I’ve seen refrigerated cooked rice turn pink and slimey in spots. I trash the dodgy looking stuff and fry the rest. Is that a bad idea? I got away with it twice so far. Now I leave the lid loose so some of the moisture can escape.

(edit) after reading the link posted by ‘solo’, I guess i should freeze rice if I don’t use it after a couple days.

Guess I’d try getting a separate mini-fridge, with a lock. When something is ~2 days before triggering the chronic waste manager, move it to the locked fridge.

I would add: if it tastes off, spit it out, as tasting does not imply swallowing.

Worth noting as well that the taste test can kill you when dealing with some very toxic variaties of wild mushrooms – even if you spit it out.

Nutrition doesnt generally need to be minmaxed;

That may be true superficially but some ppl have an interest in minimising waste. On the one hand, we want to minimise food waste. But if that leads to consuming more food to get the needed nutrition we may still be failing to minimise waste as we try to minimise waste. So consider these two scenarios:

1. Bob eats 1 freshly picked bell pepper. But this habit led to throwing 1 bell pepper away because he routinely eats the freshest option.
2. Alice, who tries to minimise food waste only has near-spoiled bell peppers. So she eats 2 bell peppers as they lost nutrition.

In both cases 1 bell pepper was wasted. It’s oversimplified¹ in order to convey the problem. Alice may not be consciously choosing to eat more but when living the zerowaste lifestyle her body naturally demands bigger portions (we might hypothesize).

¹ No idea if 50% nutrition is lost in aging from freshest to near ruin. It’s arbitrary for the sake of the example…

Well I have no problem stuffing my face. If I had a robot chef there would be no problem at all. But anticipating my future motivation to prepare the food is where it gets dicey.

I recently found out about a local non-profit which collects scrap unused building material. Then it gets stored until someone needs it. You can’t just be a taker though… they keep track of who gives what so if you give something you then have an allowance to take stuff. It’s a kind of bartering. It works around the hard-ass repair/hobbyist-hostile municipalities like yours.

According ro research inspired by one of the scientists kids, nutrients and vitamins rise when exposed to sunlight, and deteriorate when in a dark fridge.

I appreciate the link but I didn’t quite catch the nutrition analysis. They did not seem to state outright that nutrients rise, though they say the daylit food has more anti-carcinogens. Are you infering that the tissue loss implies a loss of nutrition?

There was a finding in research a couple decades ago on mushrooms, which accumulate vitamin E or D under sunlight. I forgot which but it the same vitamin we directly get from sun exposure.

But then we must work out how to exploit this knowledge. Mushrooms need to be refrigerated. Should they be in a fridge with a glass door? Or does the glass block most of the UV which is likely the key ingredient anyway? I keep them in a dark fridge but if insects are not around I will take them out of the fridge in the morning so they get sunlight in their final day.

Potatoes need to be kept in darkness to slow sprouting. But I wonder if I should treat them like mushrooms and give them a final day or two of light.

Smart shopping

Not exactly sure what this implies. I buy edgy food which was slow to move off the shelf so the price gets cut down in order to make it move. It’s cheap¹ and mitigates food waste outside my house. If by smart shopping you mean to buy the freshest food, well then that would prioritise nutrition over rescuing local food from waste. Which is smart is not obvious to me.

My kitchen becomes like a ER triage to eat food before it spoils. And sometimes I have to do surgery and make sculptures. That is, carving decayed parts out of partially ruined food. It’s food in its least nutritional state, but there is still something to be said for training your immune system.

Ex. I eat leftovers from last night’s dinner for lunch the next day.

Leftovers the next day risks giving you more of the same nutrition you still have traversing your body from the previous meal. So I deliberately skip a day or two on leftovers to ensure the nutrients are replenished when they are needed more (which is after they left the system). Leftovers are also less urgent because the cooking kills the baddies and enables the spoilage clock to be reset.

¹ Since the edgy food is generally ½-off, it’s fair to say I can buy twice as much for the same price. I don’t really know if that more or less than compensates for the age-induced decline of vitamins.

i’d say throwing away edible food is being overly cautious.

That’s not really what’s happening. People who eat the freshest food first don’t toss edible food. They still wait until it’s rotten before tossing. It’s just that when you eat the freshest food first, more food ends up reaching the spoiled state.

editing to add: happy cake day, activistPnk!

I’m afraid it’s a fake cake day to throw off the doxxers (who now know that I was born on one of the other 364 days).

That’s some nice scrap wood. My region is so overloaded with Ikea melamine particle board garbage that I only keep two pieces around. On any spontaneous day that I need wood, I can cycle around the neighborhood and find a pile of Ikea discards. Every minute of every day, there is something.

Solid wood would be worth saving but it’s much more scarcely dumped on curbs than Ikea wood.

Various cheap LCD panels can be repurposed using a $10-20 driver from Ali or eBay.

When a Thinkad is disassembled, there are like 20—40 fragile pins on the connector. I always just assumed it was custom and proprietary. Although it probably would not make sense for IBM to be in the LCD business, so I guess the pins must be standard (probably not the connector though). From there, can I trust the wire colors?

I ask because sometimes I find a destroyed laptop like a keyboard and base busted in half, where the LCD could be salvagable.

The most recent trashed laptop turns out to be purely the display, which was torn off, scratched up, and hanging by a wire. The power connector was smashed. But I got a Thinkpad docking station which supported an external display and a new power input, and it works just fine. It is now the fastest “desktop” in my house.

Precise (but weak) stepper assembly from old CD/DVD drives.

I had to look into how that’s useful. Apparently printers, engravers, and laser cutters are made with them. Requires a lot of ambition but if I really need one of those things and I hate what is in the enshitified marketplace, it might be interesting. I imagine the difficulty is in all the other components needed for those things.

Some old keyboards (especially programmable ones) have a DIP chip, if you are into building keyboards.

I did not know that was a thing. I have lots of spare keyboards and thought of using the linux app keyb to map chars like ½, “, ”, etc. to it. Thanks for the suggestion, b/c I think my plan of having two keyboards in front of me is a bit wasteful of desk space.

I don’t know. I might have to try to track one down since I currently have devices I cannot control easily.

Is there an IR receiver or something we’d need?

Woah, I’m glad you asked. I have an Iguana USB IR transceiver which runs on FOSS.

It has an IR sensor which can record remote control signals. But the project has quit! No idea if there is a competitor, but given their rationale (slow sales) I guess not. Wow… that sucks. I wonder if they just had bad marketing. Instead of targetting people like me who use the device to control a decreasingly popular MythTV rig, they could have targetted governments and NGOs with an interest in e-waste salvage operations. I just cloned their repo and fetched their last software release since the days are numbered.

A city that accummulates a massive collection like that could hire someone to record the signals of all those remotes and enter as much data as possible. Then the stash could help salvage appliances that would become e-waste worldwide, as opposed to just those in that city.

There are RCs like this with no name, no model, no part number… just totally unidentified (should be illegal):

So ideally the DB would also store pics of them.

I don’t have it in front of me but it’s the cylindrical fabric speaker that looks like this:

https://www.cravingtech.com/best-alexa-smart-speaker-for-the-price-with-great-sound-bass-amazon-echo-3rd-gen-2019-review.html

That will be nice if I can put Lineage OS on it. Though I have to wonder how useful a headless unit could be… if I could get a remote display on my PC that would be cool.

I have 25 tabs open on Ungoogled Chromium w/the Sway window manager, without struggle, and a few other workspaces and browsers going. But Sway may be making the difference. I think things like Gnome and KDE can be a bit heavy.

4gb is what I have. That’s plenty for linux.

I actually prefer 2008 chips (no spy chips / management engine). And yet my local charity rejects any laptop older than a Windows 7 sticker. So the hardware I prefer gets trashed before I can get to it because it’s presumed too old for anyone.

If you put it on freecycle.org with a pic of the stuff sitting on the curb, there is no calling dibs. It’s a competition between other takers and the rain which can inspire quick action.

If someone is offering a public wifi, there is a reasonable expectation that other people sitting in the same cafe for example can’t listen in on what you are doing on your device. As older wifi encyption standards are easily compromised, this requires enforcing a semi-recent wifi-standard. You can of course make your own judgement in your own home, but in a public space it is different.

I think WEP is pretty much dead. Even my first Android (2.2) supported WPA. WPA can still be snooped on with some effort when the attacker has the PW. Apart from that, you’re still trusting whoever supplies the uplink. I do not think people have an expectation of privacy on public networks. There are far too many compromises, the most trivial being an imposter AP. I always tunnel in some way over public wifi by using either Tor or a VPN. So even WEP or fully open is still secure enough for my use.

I would not want user nannying to get in the way of someone who knows how to secure themself. I’m also not quick to support the idea of dumbing down the community so people don’t develop self-defense skills and take personal responsibility. If someone cannot be bothered to tunnel, then hopefully they would buy a device that is configured to insist on WPA3. But in the end this is the user’s responsibility one way or another while nannying is a kind of tyranny.

As for SSL certificates… this isn’t only a captive portal issue. If your device has such outdated root certificates that you run into issues already at the captive portal, you will have also issues with each and every website that uses https.

They are completely independent. I can do what I need so long as the captive portal doesn’t fuck with me. Captive portals can be broken in more ways than the web generally is. And when a captive portal is shit, it’s a disaster across the board… It breaks all apps that need the net.

Root certificates are only cycled out of use for good reasons, such as them becoming compromised, so by using an super old root certificate on your device you are wide open to MITM attacks on supposedly secure connections.

I don’t recall if the sparse cert errors I had were due to root certs or normal certs, but I should indeed pay close attention. My only persistent problem was getting OSMand maps, which I solved by side-loading the maps from a PC.

But enforcing certain security standards on public wifi so that random people can not see everything you are doing online is good.

There is a blind “for security reasons” excuse the industry likes to use to force people to chronically upgrade their hardware… to boost sales. I try to stay immune to that bait.

The access point needs to protect itself – full stop. An access point that oversteps their authority and becomes a nanny that dictates security practices on others without knowing their security posture and threat model to protect people from themselves can bounce. We don’t want their “help”.

In any case, the DB I am proposing is factual. Whether a fact in the DB is “good” or “bad” is for the users of the DB to decide. And either way, it’s useful.

And I would advise against going online with a device so old and unmaintained that it has issues with its SSL root certificate.

Can you give more details? If the certs have not expired, the device is able and willing to make a connection. If the certs fail due to age, the app makes the user aware of the problem (and in the case of OSMand it refuses to use the connection regardless of the user’s wishes). So what’s the issue?

Note the context is with captive portals. If someone thinks it’s a good idea to force a captive portal on a public LAN to get a simple “I agree” signal, why might that be sensible? AFAICT, it’s down to a clumbsy admin who did not think through the consequences of SSL on a captive portal. The captive portal is not in itself a useful resource for the user. It’s just an obsticle with the sole purpose of getting a signal that someone agrees to the text of a policy that is public anyway. Once the obsticle is out of the way, it’s the independent job of every resource to implement appropriate security for the task at hand, which in come cases may not involve SSL at all (e.g. accessing an onion server). But when the captive portal blocks someone due to (what I regard as clumbsyness), the apps the user would use are blocked regardless of how well they are secured.

(edit) Some captive portals collect personal info, where you must submit an email or phone number. SSL is probably unavoidable in those cases, but ideally the app would collect that info as well. We would want the DB to indicate that sharing personal data is a precondition to access.

Nice that the link ultimately leads to a PDF, for those of us who have ditched residential Internet but like to collect stuff for offline reading.

the wii

The wii was mentioned in the PDF but not in any detail. I was able to install some FOSS apps on an otherwise useless wii (which was designed to be dependent on a cloud store which has been unplugged). One useful app converted the wii into a media player that could access Samba shares on the network. So if you are lucky enough to have non-“smart” TVs (read: non-snooping TVs), you can use a wii to access your video library – which can be fed by MythTV.

Roku (not mentioned in the PDF)

Roku abandoned the consumers just like Nintendo did with the wii. But you can also install a FOSS app that makes the Roku into a media player that you control, which can be fed by MythTV content for example.

TomTom (not mentioned in the PDF)

There is OpenTom.

The problem – it’s all glitchy

The shame of it is that so few people are interested in keeping old hardware going that projects to liberate devices are half-baked and fizzle out with no persistent maintainers. Someone starts a work of passion but these one-man shows never get the traction they need.

No, I have no links or guides. It was an off-the-cuff idea. But speculatively, I would assume you could start by following one of many guides on how to configure an Android as a functional hotspot, such as:

• https://www.androidauthority.com/mobile-hotspot-setup-631280/
• https://www.wikihow.com/Use-Mobile-Hotspot-Without-Using-Data

Then cut off the uplink by removing the SIM chip or going into airplane mode (then re-enable wi-fi). I’ve not tested that. From there, if that works, you would need a web server. F-droid has a few prospects:

• a standard webserver
• a file server that uses HTTP
• a webserver specifically to serve sensor data

Ideally you would also have a redirection mechanism that acts like a captive portal and redirects all traffic to your server. That’s getting a bit beyond me… perhaps a firewall like Netguard or AFwall could do that, but I’m not sure.

If you can root your phone

Only certain phones. I tried several different hacks out in the wild for my version and they failed. It’s also an off-brand phone that gets no notice by any of the alternate OS projects so flashing is not an option either.

you can install whatever location mocking app from fdroid,

What exactly are you referring to? The stock AOS already supports mock locations. And I’ve used it. But not many apps are designed to make use of the mock location. I vaguely recall coming across an app that hacked the official GPS API to use the mock location in order to fool apps that are naive about mock locations, but of course that bit only works on rooted phones.

It’s a shit show all around. But in any case since not all phones are rootable, apps need to be written to specifically read the mock location feed as a GPS alternative.

Network based location is available via other ways, not just by the goog, if you install microg

I heard of microg before; looked into it, and went no further. I don’t recall what the problem was, but I vaguely recall that it still requires some kind of ties to Google.

(edit) MicroG is proposed as an alternative to playstore. I used to use Raccoon, a desktop app to fetch playstore junk. It still required a Google login to use Google’s API. The circumvention was to use a shared account. I imagine that’s also how microg must work. But I eventually decided Playstore garbage does not belong on my phone anyway. I will only use apps I can obtain outside of playstore.

or only its location part unifiednlp, you can get quick rough location from celltowers and even crowd sourced wifi based location, formerly collected by mozilla, nowadays by poziton.

If there is some way of getting that info using an unrooted phone that has been Google-neutered to the full unrooted extent, I would be interested. I could not remove most of the Google infra but I could disable it. I had it in my notes to check out Unified Network Location Provider and forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder.

My notes also mention this app, which only works on recent phones (not mine):

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.wigle.wigleandroid/

Not sure if that was the barrier that stopped me looking further.

In any case, there is still a role for old TomToms to play here. Using cell towers and wifi APs requires your navigation phone to have those radios powered on, which need energy.

Also when people would dig through the piles they would often throw shit everywhere

The problem is that they are in piles to begin with. I have climbed on piles of appliance waste stacked ~5 meters high. These are not neat stacks but randomly dropped/tossed things which roll when you step on them. I fell once and got bruised but was lucky I did not get impaled. I’ve been kicked out of junk yards ½ dozen times.

The problem with the chain of disposal is the public tosses something out and the privately-operated metal recovery business immediately claims it as their property to be cashed in for its melt value. They immediately treat the incoming appliances as garbage. A middle step is missing. The middle step should not involve a massive pile of junk that is dangerous to climb. Large appliances should all be on the ground with space around them to inspect. The metal recovery business should not have a claim on the property before this middle step.

Seems like a good approach for the scale. It’s quite thin but I’ll see if I can add a mechanical switch.

i might try this for the calipers. But the battery cover for the scale uses a screw… so i might opt to hack that to use external power of some kind.

That’s interesting… I thought a Scandinavian country was known for banning ICE cars. Though apparently Ethiopia is getting credit for the first to enact the policy.

Though in principle it would make sense to have an exception so that someone in Ethiopia could to do ICE→EV conversions if they wanted.

The pics are a bit deceiving. They make it appear as if you get uniform thicknesses, but is that often the case? I doubt it. When a building is demolished, it’s disturbing how sloppy and chaotic they are. They just smash it to bits, producing all different sizes and shapes. I wish they would think about reuse. They could take a cutter and cut uniform blocks off the building which can then be used like building blocks. Instead you got a gnarly mess of blobs with rebar sticking out.

Anyway, I think it’s common to buy much less concrete than you need for a driveway, then mix urbanite with the wet mix so a large portion is reused. I’ve not done it myself but probably entails soaking the urbanite in polyvinylacetate (PVA aka wood glue). I once had to repair a broken concrete step as well as patch some existing stucco. If I had just put new concrete where needed, it would not stick to the old concrete well. So many bonding layers are needed. You water down PVA and paint that onto the old surface. Then when that’s ½ dry you do it again but with a little concrete in it. It’s like a sloppy slurry… gets everywhere. Then again with a thicker layer. Then you also add PVA in the new concrete mix. That’s how to make it bond. So it’d be the same idea with urbanite. It would only trust that for non-structural projects though. Probably wouldn’t want a foundation relying on it.

We are indeed.

Of course when talking about designs, that’s about the future. After a design has been implemented, it’s too late. You can change a past design but it would only be for a future production because a design has already served its purpose after implementation. Apart from that, you would need a time machine.

But the right to repair in the EU is not just about designs. Design is only a small part of it. If a dishwasher were to end production 1 year before the right to repair law is enacted, that last dishwasher is already under a statutory warranty for another year, and likely under a commercial warranty for a year or three more. So spare parts would already be in production just to satisfy warranty obligations. There would be nothing radical about extending that since it would not have stopped production anyway. It would be foolish not to take that opportunity. And with manuals… who loses manuals? Consumers do, but not likely producers. Mandating that literature be made available for old appliances would be reasonable, at least in electronic form. The EU would be foolish not to make literature disclosure retroactive. Some EU countries will even enact retroactive taxation. If they will do that, anything is possible.

Emulation is an extremely CPU intensive activity particularly when you are emulating a different instruction set at the hardware level. If you are emulating a gaming system rather than just running that gaming system, you’re doing it wrong (from a permacomputing PoV). The simple physics answer is to pick up an snes at a yard sale for $5 and save it from the landfill, instead of blowing a wad of cash on new hardware you don’t need. Then hack that snes to do whatever you need, such as to attach a copy console. I hacked a Wii to act as a media server, so it can not only play the old wii games but also play AVI movies from the LAN via samba.

Your take is like saying: I want to simulate a nuclear fission reaction in my livingroom… these old PCs suck and should be tossed. Of course if you select an obscure and heavy task you are limited in the hardware you can deploy for that.

It has not been established on when the law will take effect. If it takes effect the day before the last sale of a dishwasher, then they could have a ten year obligation starting instantly. Or not. Those points have not been pinned down in anything I’ve seen. This law has been discussed in the EU for the past 10 years now. It could be retroactive, if lawmakers decide to do that. If the last dishwasher was sold 5 years ago, they could have a sudden obligation to provide parts for the next 5 years forward.

Right to repair means the parts can’t be drm’d to legally prevent you from repair, not that all out of warranty products must be cheap to repair.

You may be confusing US variations of right to repair, or perhaps you are just judging by the “right to repair” title. US states are ahead of the EU and have different motivations. The EU goes much further than mere new design requirements. It is not doing this to be nice to consumers. It’s part of the “green transition”. If parts prices are priced out of the market, it defeats the purpose of the right to repair. The EU is actively trying to reduce unsustainable consumption of new products and prevention of e-waste.

Here is a jan.2022 clip from the EU Parliament briefing:

In its resolution of 4 July 2017 on a longer lifetime for products, Parliament proposed a number of actions to promote product reparability, including: measures to make repair attractive to consumers; requiring products to be designed for easy and less expensive repair; extending the guarantee if repair takes more than a month; discouraging the fixing-in of essential components such as batteries; urging manufacturers to provide maintenance guides at the time of purchase; developing the standardisation of spare parts and tools necessary for repair; encouraging manufacturers to develop battery technology to ensure that the battery’s lifespan better matches the expected lifespan of the product or, alternatively, to make battery replacement more accessible at a price that is proportionate to the price of the product.

Parliament raised the level of ambition in the current term by adopting two resolutions that call on the Commission to establish a consumer’s right to repair, with a view to making repairs systematic, Right to repair cost-efficient and attractive. Its resolution of 25 November 2020 on a more sustainable single market for business and consumers and its resolution of 10 February 2021 on the new circular economy action plan both called for the adoption of a set of measures, including: mandatory labelling on the estimated lifetime and reparability of products, such as a repair score and usage meter for certain product categories, and ensuring that consumers are provided with the information on availability of spare parts, repair services and software updates at the time of purchase; giving the repair industry, ‘including independent repairers, and consumers’ free access to repair and maintenance information; encouraging standardisation of spare parts; setting a mandatory minimum period for the provision of spare parts that reflects the product’s estimated lifespan, and reasonable maximum delivery times; and ensuring that the price of spare parts is reasonable, and that independent and authorised repairers, as well as consumers, have access to the necessary spare parts without unfair hindrances.

The projector manufacturer doesn’t control those costs. The Dcd isn’t drm’d. It’s not covered by right to repair.

The Right to Repair is not limited to DRM issues. From the briefing:

New implementing acts on servers and data storage products, washing machines, dishwashers, fridges, electronic displays (televisions and monitors) and lamps require manufacturers, for instance, to ensure that spare parts are available for a certain number of years after the last item has been placed on the market (e.g. ten years for washing machines and seven years for fridges); to deliver the ordered parts within 15 days; and to make maintenance information, including manuals, available to professional repairers.

I have yet to see a DRMd washing machine.

Of course manufactures can control the costs by shifting the cost onto the purchase price. If they must offer reasonably priced spare parts for ten years, then they might have to factor that cost into the sales pricing. And fair enough, because consumers should be discouraged from buying new stuff anyway.

I am writing this from a 2008 machine.

Bad software forces people into the market for new hardware. I can run the most recent version of Debian on this old hardware with 4gb RAM just fine. I will never for the rest of my life have to buy a PC or laptop because I keep finding abandoned PCs and laptops that are faster than what I have (faster than what I need). Microsoft will exploit these consumers for decades to come. Glad I am not feeding the ecocide.

The infrastructure established by the right to repair laws will not likely be that sharply keen to deny rights on old products because there is a cost in making that separation.

Think about why Dell computers snap apart easily. The EU forced Dell under environmental law to make their PCs come apart easily for disposal. Dell resisted at first but did not want to give up the EU market. So they complied. Dell also decided that it costs more to have a separate infrastructure for US consumers, so Dell made all their PCs snap apart wherever sold globally. So rights will manifest unintended benefits.

I’ve already accidentally exploited this. I /thought/ a right to repair law was already enacted, so I requested replacement rubber o-rings citing the not-yet-enacted right to repair law. They sent me the rubber rings (which cannot be bought in stores) at no cost.

I think France has subsidised some repair shops and incentivised consumers using them instead of buying replacements. So if some particular manufacturer tries to get persnickety about the timeline, 3rd party repair shops may be willing to step in.

I bought a DJ mixer, which turned out to be dead. I popped it open and could not see any obvious issue, thus fixing is beyond my expertise. So I plan to get out of warranty repair at a reasonable price.

I bought a projector and the DCD chip turned out to be bad. DCD chips are about as costly as a whole projector. So I expect the right to repair law to force the replacement part to be reasonably priced. I have the same expectation for the boiler mentioned in my other comment.

I have 2 vaccums with broken proprietary nossle/hose and one has a broken plastic part. Both manufacturers ignored my request to tell me of a local parts reseller. I doubt they will be able to ignore that request after the right to repair law passes.

I found a vaccum with missing proprietary floor rolling attachment (so it only functions as a hand-held vaccuum). No idea if the part I need is separately sold or if the price is reasonable. But the right to repair should ensure that repair becomes viable if it’s not already.

There are a lot of things I bought 2nd hand for which the manuals are either on tor-hostile websites, or jailed in various enshitified 3rd party manual repos. I hope the right to repair can be used to force the manufacturer to send me a paper manual that avoids the enshitified web. Not sure if that will be a reality as we get more and more to a point where people have lost the right to be offline through legislation that assumes everyone is happily online with no issues.

The right to repair (at least in the EU) is being written to facilitate both people who have the ability to repair and those who do not. If you do not have the ability to repair, the law will entitle you have the device repaired outside of the warranty for a reasonable price.

If you have the ability to repair, the law entitles you to manuals and parts, and the parts must be at a reasonable price.

I had a proprietary valve fail in a boiler. The valve should be under $10, but because the manufacturer bundles the valve with many other fittings people are forced to buy a kit that’s no less than $100. That’s one thing the right to repair should solve.

What do you mean by “good”? I see a constant stream of articles about EVs being enshitified with cloud-attached surveillance tech and vulnerable to unwelcome remote hacking. To privacy advocates and tech rights proponents this means the ones designed as EVs are worse.

If you mean efficient, I’d be tempted to say the difference would be negligible in the big scheme of things. Factory produced EVs are not only surveillance systems on wheels, they are more hackable by threat agents than they are by their owners. Whereas a converted EV is likely more conducive to a /right to repair/.

The best scenario I could envision is this:

You bring your car to shop of expert converters. You watch over their shoulder as they convert it. This serves as training to know your own car. And as well to know how the power generator is built. You drive away with an open source EV that you can fix yourself, pulling behind it a trailor with a power generator, which is then connected to the charging inlet of the EV.

Okay, that last sentence was a joke, to be clear… Some Teslas have been spotted pulling a power generator on a trailer which then plugged into the car. I hope that practice of towing a generator is not actually a serious trend.