another empty bottle with a rooted pothos cutting in it. > > My workplace provides snacks and some condiments for folks. When the soy sauce runs out, I do my best to snag the bottle. It looks like it ought to have a potion in it. A plant is the next best thing!

cross-posted from: https://lemmus.org/post/20206389 > > Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse. > > > > The ban on destruction of unsold apparel, clothing accessories and footwear and the derogations will apply to large companies from 19 July 2026. Medium-sized companies are expected to follow in 2030. The rules on disclosure under the ESPR already apply to large companies and will also apply to medium-sized companies in 2030.

This one is nothing fancy, but it fit our workflow well. My SO has always saved recipes to a pinterest board - normally she brings a laptop to the kitchen and sets it up on a chair. We finally took this tablet (came from corporate ewaste) and stuck it to the wall. It's too old for most apps but it seems to work well for this. We installed pinterest, and a podcast player. Eventually I'll check if there's a good replacement OS for the expired android version, but I figure we'll do a bit of a trial run, see how it's working for us and what we need, before starting with that.

publication croisée depuis : https://feddit.org/post/3142575 > [Source.](https://www.statista.com/chart/24350/total-annual-household-waste-produced-in-selected-countries/?utm_souce=Blog&utm_medium=RSS)

So I’m a huge fan and advocate of groups where people give away things they don’t want anymore. And if it’s cool, I’m just going to rant about them for a bit. What are they: So for this, I’m talking about online groups, usually covering a very small geography like a town, where people can either offer up things they don’t want anymore rather than throwing them away, and where people who need things can post a request or In Search Of (ISO) for specific things in case anyone has one they don’t need. Why they’re good: They help people find things they need without money changing hands. Whether you’re struggling financially, or just getting something you’d otherwise have spent money on, it makes everyone’s life a little easier. They connect people to their neighbors. I’ve met hundreds of people from my city over the last few years, some frequently, some just once. My favorite has been getting to know my nextdoor neighbor as we cleaned out his house – the circumstances weren’t great, but for months I saw him every day when I helped him photograph items, find people who wanted them, and give them away. We became pretty good friends through the process, and because he’s the kind of guy who sits on his front porch and talks with anyone who’ll stop, he had an awesome time visiting with everyone who came to get something. It knocks items out of the “resources extracted → product sold → product used → product thrown away” cycle, at least for a little bit. I can remember walking around my neighborhood years ago and seeing someone unwrapping brand new tomato trellises (we were also planting at the time), then a few streets over, finding a stack of them leaning against a trash can, and just being struck by the disconnect there. Here was a stack of metal on its way to (hopefully) recycling, while someone else had had to buy the same thing to do the same job brand new. Somewhere steel and other metals had been extracted as ores, transported, smelted, cast into wire, possibly transported again, shaped/welded into a trellis, wrapped in plastic, transported again, bought at a store, and transported again. But because the person throwing them away and the person who needed them were disconnected, one set was going to be transported to the dump while a new one was being set up. It’s a small and kind of silly example, but it happens constantly, with tons of items, just in the waste stream. I have access to an e-waste bin where companies throw away functional computer monitors, laptops, tablets, mice, cables, adapters, monitor stands, and all kinds of other bits and pieces. I carry great bags of them home and offer them up on my local group. So far, I’ve found interested people (usually tons of them) for each item I’ve brought back. I consider reuse and continued use to be much better than recycling, especially for functional tech, and at the same time, it helps my community, providing devices to people who need them. (I’ve recently started diverting the working computers and tablets to a local charity helping Ukrainian refugees, many of whom have no computer/device at all – this helps them get on their feet, work on resumes etc). Then there’s the items that people are holding on to because they don’t want to throw them away, but aren’t using/don’t need. A few years ago I asked if anyone had a digital picture frame, so I could set one up for my grandmother. A lady from my city said she had one sitting in a closet, she’d bought it for her mother but it never got used, and she didn’t want to throw it away still new in its box. I saw an ISO for an Apple computer monitor (an old CRT version) and checked with my neighbor, who I knew had been putting off driving some monitors to the recycling center because of the fees and because they’re heavy. He had the exact model the guy wanted – and the guy was thrilled, because it’s not like they’re making new antique monitors. Every one recycled is that many fewer components available to people who are into collecting and building those machines. Even better, my neighbor and the guy who wanted the monitor appear to have hit it off and are becoming friends. We’d already filled our apartment with reclaimed/fixed-up furniture, but I’ve recently started making a hobby out of finding furniture on garbage day, refinishing them, and giving them away. My goal has been to never use new-bought materials, and thanks to the lumber, stain, urethane, paint, etc frequently available in my group, I’ve mostly been able to do that. Finding these groups: They seem to work best if they’re very local organizations. So far they seem to be mostly set up on facebook, but I’ll be happy to showcase any other examples anyone has. The biggest and probably best organized one I have found is Buy Nothing: https://buynothingproject.org/find-a-group I feel like I should mention that there’s been (as in all things that involve groups of people) a good deal of drama within some of these groups, especially under the Buy Nothing name/brand. It generally looks to me like people who want to do good for each other and their communities, but just disagree on the best way to do it, but you may want to look for local alternatives. My favorite groups operate under the name Everything is Free, which appears to be a bit less formally/centrally organized, but because of that, probably a bit harder to find/less organized. https://www.curbed.com/2023/02/buy-nothing-gifting-with-integrity-drama.html There are also dedicated websites like freecycle, and the Buy Nothing app – I think there’s some value to setting these things up in the spaces people already occupy, but as someone who has increasingly fled into federated alternatives, I can also understand wanting to disconnect from big social media sites.

I love wrapping Christmas presents. But I haven't bought wrapping paper in over a decade. Even before I found zerowaste as a concept, I enjoyed the thrift and challenge of reusing old paper, working around tears, tape, and crinkles. I've always been kinda weird so my family went along with it, until it's now part of our tradition and they help me gather up the big scraps after everything's been opened. My advice, if you want to try this: - Tape the paper to the present first so you can sort of cinch the paper tight. That pulls a lot of the wrinkles and folds out of it and makes it look nice. - Fold it at the corners for a sharper look. - Use the gift/name tags to cover any damaged spots. I use the ones charities send in the mail after you donate once five years ago. Or blank bits of the sticky paper from the sheets of mailing labels. - Consider other sources of paper - I've also used posters that didn't print right and regular newspaper Benefits/reasons my family puts up with it: - It can be surprisingly nostalgic to see paper from last year and remember projects and things we gave back then. I've kept some pieces going, showing up again and again in smaller pieces for like five years now. - Fancy paper: I try to prioritize the really fancy/pretty stuff from years past, the shiny foil papers etc. it's nice to get extra use out of that. - Humor: most of us live separately now so everyone tends to wrap their presents with their own paper, which kinda indicates who it's from. Except me - my presents look like they came from everyone else, which is sometimes surprising or funny.

My SO's company handles food. Sometimes that food goes bad. In this case, they got a whole shipment of milk days away from its expiration date (at which point they can't serve it, and local food pantries very sensibly won't accept it). Luckily, they're not committed to dumping it down the drain, and they'll let us take it. Sometimes it's still okay to drink, but usually we take it so we can make farmer's cheese. This is a soft, mild cheese which makes an awesome dip/spread, or which is useful as an ingredient in other foods. It's super easy, and requires no aging, just heat and vinegar. This was our biggest batch yet. We normally use this recipe: https://www.olgainthekitchen.com/homemade-farmers-cheese/ though we add additional seasonings depending on how we plan to use the cheese. Step one is to bring the milk up to temp. The recipe will have more details, but the important thing is to stir it to keep the milk from burning and not to bring it all the way to a boil. We wait until there's a sort of bubble froth along the edge of the pot. Once it's hot, its time to mix in the vinegar. You want 1/2 cup of vinegar per gallon of milk. Stir it and you'll immediately see the milk separate into clumpy white curds, and the thin yellow whey. If it doesn't separate, hey just add more vinegar. Strain it through a siev or cheesecloth. You can speed things up by squeezing it a bit, but be careful since it'll be hot. Let it drain a bit and you've got farmer's cheese. You have tons of options from here. You can keep draining it in the fridge if you want it kinda crumbly, or you can run it through the food processor with a bunch of seasonings to make a nice smooth, spreadable dip. We have a cheap jalapeno cilantro mix we really like for making a dip for crackers. You can also use it as a filling for stuffed shells, or mix it into a white sauce for pasta. Alternatively, leave it unseasoned and use it to make syrniki, a kind of traditional Russian cheese pancake which is really good. (I've posted about this previously here: https://imgur.com/a/vqk4r4B and the recipe is here: https://www.alyonascooking.com/syrniki-recipe-cheese-pancakes/ ) Like I said, this is our biggest batch yet. Five and a half gallons of milk condensed down to one large bag of cheese. Our plan is to portion off enough for any meals that'll use it this week, and then to freeze the rest.

I've got a coat I wore every winter for like eight years but didn't use this fall because a rain of macroplastics would follow me wherever I go. I can strip the pleather, flaking-paint material off to replace it with something but the fabric underneath is sort of thin and stretchy so I'd need to find something that'll help seal it against wind and rain again. I know they sell pleather paint but reviews said it's short lived or meant for patching lesser damage. It's probably a long shot but is there another option for doing the whole outside of the coat? Otherwise it's still in great shape.

This is a quick one, not an impressive repair, but maybe a nice demonstration of the perks of keeping stuff until its useful. I found a multi-socket extension cord/usb charger while digging through ewaste (I fix up laptops and give the stuff I find away on my local.Buy Nothing -type group). Someone had really yanked on it (probably the plug was stuck behind something heavy) and when it came free, two of the prongs were bent, and the ground prong was ripped out altogether. I had a spare 120v plug - about a year ago, I took some old extension cords from an estate cleanout. Awhile later, while helping a friend build an arcade cabinet, I dug one out and cut the socket off it to wire the cabinet up for electricity. Unfortunately, the sheathing around the individual wires inside the cord had crumbled away to almost nothing, and it wasn't safe to use. I gave the copper to a friend who sells metal to a junkyard, and kept the plugs from either end. The actual rewiring isn't difficult, just stripped the wires and attached them to the correct terminals. I used an old neon tester my neighbor gave me to check my work. It lit up just fine and I didn't trip the circuit. Later I plugged a bricked, ewaste 1st gen ipad into the usb socket and it started charging just fine. So it looks like this worked out So there's my excuse for why I keep all these odds and ends.Even when it's something as simple as this, there's something wonderful about being able to take multiple pieces of junk, combining them, and suddenly having a useful item.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/14508843 > Here is a map of current free stores in New York. > > https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1LiHVRiKFOtkx0LwDIczp4KoseLhdDg9n&ll=40.75095081144914%2C-73.95967585&z=12 > > Also a similar project called the freecycle network lists towns across the world. > > https://www.freecycle.org/find-towns There's also [Buy Nothing and Everything is Free](https://slrpnk.net/post/354527)

This was a recent one, kind of the start of refinishing furniture with the intent to give it away on our local Buy Nothing -type page. We found this old kid-sized chair on the curb on garbage day. The finish (some kind of shellac, I think) was peeling or gone in places, the wood was a bit weathered, scuffed, and water stained. I sanded it down and posted a photograph of it with the bare wood, surrounded by cans of stain, to the facebook group, offering it up with a promise I’d stain it whatever color they picked form the pile (or provided themselves) and urethane it. I ended up having to do a little raffle as there was a decent amount of interest. The winner picked a nice medium brown color and I stained it and urethaned it. The person who received it was delighted – it turned out she was a retired teacher, and had fond memories of these chairs. She brought us a pot-holder her granddaughter had knitted to thank us for it (which was unexpected but very nice!).

I stumbled onto this article while working on a photobash of a solarpunk scene. I think it does a good job of explaining the concept but there seems to be something wrong with its certificates, which might throw an error in your web browser. https://nwedible.com/urbanite-broken-concrete-retaining-wall-as-a-garden-feature/ Just in case you don't want to check the link I'm also going to plagiarize a few quotes and images from the article:  "The marketing term for “old chunks of broken up concrete” is urbanite. Urbanite has a lot going for it: it’s durable and heavy like natural stone, reusing this product in garden and landscape design takes it out of the waste stream, it’s often a uniform thickness which makes it easy to stack or lay as a permeable patio surface, it’s often available in most urban locations, and it’s frequently free for the hauling. Free is good. Drawbacks to urbanite can include potential contamination – this is more of an concern if your urbanite comes from a torn out commercial parking lot where all manner of auto fluids may have seeped into it than from the neighbor’s pool deck tear-out. Concrete itself can contain additives that might pose a health or contamination risk, although my feeling is that old, weathered concrete has probably already leached the worst of itself out somewhere else. I probably wouldn’t use urbanite to build edible garden beds, but I can see great potential for turning this waste product in retaining walls, steps, and patio areas."   And a few examples of recycled concrete patios:    This last one came from https://www.terranovalandscaping.com/90/, which has a few other examples, including raised beds, so perhaps they knew their source of concrete was clean, or weren't worried about the potential for contanimation? 

We recently switched to using a Linux Mint laptop with an adblocker for our streaming (while also cancelling a bunch of services). A friend at the recycling center set it aside for me - the screen was irreparably smashed but it was otherwise quite a nice little laptop. Replacement screens were too expensive so I carefully removed the broken one entirely so it'd default to the HDMI port and then set it up as a quick media center (we watch a lot of YouTube and the ads were driving me crazy, I might switch to a more purpose-built OS eventually). The TV is one I pulled from an ewaste bin to replace my previous ewaste TV after it finally gave up. It has a thin line through one edge of the screen occasionally but is otherwise fine. I also recently found a perfectly good wireless trackball mouse and a Bluetooth keyboard in the same bin where I got the TV (came with that other mouse). The bin even supplied HDMI cables. The whole thing is perched on a particle board TV stand I found like a decade ago when the college kids move out.

This is my first step-by-step post using our local movim microblog rather than imgur. I'll upload it to [imgur](https://imgur.com/gallery/FQO6MJU) later as a backup but I'm seriously impressed with movim, very glad to have a noncorporate place for my projects. Let me know if there's any issue with [the link.](https://movim.slrpnk.net/blog/jacobcoffinwrites%40slrpnk.net/picture-frame-made-from-salvaged-wood-ftNKhh) This is another quick one but at least I remembered to take pictures for most of it. I don’t enjoy oil painting as much as I do [photobashes](https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/postcards-from-a-solarpunk-future/) and other digital art, but it’s still a lot of fun in the right moment. I needed a picture frame for a recent one, to complete a gift to a relative. It was on a stretched canvas, rather than canvasboard, so the frame had to be deeper than normal. So decided to just make it from scrap lumber I had squirreled away. I started with this stuff. These 1 ½” by 1 ¾” boards were part of a kind of disappointing haul I got from my local Everything is Free page. I don’t remember what it was I thought I’d find there, but by the time I got to it, all that was left was this tangle of busted-up boards from inside some kind of homemade builtin cabinet. They were cracked from their demolition, and full of wood screws, but I took them because there was still plenty of good material and I think I wanted to justify the trip. I pulled all the screws and used them in another project, and when I went looking for material for the picture frame, they were pretty much perfect. Plenty of material, and I didn’t have to worry I’d use it for something better. The painting was of a rustic cabin, so the frame was going to be a bit rustic anyways, so a little battle damage was no big deal. I measured and marked them based on a picture frame my grandfather had made (I would have used it instead but it wasn’t deep enough for the stretched canvas). I cut them to length, then down to 45 degrees on my miter saw (it makes squaring up lumber and doing corners absurdly easy, I used to do them all by hand and getting them to fit was much more art than science back then.) Once I was looking at it, I realized the frame was a bit too thick, and decided to remove about half an inch in depth from the four pieces. This would be quick work on a table saw, but I don’t have one, so I marked a line and used the band saw. Then I sanded up all the sides on a belt sander until they looked good. There was a bit of stain left in deep spots from the original project, and I tried to keep some of it – I like a little character and history from the life of the piece. This wood was a part of someone’s home, they knocked it out with a sledge hammer, a weird goblin man came by on trash day and took it, now it’s a picture frame hanging on a wall. Then I had to use the router to notch the back of all the pieces to hold the actual canvas. My router was a recent junk store find, it’s the old craftsman kind that’s a hand router bolted to the underside of a little fiberglass table. I screwed it to the workbench over the lathe, down on the far end, since its out of the way and that’s my heaviest workbench. I have plans to rewire the router, so you can turn it on and off with a proper tool switch, like I did for the drill press, but I haven’t done that yet, so turning it on meant reaching underneath, feeling for one of the handles, finding the trigger and the locking button, and setting them, at which point it begins to spin. It’s awkward and I wouldn’t want to have to do that in an emergency. This was my first time really using a router on my own projects, so it wasn’t quite as pretty as I’d like, but overall it looks fine. I definitely want to replace the small, two-part fence with a taller one that runs end-to-end and gets closer to the blade. That would reduce the piece’s ability to wobble when its only braced against one of them. Once the notch was cut I found the 45 clamp didn’t work that well so I stuck each joint together with a big dab of wood glue and a couple small dabs of super glue. The super glue gives you just enough time to get the pieces where you want them, and sort of acts as the clamping force for the wood glue, which takes much longer to dry. Once it was dry, I stained the frame with Sedonia Red, it came out a sort of pink color but I think it’ll be a good fit for the white cabin with red trim in the painting, and the recipient can always hit it with a second coat of a darker stain if they choose. The last step was to add a cable to the back. They make little metal picture frame hanger things, and I thought about just cutting and bending one from a soda can, but to be honest, I kinda hate those hangers. I don’t think they work well and they feel unreliable to me. Usually I just use a strand pulled from some damaged CAT 5 wire, but this time I happened to have this metal cable left over from… somewhere? I honestly can’t remember what it came from. But it’s the sort of thing I keep because it doesn’t take up much space and it’ll be useful eventually, and sure enough it was! The loops had already been cut, so I just drilled a hole through the little aluminum clamps at either end, used the vice to squeeze them down on the wire a little extra, and used them to attach the cable to the painting. I measured both holes from the top, and predrilled them with a thin bit to make driving in the nail easier (since I didn’t want to break the picture frame. As a very last touch, I cut a tiny sliver of wood and glued it into a notch where the miter saw ripped out a bit of wood at the top left corner. A little stain blended that back in nicely. Overall, not bad for my first picture frame. It’s a little rough, but it’s supposed to look that way.

This one was scratch-built as a gift. They wanted a shoe rack and sent me some links of examples for sale on amazon. The designs weren’t consistent, so I took what I felt were good features from each and built one from lumber I had. Most of it was just pressure treated 2”x4”s someone on Everything Is Free had been looking to get rid of while cleaning out under his deck (these are the ones with thick, visible grain and a slight greenish tinge (always wear a dust mask while sanding but especially for these)) and older heat-treated 2”x4” whose origin I don’t remember. The top section's side plates and the supports for the lower shelf were cut from lengths of white-primed trim – these were edge-glued boards, meaning they were glued together from pieces of smaller scrap, and had zig-zaggy joints straight across the face of the lumber here and there. Because these joints are kind of ugly and not as strong as the regular wood, I cut sections from it that didn’t include them. Then I sanded off the white primer (wear a dust mask for this too) so I could stain them to match the rest of the piece. The hardest part was finding something for the shelves themselves. I had a few thin lengths but not enough, and ended up posting to the Everything is Free page with a couple example photos asking if anyone had something close. Within minutes a guy offered up some bedrails he’d found on garbage day. He had taken them so they wouldn’t go to waste but didn’t have a project in mind and was happy to offer them up. I sanded them down smooth and cut them to length. Wherever I can, I use wood screws as they’re much easier to remove than nails. But for a piece of furniture with very visible joints like this, I used finish nails almost everywhere. I also glued the joints as I nailed them so they wouldn’t work apart (this was especially necessary on the top, as the finish nails were thin brads and the slats liked to try to wander as I hammered others into place). Once it was done, I treated it to the usual stain and polyurethane (both left over from previous projects, the stain I think was second-hand). I was pleased with the final product - it's surprisingly sturdy for something without any 45's in the design - and the recipient liked it quite a bit, which is what matters.

One of my hobbies is fixing up old furniture to give away. This one was interesting because I was able to combine two pieces of damaged furniture to produce something decent. (This is a somewhat challenging one to write up because despite having the thing taking up most of my basement for months, I somehow failed to take any in-progress pictures of the desk itself. This is probably because almost all of the work was done on the desktop instead, but it's still kind of annoying. There's still a bunch of photos of the project in the imgur link though) So almost a year ago, someone on my local Buy Nothing page offered up a mid-century desk. The kind with two file cabinets, pull-out writing surfaces, a central drawer, and a panel in the back. It even had the feet. The only problem was that it was missing the top. It seemed like a fun restoration job, so I stated my interest and they let me know where to pick it up. Once I got all the parts home and took some measurements, I put up a few posts on the page over the next few weeks asking if anyone had an old tabletop with the right dimensions. And someone did. She had the absolutely perfect top for this project. It was an old ikea table of the exact right dimensions, which had been stored in an open-sided garage for years. The finish had weathered off, the wood had bleached silver, birds had dumped on it, and the metal legs had rusted to the point where even I didn’t think they were recoverable. In short, zero guilt for taking the top and redoing it to match the desk (I always hate ruining one thing to make something else, but this wasn’t very fixable as a table). I spent the next few weeks sanding it down until I just had bare wood, and had removed most of the water damage. Then I stained it, in two coats, of two different shades of brown, trying to hit the sort of medium shade the rest of the desk was made in. All my stains and urethane are also secondhand. The top came out slightly redder that I'd have liked. I’d say the desk has a more yellow-brown tinge, but all in all, I was quite pleased with it. I applied several coats of polyurethane (using a brush because I’m a furniture refinishing monster). This was somewhat tricky because I was working outside - the local bugs decided to explore it and I had to keep chasing them away/rescuing them. Once it was dry, I removed the rest of the table hardware (boards that ran width-wise across the underside, and which held the screw-in metal plates for the table legs to attach to). I saved the hardware because it’s always useful eventually, even if I don’t think I can fix the rusted-out galvanized table legs. Assembly was as simple as putting the desk together, marking my drill bit for depth with some tape, and predrilling holes for some short screws, to attach the metal brackets on the desk cabinets to the underside of the top. Finding a home for it was a little more difficult but the Buy Nothing page came through. I offered it to a person who was acquiring furniture for their neighbor, who was planning to host refugees in a spare mother-in-law type apartment. They ended up not needing it, leaving her with a pile of disassembled desk stuck in her garage. She was a good sport about that though, and a month and a couple posts later, we found another taker, who was happy to get it all set up. So now a incredibly sturdy, absurdly heavy old desk, and an old ikea tabletop are back in use and hopefully will be for many years to come.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21299422 > My kitchen scale is powered by a cr2032 lithium button battery. Yes, it was sloppy of me to buy the scale without seeing how it was powered. I only use the scale once or twice per month, yet these shitty button batteries only last a few months. It seems like I only get about ~6—12 measurements before the battery is dead. > > WTF? This seems to defy physics. The scale automatically powers off. Of course it must always have some power because there is no ON switch. The scale detects capacitive touch taps or weight before turning on the display. > > Digital calipers use a button battery which also only gives a dozen or so measurements before the battery is dead. It seems the calipers power on when the case is snapped shut. Maybe the rattling causes it to power on since it’s very touchy. Turns on with the slightest movement. > > My bicycle helmet takes a cr2032, which only lasts a few months. Perhaps because it’s hard to remember to turn off the light. But still, it’s a shitty design because it has no timer or motion sensor. Or would a motion sensor itself use more power than the LEDs? > > Questions: > > * are button batteries a significant e-waste burden? > * are the batteries themselves really short lived, or are the appliances that use them all just poorly designed? >

It doesn’t take long for mold to grow on empty beer bottles. Considering beer bottles get returned for a refund, you have to assume that the brewery will make an effort to reuse as many as possible. I toured a brewery once and they showed us the big industrial bottle washing machine. They said the bottles get scanned for cracks using a laser, and rejects obviously get tossed. The question is: what about mold, which adheres quite well to the corners of the glass? I wonder if the laser also detects bottles that didn’t get clean. Or if they just figure the temps would kill everything and just be considered safe enough from there.

A box of really old TomToms (softball sized) appeared at a street market [a year ago](https://slrpnk.net/post/4439227), two for a dollar. I doubt anyone was interested in any and I doubt the seller would bother to return with them. They were probably be wasted. In principle, old TomToms could be used to feed a smartphone. If you use a smartphone for navigation, these components compete to suck the battery dry: - the color LCD - GPS radio receiver - WiFi¹ - GSM¹ (1) only applies to Google boot-lickers who enable location tracking in order to avoid the wait to acquire satellites. The GPS is a significant drain because it’s heavy on non-stop calculations, which generates heat (wasted energy), and the heat itself hits the battery even harder. We can do better. TomToms with bluetooth tend to suppot NMEA (I think). So the old TomTom w/outdated maps could be used purely to get a fix using its own battery supply, which it then transmits over bluetooth. So you toss TT in your backpack. Disable the GPS on your smartphone and enable bluetooth. Bluetooth is like 1 tenth the energy consumption of GPS. Then you enable mock GPS in advanced settings and run a FOSS bluetooth app that serves as middleware to feed the mock location. **The problem**: OSMand and Organic Maps are both incapable of using mock GPS locations. And even if they add the capability, it would only be in their recent version which has already left behind older phones. (edit: well Organic Maps is not that bad… their latest version supports AOS 5) Refusing to support Google means using airplane mode with location svcs off and being wholly dependent on GPS. And for whatever reason it takes me around 20—30 min to get a fix despite being in a large major city; every time. This must make Google happy. The old TomToms were faster at getting a fix. IIRC, they would take 20—30″ only the first time but quickly got a fix after subsequent power cycles in the same area thereafter. Smartphones have the sensors to do inertial nav if you calibrate a starting point. But the apps don’t have their shit together yet. I vaguely a recall a FOSS app doing inertial nav, but not too useful if it results in a mock location that OSMand cannot handle.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21474636 > If I have a Whirlpool machine model XYZ, broken or not I should be able to add a record to a DB that says notify me if a machine of that model is disposed of so I can pick it up for parts or come and just remove a part that I need. > > Yes, this means staff in the e-waste disposal services would need to look up the model of every item disposed to see if a repairer wants to be contacted. Is that too much to ask? >

A friend was dumping stuff prior to a move. I took all his electro gadgets just to prevent it becoming e-waste. In the pile of stuff is an Amazon Alexa. Fuck #Amazon. I boycott Amazon and also have principled objections to their snooping, business practices, etc. My choices seem to be: * trash the Alexa * donate the Alexa to charity These are both lousy choices. Donating it as-is would ultimately put it in someone’s house which then feeds Amazon. Is there another option? I did a quick search and see no FOSS to replace whatever garbage Amazon has on it. It could be attached to the LAN with an egress firewall that blocks cloud access, but I suppose then it is useless, correct? (update) I added a link to an article that shows what the thing looks like. The article is otherwise irrelevent. New extra requirement: the user must be able to say “Oh, yeah, no, for sure” without the thing [exploding into flames](https://slrpnk.net/post/29549480). (update 2) There is no product ID info on the device itself. I had to go through a lot of analysis just to find out what the fuck the thing is. Apparently it is an Echo gen 2. So then I looked for a manual. Found this: https://www.amazon.com/Echo-2nd-Generation-Manual-Guide-ebook/dp/B0793JNBYR/ No PDF manual! WTF. Amazon expects us to subscribe to some Kindle bullshit just to get the manual, or /pay/ the cost of a big mac to get a paper manual. Motherfuckers. I don’t need it that bad. (update 3) related threads: * https://community.home-assistant.io/t/hacking-using-old-amazon-echo-devices-for-voice/626351/28 * https://community.home-assistant.io/t/retasking-a-2nd-gen-echo/709084/5 Although a lot of chatter is about the echo DOT, which is something else. (update 4) [this thread](https://slrpnk.net/post/35346973) is worth a look.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21474632 > All my local junkyards accept e-waste but they bounce anyone who shows up with a screwdriver. Once a machine is dumped, it becomes the property of the junkyard who sees repairers who remove stuff as a threat to their bottom line, which comes from the melt value of the metals. I cannot even pay for the parts even if I wanted. I have been kicked out of junkyards enough times that the whole staff recognises me now. It’s really fucked up that the shitty melt value of the metals is prioritised above consumers will to repair. > > The disposal chain goes like this: > > 1. consumer dumps appliance waste (sometimes straight to the dump, sometimes to an org in step 2) > 2. some org that decides if the thing is broken or not > 3. if it works → goes to a charity to resell > 4. if reparable → goes to a charity to fix and resell > 5. if “non-repairable” → broken down for proper disposal > > That last step uses scare quotes because they are piled under such an unsurmountable stock pile of disposed appliances that only trivially repairable things get repaired. Countless things that are either repairable or good for parts get destroyed. I suspect there is a blanket assumption that inkjet printers are never regarded as repairable. > > The idea of repurposing is completely absent from this process. E.g. they would never remove a broken LCD panel from a flat screen device and use it to make a lightbox / table for a stained glass artist or photographer who looks at slides. > > Step 5 needs a mod. Everything not put through the charity should go to a weather-protected staging area where the general public can walk through and take what they want. Every item should be there for at least a week or two before breakdown. > > Freeloaders might use such a mechanism to grab things with a high melt value. But I’m not sure a petition to the city needs to address that -- it’s the city’s problem to solve. >

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/30993218 > Copious access points are deployed by naïve admins who are oblivious to the fact that not everyone runs the latest gear. The [shitty practice](https://slrpnk.net/post/28121407) of pushing wi-fi in an arbitrarily exclusive way needs pushback. The first step is exposure. We need to enumerate the various ways demographics of people are being excluded and collect a DB on it. > > The wi-fi protocol is the first point of failure. E.g. 802.11b vs 802.11a/g/n.. All new hardware is backwards compatible with older protocols. When an 802.11b device cannot see a signal, it’s because some asshat proactively disabled 802.11b. > > Most exclusivity occurs with shitty captive portals. There are countless ways to fuckup a website to make it exclusive. E.g. > - to impose SSL, which inherently imposes recent certs and CAs that exclude old devices. It’s essentially rock stupid when the captive portal is nothing more than a button that says “I accept the ToS”. > - to impose JavaScript, which encapsulates a whole industry of poorly trained people who have no concept of stability of standards and interoperability. > - to impose SMS confirmation, which makes the ignorant assumption that every single user has a mobile phone, that they carry it with them, and that they are willing to share their number willy nilly. > > ### 🌱environmental impact🚮 > > The brain dead practice of deploying public Internet access using needlessly exclusive tech is a form of forced obsolscence. It’s one of the factors that pushes people to throw away working devices in order to overcome these ecocidal Internet access deployments. > > ### 🔧the fix💾 > > An app that records SSIDs, their location, and all the detectable exclusivity characteristics. It should also take human input with notes to record exclusivity that is not auto-detectable. Ideally the local DB would sync with a central DB. It should also be possible to extract a GPX file for a given region which could then be imported into OSMand or Organic Maps. >

This was a kind of odd project, but I think it’ll fit. Back when I was researching ways to reuse plastic from 3d-printers, I ran across a thread discussing HDPE, turning plastic bags (if you can find only filmed HDPE ones) into printer filament through something like a filastruder, and that got me thinking about milk jugs. HDPE is a very strong plastic, is readily available, and can tolerate being re-melted better than many others. When melted and formed into shapes, it’s hard, and glossy/smooth. My experimental design was simple, a little owl figure (like a squishmallow) to make into a necklace for my spouse. I carved a simple wooden mold, and set up outside with an old toaster oven (the fumes can be dangerous, it’s important not to heat it anywhere near 400 degrees Fahrenheit – I found 250 to be more than sufficient). I cut part of a milk jug into thin strips and piled them on a piece of sheet tin and let them soften in the oven. Once they were soft and sticky, I used a pair of pliers to wad them into a ball and pressed them into the mold. It took a little clean up (trimming the flat disk of extra plastic which forms between the two sides of such a crude mold and adding the faint little face) but it worked alright. After a few tries, the soft pine of the mold started to compress a little, the softer wood around the dark grain receding slightly so the grain marked the plastic. It was an interesting one-off with some potential, but probably better done by people who know more than I do. I don’t generally like plastic projects like this because of the scrap which isn’t going to get accepted by a recycling center (if they actually recycle it at all) but I like the potential for local reuse of material and I could always melt it again. I thought about making a beta fish mold, so the disk of extra would form its fins, but never got around to it and let the project drop. As materials go, it actually feels pretty nice to touch and to carve, and I could see perhaps using it to make tool handles or something similar, if for some reason I wanted plastic rather than wood, which generally works best for me.