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. >

The research: [Microbial upcycling of plastic waste to levodopa](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-026-01785-z)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/36021551 > As a zero waste OCD nutter, I end up with a lot of TV and radio devices pulled from dumpsters and 2nd-hand markets. The remote controls (RCs) are almost always missing. For many devices, the whole fucking device becomes totally unusable without the RC. Which is probably why many devices end up in the trash -- because the remote was lost or chewed up by a dog. > > Apparently humans have not evolved to be smart enough to create an open standard mandating that all appliances with remote controls have a published manual containing the IR signal specs for every function to then enable the signals to be reproduced. > > ## Palm pilots (somewhat viable) > In the 1990s, Palm pilots had integrated infrared sensors w/LED. There was a very useful third-party app enabling physical remote controls to be copied. You could design your own button layout and have a tab for every RC. Of course the problem is that you needed the original RC as a source to copy. > > ## Smartphones (nope) > Smartphones are worse than Palm pilots. IR sensors are RARE. There are IR dongles that can be attached to a smartphone (either USB or headphone jack). It’s a bit redicious if you have to have a dongle hanging off the edge of your phone wherever you go. The phone would not likely slide into an arm strap w/the dongle. So you wouldn’t carry it around, which means you have to keep track of it. It’s something else that can get lost (manufacturers and sellers love that feature). > > ## Universal RCs (nope) > Like OEM remotes, these have a fixed set of buttons. But of course they have to try to guess what buttons will be needed. They include a database of hundreds of signal sets, but you are likely fucked if the device is an obscure or rebranded no name generic. I have radios that have the branding of the grocery store that sold them, FFS. No chance that would be in these preset DBs. I also have 4 different models of the same radio brand, and the RCs are incompatible w/each other same brand device (WTF). > > ## The collective solution > Lobby for policy to force an open standard and then mandate the use of it. > > ## The quazi individual solution (using smartphones) > 1. Derive a list of smartphones with built-in IR sensors and LEDs. > 1. Port a FOSS distro of some kind to all those phones. > 1. Code 2 FOSS apps, one for linux distros and one for f-droid for AOS forks. Or make one app that’s ported to both. > > The app should be able to record existing OEM RCs. And in the absence of the OEM RC, it should be able to sync to an open data crowd-sourced DB (which means it should also be able to export datasets to the project). > > ## The quazi individual solution (using dumbphones) > A lot of Sony Ericsson feature phones have IR sensors and an LED for the purpose of syncing the contacts, SMSs, etc. The FOSS Gammu app exploits this. If an app could be pushed to those phones it would basically repurpose otherwise wasted dumbphones to help salvage otherwise wasted RC-less appliances. >

The algorithm served me a way to reuse my soda can. I don't plan to start a craft project but this showed me there is things I could do within my skillset that would be fun. I'm now following this lady, which do a lot of cool craft projects with crash sprinkle with gore and environmental advice.

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.

A family member drink lots of them. I recycle them but it is still wasteful. What would you do with a soda can or with a lot of them?

I recently found out you can get foaming soap refills as tablets. I hadn't previously found a way to refill hand soap pump style dispensers without more plastic. These are [from Meliora](https://meliorameansbetter.com/products/foaming-hand-soap-refill-tablets).

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.

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/689223 > Most DAB radios I find¹ have text-only displays. Some even have no display at all and you must tune in blindly with arrow buttons. Apparently color graphical LCDs increase the cost of the radio enough to omit them from the design. > > And yet at the same time people are throwing away quite functional smartphones in mass quantity (thanks to capitalism and designed obsolscence). > > Also note that (most?) DAB radios have a USB port for attaching a drive holding music. > > Wouldn’t it be sensible to create a DAB radio with no display, but with the possibility to connect a smartphone which runs an app to show station metadata? (Would also be useful if it could connect to the LAN to feed metadata and even accept commands, but that’s another discussion) > > I also suspect existing radios could be hacked. That is, radio flashed to decode the signal metadata and (for ease) write it to USB mass storage, which a smartphone can mimick while running an app to display the data that lands on the SD card. The problem would be phones refuse to simultaneously mount external storage that is externally mounted. Could a rooted phone read-only mount an SD partition that is externally mounted? Perhaps the mass storage hack is a broken idea, in which case we would need to invent a protocol for this. Or does a suitable protocol exist? > > ¹ I say this as a locally buying (usually 2nd-hand) type of consumer. Online consumers might have a different experience. >

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.

My mother-in-law made these from her mother's bottle collection. The bottles were found near old cellar holes- they were discarded by the people who used to live there. We think they're somewhere around one hundred years old. Cleaned up, they make a beautiful display for plant cuttings!

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!

It is now mandatory but lots of people still don't have access to a collect point. Some progress have been made in 2023 but it is far from being enough for the whole population to start separating compostables. For most people around me there is no difference in the way they handle their waste and many are not even aware of this regulation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!).

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.

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 was an interesting one – we found this table on the curb on garbage day. The finish on the tabletop was peeling and rough. Possibly from water damage? We knew it would be challenging because the surface had a very thin wood veneer on it, but it wasn’t likely to be taken by anyone else in this condition so we lugged it home to try fixing it. We had to sand the finish off, but we also had to be careful to avoid sanding through the veneer. We used a very smooth sandpaper (starting with 220 grit) and carefully sanded with the grain for each panel so as not to scratch the wood. Once we had it completely cleaned off, we finished it with high gloss polyurethane. I don’t think we stained the wood first but it’s been awhile and it’s possible we did. This picture is during the first coat (applied following the grain). Once it was dry we sanded very lightly, wiped away the dust, and coated it again. When I think about salvaging these things, I tell myself it's not just the wood (decompostable or burnable for power) that I'm salvaging, but the resources and person-hours spent making it. Trees were cut and hauled and milled to size, the pieces transported, machined down, turned on lathes, planed, routed, cut, and glued. Even on a factory-made piece there's a bit of history and it's worth keeping around if possible.

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? 

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.

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)

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.

This is the machine translation (Argos Translate) of Lidl’s “zero waste” announcement: --- The revenues generated by this initiative will be fully donated to the Belgian Federation of Food Banks Monday, 10 February 2020 — The Lidl supermarket chain launches the "Good appetite, Zero gaspi" project in all its Belgian stores. The goal of this initiative is to limit food losses and to allow Lidl to reduce food waste by 25% (as compared to 2015) by the end of 2020 and 50% by 2025. The discounter sells products that are always consumer-friendly at broken prices such as cartons of fruit and vegetables of 3kg for 1€, meat and fish to be consumed the day for 0,50€. Revenues generated by "Good appetite, Zero gaspi" will be donated to the Belgian Food Bank Federation. Broken price products to stop food waste The "Good appetite, Zero gaspi" initiative will significantly reduce the food losses of the ensign. “By 2020, we aim to reduce food losses by 25% compared to 2015 and 50% by 2025. Since today, the "Good appetite, Zero gaspi" project has been implemented in Belgium, where every day we present to our customers different food products that are always consumer-friendly at a small price: * 1€ for dry products with slightly damaged packaging and cartons of 3 kg of fruit and vegetables * €0.50 for all types of meat, fish and pastries to be consumed on the day * €0.20 for dairy and ultra-fresh products (compound salts) to be consumed on the day. » Philippe Weiler, Lidl Sustainability Manager Lidl Belgium has a structural agreement with federation of food banks in Belgium. The revenues generated by this initiative will be donated to these two associations. Lidl wants to be a state-of-the-art sustainability supermarket by 2020 Lidl has recently presented a new sustainability strategy composed of 20 ambitious goals by 2020, and a goal is dedicated to food waste. Philippe Weiler: "To achieve this goal, we must both fight food waste and revalue food surpluses. » --- Ideally the staff should notice that something expires today and put a zero waste sticker on it which marks the price down to €0.20 or €0.50, depending on whether it’s meat or veg. The problem is they are not diligent about spotting the expiring food. And worse, there are inconsistencies: * Lidl store 1: if you point out an expiration date of today to the cashier, they will ring it up under the zero-waste pricing (€0.20 or €0.50). The sticker is not needed.. just there to highlight the low price customers. So while standing in line it’s wise to check dates for stuff expiring today to lower the price. * Lidl store 2: they are apparently deliberately not putting the zero waste sticker on things expiring today. If you point out the expiration to the cashier, they refuse to alter the price. They even called the manager over who said “no zero waste sticker, no discount”. * Lidl store 3: sloppy about which sticker. Sometimes meat gets the veg price (€0.20) and often veg gets the meat price (€0.50). And the cashier refuses to correct mistakes. So unfortunately every store is different and #Lidl HQ says that’s expected. I have no idea what happens when something expires on Sunday, when they are closed (I saw a pastry on Saturday that expired on Sunday but didn’t think to ask for zero-waste pricing). They certainly will not sell something that is past the date under any circumstances. update --- I’ve found there are differences based on the item involved as well. Shops are not at all fast and loose with the zero waste discount if it’s a pie which goes from €5.50 to 50¢. * Lidl store 1: Refused to give me zero-waste pricing on a pie first thing in the morning, but they allowed the zero-waste pricing on a salad and some pasta. They said they will only markdown the pie in the afternoon. Next day I found another pie expiring that day. It was 1pm but they blocked me again, saying it had to be after **4pm**. The goal posts keep moving! * Lidl store 4: Refused zero-waste pricing on a pie mid day, but said after **5pm** they would. * Lidl store 5: Was there shortly after 5pm and happened to find a whole pie with the zero waste sticker (50¢). That must be very rare. update 2 --- * Lidl store 1: found an item on Saturday that will expire on Sunday. Zero-waste pricing refused. update 3 --- None of this matters because [we should be boycotting Lidl](https://slrpnk.net/post/8258852) anyway.

Over the counter remedies are costly in Europe (€9 for a bottle of cough syrup). And [like prescription drugs](https://slrpnk.net/post/4042891), they just slap an arbitrary expiration date on the pkg. My bottle of cough syrup which expired Dec.2019¹ is nearly empty. I took a risk and took swigs from it over the past few days. No issues. Potency was likely reduced but it wasn’t useless - coughing frequency cut down noticeably for a brief period. I did everything wrong and got away with it. It’s dicey that it’s in liquid form (which ages quicker than meds in solid forms). I also stored it in a room that gets quite warm in the summer. I always drank straight from the bottle. ***Research*** It’s interesting to note that the US military doesn’t want to stock up on meds and throw them away upon expiry. It would be a huge cost waste impacting public money. So the “Shelf Life Extension Program (SLEP)” was undertaken by the FDA for the Department of Defense. [The findings](https://www.drugs.com/article/drug-expiration-dates.html) go as far as to test drugs that are [28—40 years past expiry](https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-10-drugs-fine-years-expire.html): * Based on stability data, expiration dates on 88% of the lots were extended beyond their original expiration date for an average of 66 months. Of these, roughly 12% more lots remained stable for at least 4 years after the expiration date. Of these 2652 lots, only 18% were terminated due to failure. A lot of the advice is what you would expect.. vaccines and biological meds don’t hold up. Anything that’s crumbled and stinky is toast. Perhaps not so obvious: some anti-biotics can become dangerous. Freezing cough syrup is a bad idea but [refrigeration is sensible](https://www.cnbco.com/blog/how-long-is-cough-syrup-good-for-after-expiration-date/). 1. The Dec.2019 is technically irrelevant the moment the bottle is opened. Manufacturers only guarantee expiration dates on unopened packages.

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)

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. >

I’ve been kicked out of local junkyards ½ dozen times or so now. It’s a tricky game of trying to reach the waste pile when no one is looking, and also seeing who is on duty in hopes of at least ensuring that the same person doesn’t experience the pattern of kicking you out multiple times. Perhaps they would get aggressive and even block you from dumping stuff if you’re kicked out too much. Strictly speaking, it’s theft to take stuff from the junkyard. To be clear, the junkyards in my area do not sell parts. They just melt and refine the waste. The melt value is naturally less than the as-is value to someone who would repair or reuse. IMO, the #rightToRepair movement needs to expand to give the public access to junk before it’s recycled or dumped into landfills.

After eating the last pickle save the jar of pickle juice. Then when a broccoli stem becomes available cut the tough outer skin off, chop it up and toss it in the pickle juice. Works well. They reach a taste that’s very close what the pickles tasted like. After 2 or 3 cycles of that the pickle juice starts losing its strong punch. Adding vinegar and a sweetener can help at that point if you don’t have more pickle juice by then. Otherwise broccoli stems are not too versatile. They’re not that great in veg. stock because they bring a bit of bitterness. So I only use like ½ a stem in a pot of broth (which is wholly from veg scraps). My next experiment (untested): reusing juice from a jar of jalapẽnos to pickle broccoli stems.