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3mo ago

Question about analog voltmeters and antique telephones
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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 3mo ago
That's a really clever answer to the ringer light! I should definitely be able to piece something together from there.
It also hadn't occurred to me to just tap the phone itself for the voltmeter (though it feels a little less authentic than doing the line between them, somehow). It's very good to know about the voltage tolerance - I'll see what I can find!
Thank you very much for your help, I really appreciate it!

4mo ago

What brings you joy?

It's an incredibly useful skillset in my opinion (though I'll admit the saying about everything looking like a nail when all you have is a hammer probably rings truer than I'd like to admit). One of my main hobbies is scavenging furniture on trash day and fixing it up to practice furniture restoration. We got a ton of the stuff in our place that way. Sometimes I fix nice stuff I don't need and give it away on my local Buy Nothing page just to keep it out of the landfill.

I also turn replacement handles for knives and spatulas and other kitchen stuff on the lathe, and help out with carpentry projects for friends and relatives.

The big cost is space for tools and lumber. Where I am at least, tools aren't especially hard to come by secondhand so most of mine are hand-me-downs or purchased at consignment shops. Older tools are almost always better quality than newer stuff, except for safety, where some of the new ones have much better designs or features. I find most of my lumber through Buy Nothing or trash day - haven't bought any for years now.

4mo ago

What brings you joy?

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 4mo ago

Doing woodworking when I can get the time - there's nothing like a spinning chunk of wood or whirring bandsaw blade to narrow your thoughts down to just one topic. I have a hard time quieting my mind but that works pretty well. Probably about as close to zen as I get.

Creative stuff, writing/editing a solarpunk TTRPG campaign guide when my mind is in the right place, doing the art for it with a podcast on in the background when it isn't and I want to be distracted. Chipping away at these projects feels good. I can end the day thinking about what I got done and planning next steps.

A bit of volunteering gets me out and into the company of folks I get along with.

5mo ago

this is why schools still assign upton sinclair

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 5mo ago

Thanks, this was an unusually decent interaction all around

5mo ago

this is why schools still assign upton sinclair

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 5mo ago

Fair enough. Personally I'm skeptical that there is a "passive corrective method" for individuals to fix problems in either system (maybe a socialist can identify one for us). There aren't many passive solutions at all.

The way to fix these problems in either system is through regulation, governance, and collective action. People just buying other products hasn't worked to correct the flaws in capitalism, regulation has, so you might as well go straight to that either way.

5mo ago

this is why schools still assign upton sinclair

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 5mo ago

It's to peoples' best interest to choose a better product if they:

even know there's a problem in the first place. Corporations have a long history of covering up faults in their products, sometimes for decades, before independent tests or reporting reveal them (during which time they're outcompeting more legitimate competition on price).
competing products exist. Monopolies are a natural outgrowth of unregulated markets. It's always more profitable not to have to compete so endless mergers are a threat which have to be regulated but frequently arent. It's also much easier for an entrenched institution to crush or buy out new startups before they can become a problem. Add in collusion where companies that compete on paper secretly agree not to undercut each others prices and you end up with a market where there is no real competition and no need for costly innovation. And though regulatory capture may not exist in a truly unregulated free market, we certainly see it in real life, where superior foreign products can be outright banned from a market, the entrenched industry's products made artificially cheap through subsidies, and new safety laws kept off the books to protect the corporate bottom line.
the competing product is actually superior. We frequently see a race to the bottom effect where most people consistently choose the cheapest product available (often because wages have been stagnant for generations and they're poor enough that they legitimately can't afford better) and better, safer, more ethical products are simply priced out of the market, whereupon the companies making them either start cutting corners themselves or go out of business. And we can refer back to point one where just because one product has been revealed to be unsafe doesn't guarantee that the competitor hasn't managed to hide an unknown hazard in theirs.

Asking regular people, many of whom are perpetually overworked and exhausted, to extensively research every product that's made it to market (and to overcome marketing, illegal concealment of hazards, and collusion) strikes me as a kind of Just World Falicy thing, where the 'opportunity' to simply buy a better product becomes a chance to blame people for the bad things that happen to them. They should simply have bought a test kit and figured out that there was lead contamination in their baby formula. They should have studied auto accident statistics from the last five years to notice that that particular model routinely explodes in a fireball with the doors jammed. What did they expect buying something without doing their own research?

5mo ago

this is why schools still assign upton sinclair

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 5mo ago

They also ignore that companies will cheerfully skimp on safety to save a buck and then spend far more than they saved fighting legal battles against the government to prevent or delay relevant regulations, against their own customers (or their next of kin) who have been harmed by their products, and against any kind of criminal prosecution. They'll also spend millions on marketing to minimize awareness or the severity of the problem and to actively increase sales of the dangerous product. It's not exactly an environment designed for fair and informed decision making.

Speaking of unfair, the history of monopolies, market collusion, and the race to the bottom have given us plenty of examples of companies removing that choice of product quality from the board entirely. If the people making the unsafe or unethical thing buy out all the competition and eliminate or cheapen the former competition's products until the have the same problems, there's no choice. If the competition look at the market and realize they can also take unsafe shortcuts and remain competitive, there's no choice.

There's a long history of rich people framing exploitation as the freedom to choose to accept a dangerous product or job or place to live. After all, if people are poor and desperate and propagandized enough there'll always be someone to make that choice. And the lower they drive the quality of life, the more people will have to choose the same. But it's not about saving you money. They're not doing you a favor. It's about saving money for themselves and framing things so you thank them for it.

5mo ago

Which portion of the transport sector do you think is the most difficult to electrify aviation or maritime?

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 5mo ago

There are some interesting proposals for electric ships using containerized batteries which can be loaded/unloaded with the same cranes they use for shipping containers and charged in port. https://cleantechnica.com/2025/05/24/beyond-the-harbor-electrifying-short-sea-routes-and-hybridizing-blue-water-shipping/

It may not be suitable for transoceanic trips but a lot of shipping follows the coasts or even travels by river where this may be more practical.

6mo ago

Permanently Deleted

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 6mo ago

The reasons I've seen mostly have to do with upfront cost and convenience for maintenance. Support structures for solar panels can be pretty crude and basic if they're just sitting low on a field. For a parking lot you need a much taller structure which will likely deal with more wind, but which is also designed to minimize the number of support posts so it's not in the way, and to survive idiots running into it with their Ford fteen thousand.

If something goes wrong in a field the crew can just drive there and start working. If there's a problem with the panels over a parking lot they may need to clear part of the lot, bring in bucket lifts, etc.

It can definitely be done and I think it's a great idea all around but they're usually looking with an eye towards how quickly the project pays for itself.

6mo ago

Cat door in window

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 6mo ago

That seems like it would work quite well! Especially if the patio screen guarantees other critters won't try to come in.

Not sure what tools you have access to but If you have a table saw you can cut a notch into the wood for the plexi before you assemble the frame.

6mo ago

Cat door in window

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 6mo ago

I just helped my folks turn a porch into a catio - we used a layer of chicken wire on the inside with a layer of fabric bug screen on the outside. Years ago one of our cats got startled and ran right through a screen on our screen porch (fell one story into deep snow and kept right on going. He was fine, my dad was pissed). For this one we built wooden frames and stapled the screen and chicken wire on and attached those to the porch with wood screws. You could run slats from house to fence for support.

6mo ago

The Promised LAN

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 6mo ago

This sounds wonderful, I'd love to have that kind of network again. I'm curious about how they went about the technical side of things - if it's all tunneled together or if they're running cables to nearby houses and setting up wireless relays or something. There's so much cool stuff we could bring back if we weren't under constant attack from the internet at large.

6mo ago

The end (of Windows 10) is nigh! | Endof10.org wants to help Win10 users keep their old computers running with Linux

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 6mo ago

This is my go-to solution - I personally prefer Linux Mint with MATE for a desktop environment.

But if you, like me, have relatives who flatly refuse to use anything but windows (even as they complain about having to relearn the operating system every few years anyways!) then this might be useful to you: https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/22/windows_10_ltsc/?td=rt-3a

Whatever it takes to keep working tech out of the landfill and the potential replacement computers sitting on store shelves.

I really do recommend trying Linux though, it's been my daily driver for years, including all through college when my windows partition died and I found myself making due with the mint partition I was testing out just to get assignments done. For older computers and Chromebooks Alpine Linux is great but a little more work.

6mo ago

Quick fix for cracked plastic clip: thread wrap and superglue

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 6mo ago

This is cool, kind of a small scale version of resin and fiberglass! Thanks!

7mo ago

GM’s new battery will cut the cost of its electric trucks by over $6,000

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 7mo ago

The lack of official touchscreens/GPS/center console media etc seems like a good step - at the very least, unnecessary antennas and microphones should be easier to spot/replace with an old MP3 player with one annoying song.

7mo ago

Tesla Reportedly Has $800 Million Worth of Cybertrucks That Nobody Wants

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 7mo ago

So genuine question: are the parts like batteries/motors safe and otherwise good enough to be used in ICE conversions? Or is there some kind of software/network boobytrap to be circumvented? The car itself is a horribly flawed surveillance box, but it seems like the flaws I've seen are mostly a sort of problem by compilation, like the finished product is worse than the sum of it's parts. Is there a chance at least that this overproduction could help provide parts for conversion vehicles?

7mo ago

Totally me

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 7mo ago

Boss makes a dollar...

7mo ago

New Boycott schedule is up!

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 7mo ago

Depends on the area but thrift stores can be great for toys - if only because survivorship bias says anything that makes it there will last a long long time.