I needed a new roof a couple years ago. Only 1 roofer in my whole city offered vegetated roofs. He only had experience with commercial installations, not residential.

So indeed there is a shortage. No idea why roofing companies are not on the ball with this.

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 saw a video at some point on how to build an ultrasonic by epoxying an u/s generator to the bottom of a metal tub. Many adhesives fail when a surface gets sufficiently hot. I haven’t opened it up yet but I imagine they used some kind of adhesive, as opposed to welding it. It would be interesting to know if your cleaner uses glue or welding to fasten the u/s generator.

No, in fact the cheap thing is allergic to heat. The manual says it’s important to fill with /cold/ water. And the running time is restricted to like 4 min. If I run two cycles, the water gets a little warm despite (apparently) having no heating element. The manual also says not to run more than 2 cycles. So it seems the thing is sensitive to heat and the water functions to keep the ultrasonic generator cool, which makes it a bit sucky. I know pro jewelers who have industrial cleaners that have heating elements to deliberately make the liquid very hot.

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

The page you linked is full of incorrect information

I guess you are talking about the hitchwiki not NPR, since you are talking about Europe. Would be cool if you would correct it, since it’s a wiki with open access.

The stock Lemmy client does that. Indeed it’s a poor design; and there are no decent Lemmy apps for desktop users.

other passengers? If there are other passengers on a freight train, they would be train hoppers too, no?

Are there trains that simultaneously function as both passenger trains and freight trains in Europe?

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.

For the laptop, you will want to ensure that the bottom of the laptop compartment is not at the bottom of the bag. A good design puts a few cm air gap between the bottom of the bag and bottom of the laptop compartment so that when you set down the bag, no shock reaches the laptop.

Maybe it’s common… not sure.

Indeed it would be impossible to have a complex diversified fund that is free of controversy from more than one person’s viewpoint. The ideal answer must rule out managed funds¹. So we are left with each investor picking individual stocks and bonds. But as the OP says, huge effort. Full-time job level of effort.

I do not believe it needs to be a huge effort, though. It’s a tooling problem. Crowdsourcing the labor could be part of the answer.

This thread just inspired this FOSS proposal.

¹ But they can still be useful. Rutger Bregman has said if someone is at least 70% aligned with you, that’s sufficient to join forces or something… I don’t recall exactly what he said but you get the idea. Some might say if a managed fund is 80% ethically aligned with them, that’s relatively good enough in the grand scheme of things.

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.

This page covers CF as a walled garden generally:

https://thefreeworld.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/18/cloudflare-has-created-the-largest-most-rigidly-exclusive-walled-garden-in-the-world/

W.r.t the fedi, Cloudflare blocks Tor and VPNs by default. So if you wanted to run your own Lemmy node, it would be unable to federate to Cloudflare nodes over Tor or VPNs. Lemmy end users are also oppressed by CF because images come from the source and are not cached. So if someone posts an image on a CF node and I use Tor to connect to slrpnk.net, I can only see the text and not the pics.

Users of CF nodes tend to be ignorant about the exclusivity of many clearnet sites, so they often unwittingly post links to tor-hostile sites.

Are you talking about a pure matter of size?

That too. The fedi is designed to make decentralisation /possible/. But obvisouly if network effect causes a majority of people to pile onto a single host, that’s not decentralised. Lemmy was not designed to be smart about this.

There are several node operators who do not give a shit about decentralisation or the balance that that requires. They just want to have a disproportionate amount of power over users so they can control the narrative through selective censorship. So they grow nodes that are obscenely large. Lemmy World goes to the extreme of using Cloudflare to circumvent the natural control of resource limitations, to grow out of control.

Some non-CF nodes also don’t know when to quit new registrations. I track them by calculating the average node size. If a node has more than 2 standard deviations above the avg number of users, I consider them centralised and avoid posting in their communities, just as I avoid posting in Cloudflare’s walled garden.

In the decentralised free world:

🗽☯lemmy.sdf.org/c/electronics (67/0) “Electronics”
🗽☯fedia.io/diysolar “DIY Solar”
🥧piefed.blahaj.zone/diy_hrt “DIY HRT”
🥧piefed.social/solarpunk “Solarpunk DIY”
🗽☯krabb.org/c/diy (8/0) “DIY”
🗽☯lemmy.perfecthluxury.store/c/DIY (1/0) “DIY”
🗽☯notdigg.com/c/diy (32/0) “DIY”
🗽☯europe.pub/c/DIY (71/1) “DIY”
🗽☯foros.fediverso.gal/c/maker (58/1) “DIY e Makers”
🗽☯hi-fi.community/c/diy (5/1) “DIY”
🗽☯hilariouschaos.com/c/diy (58/1) “DIY”
🗽☯lemmy.sdf.org/c/synthdiy (192/1) “synthdiy”
🗽☯lemmy.staphup.nl/c/diy_energy (2/1) “DIY wind water energy projects”
🗽☯szmer.info/c/diy (179/1) “DIY, majsterkowanie i takie tam”
🗽☯tech.pr0n.pl/c/electronics (5/2) “Electronics”
🗽☯feddit.uk/c/diy (284/4) “DIY”
🗽☯sopuli.xyz/c/bike_repair_tips (374/29) “Bike Repair Tips and Tricks”
🗽☯discuss.tchncs.de/c/electronics (2631/38) “Electronics”
🗽☯slrpnk.net/c/fixing (950/66) “fixing”
🗽☯beehaw.org/c/diy (8518/184) “Do It Yourself”
🗽☯discuss.tchncs.de/c/askelectronics (3901/326) “Ask Electronics”
🗽☯slrpnk.net/c/diy (3792/500) “DIY”

specifically audio:
🗽☯hi-fi.community/c/audiophile (33/1) “Audiophile”
🗽☯lemmygrad.ml/c/audiophile (115/1) “Audiophile”

There are also DIY / fixing communites on these centralised instances which should be avoided if you value digital sovereignty:

hexbear.net, lemmy.blahaj.zone, lemmy.dbzer0.com, lemmy.ml

^ Those are bad nodes simply because they have grown 2 standard deviations above the mean. Thus growing out of control.

The following are the worst of the worst because they are in Cloudflare’s walled garden:

lemm.ee, lemmit.online, lemmy.ca, lemmy.world, lemmynsfw.com, programming.dev, sh.itjust.works, zerobytes.monster

Coming from a Cloudflare node, you’re obviously not on the ball about privacy. But if you publish incidents just as you encounter them, it makes you trivially doxable.