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.

Downtime by a freedom-respecting trully decentralised node like slrpnk.net really exposes how Lemmy clients leave a LOT to be desired.

The prospect of data loss is gutting. A proper client would be syncing threads of interest between the server and my PC, so during downtime I can still at least locally access past content. No proper clients exist for Lemmy.

Indeed. The instances that have solid uptime have, in most cases, sold their soul to the devil (aka Cloudflare, which is a centralised threat on the free world and all things good).

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.

I agree. But you have to start somewhere. The guideline has been converted into legislation in Belgium since last week.

Do you have more detail on what was implemented? I could only find this repairability index, which I suspect won’t be much more useful than energy indexes and nutrition indexes.

This is why I said at the local level. City council cannot change federal laws.

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.

The EU has been grappling with right to repair laws for over 10 years now. It’s a complete shit show.

At the moment, a washing machine maker in the EU is only required to release repair documentation to professional repairers who are insured, not consumers. And they only have to do it in the 1st 10 years, not in the time period that things actually break. At the 10 year mark, they automatically lose the docs and stop making parts.

The law you reference is not yet in force AFAIK. But when it comes into force and each member state eventually legislates, look at what we are getting-- from your reference:

A European information form can be offered to consumers to help them assess and compare repair services (detailing the nature of the defect, price and duration of the repair). To make the repair process easier, a European online platform with national sections will be set up to help consumers easily find local repair shops, sellers of refurbished goods, buyers of defective items or community-led repair initiatives, such as repair cafes.

That’s crap. It’s fuck all. Consumers are not getting service manuals. They are just being told where they can go to get someone else to do the work. We can of course already find repair cafes because they publish their own location. But repairers at repair cafes are just winging it. You cannot bring them a large appliance like a washer. They don’t even have water and drain hookups. And even if one repair cafe made an exception for large appliances, their repairers are not insured and thus cannot legally get access to service manuals.

Everything at the state/fed/intl levels is a total shitshow. This is why I asked in the OP what can be done at the local level.

I should have linked the parent thread. Federal laws are a shit show. In the US, most states have paltry R2R protections typically only covering cars, wheel chairs, and farm equipment.

This is why I am collecting ideas for what we might petition LOCAL govs to do, like city councils.

I don’t think that is true. I never heard of a creativity test or measurement as a precondition to copyright protection. As I understand it, anything you write (regardless of artistic creativity) is automatically protected under an all rights reserved copyright unless you explicitly state otherwise.

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.

So email is actually fine, but some companies which offer email services are highly problematic and should be avoided.

“some companies” includes MS and Google, which likely covers at least 75% of the world’s email recipients. While most of the other ESPs pull the same shit as MS and Google.

So no, email is not fine in any general sense. You can carve out an exceptional case where it’s fine if you can twist your correspondent’s arm to use a rare non-problematic service, but that’s unsurmountable in most situations. You cannot demand that your gov switch to Disroot email to contact you using non-problematic email.

I don’t want to imagine using fax and paper for distributed software development.

I don’t want to imagine a world where everyone is forced to share sensitive information with an ecologically harmful surveillance advertiser.

What if you want to sell the house

I’ve not read the contract yet. Considering they include removal an reinstallation labor for free if someone renovates their roof, they theoretically might as well relocate them to another house when moving within their service area (which is constrained as well by the region of the green certificates).

What happens when you want to exit the contract within the 30 years?

Certainly you can buy the gear. And if you buy all the panels you are out of the contract. Price per panel as they age is something like this:

• years 0-5: €850
• years 5-10: €750
• years 10-15: €650
• …
• year 30: €0

If you want to exit the contract and return the panels, I have no idea. But since these prices seem to be heavily inflated to cover their labor, I imagine it’s quite uninteresting to return the panels because they likely factor in the labor.

When the sun is shining at peak brightness, what’s the guarantee that you get to use all of it?

All the boxes have LCDs. The 1st box shows the power generation. Then another box shows what of that you are consuming. I don’t recall what the 3rd box shows but I can only imagine it’s the energy fed to the grid. I assume the original electric meter is still installed, in which case it might be possible to check the math.

There could still be shenanigans because it’s probably hard to verify. I think as a low consumer I might be better off buying the panels and getting an i/o meter (not sure what the correct term is but something that compensates me for what is fed back to the grid).

Anyway, I appreciate the reply. I’ll have to mirror some of those questions to the supplier.

I can only guess. I don’t think that could even be in contract. My guess:

• another company buys it: the buyer takes over the contracts
• liquidation: normally assets go to the creditors. But every homeowner is a creditor for the property in the future. So I think a reasonable court would just turn ownership over to the homeowner. OTOH, the energy company is also a party to the deal because the energy supplier gets the unused power. Perhaps the panels would be taken over by the energy supplier until the 30 year mark.

The cost of installation, wiring and transformers is more than the cost of panels.

They likely factor all those costs into the panel costs. But would labor and parts overhead represent 9/10ths of €8500, for example? Looks like they install 3 boxes in the basement plus panels for around €7500.

That may be where the fat is. So I’m tempted to say this is only a good deal for someone who really wants hands-off on-grid solar power for 30 yrs. And perhaps a bad deal if someone foresees going off grid and doing their own labor.

After the 30 years of “borrowing” the panels, who pays for their removal and recycling?

I assume that’s the homeowner because the supplier simply makes it all the homeowner’s property after 30 years… likely so they don’t have to deal with it.

I just get a white screen, even after enabling JS. I have images disabled. Is the whole page just an image?

They’re slow

Okay but that’s not the real deterrant. It’s the cost you mention. I would like to take a transatlantic cargo ship despite the extra long journey, but the cost blows it.

I don’t think cargo ships do much better on GHG than jets. But an airship would be vastly more eco responsible than ships or jets. Cost is really the issue though and that can be solved. People taking jets could be forced to subsidize those traveling more responsibly.

Today human hibernation is widely thought to be crazy talk but it’s not far off. We will see it in our lifetime. People in hibernation eat less, need less space, and need less customer service.