Solarpunk technology

Due to a quirk of geology, the purest quartz in all the world comes from the picturesque town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The mineral, created deep within the earth when silicon-rich magmas cooled and crystallized some 370 million years ago, is essential to the production of computer chips and solar panels.

China, India, and Russia provide high purity quartz as well, but what’s mined there does not match the quality or quantity of what lies beneath the Blue Ridge Mountains. With Spruce Pine among the scores of Appalachian communities reeling from Hurricane Helene, the sudden closure of quartz mines that have supplied chip manufacturers for decades has rattled the global tech industry. But this quartz is vital to the solar industry too. And while industry experts expect companies to withstand the temporary closure of the town’s two mines, it highlights the precarity of a clean energy economy that relies on materials produced at a single location — especially in a world of increasingly ferocious natural disasters.

Helene’s impact on Spruce Pine “absolutely lays bare the danger of having a monopoly in any part of the supply chain,” said Debra DeShong, head of corporate communications at solar manufacturer QCells North America. QCells, which manufactures photovoltaic panels in Georgia and is building an additional facility that will manufacture the components needed to assemble them, is evaluating whether the Spruce Pine mine closures will impact it.

Just to be clear, the noise and air pollution that a switch to drone shows away from fireworks shows would save, would be incredibly significant. I don't think the cost makes it viable yet, but it's something to aim for.

cross-posted from: https://futurology.today/post/2274888

Tricks from the oil industry have produced a hot-rocks breakthrough

I've read following article on lowtechmagazine.com a while ago: Mist Showers: Sustainable Decadence?

I'm someone who showers quite a lot (sometimes up to twice daily), especially in humid summer weather. Usually, it's one warm one with a bit of soap, to get rid of dust, smells/ sweat, chemicals and dirt, and to sleep better, and then sometimes a quick cold shower in the morning without any surfactants, especially when I've sweat a lot in the night.

According to the article, showering often takes up to a few hundred liters of warm water in some cases, which is super inefficient to heat up. Reducing the water usage would also extremely reduce energy consumption A LOT.

In my case, I don't shower long, don't have the lever opened completely, and don't like (too) warm showers anyway. Still, I found the concept of spray showers very interesting, and I'm thinking about building one for myself. Someone has to do the first steps, right?

Does anybody here already have one, and wants to show their experience with it?

I also have a few questions:

• Was it hard to build?
• Do I have to consider anything, especially regarding safety and leaks (high pressure), clogged nozzles, and cleaning?
• How does the experience of showering with them feel like? Do you still get as clean as with a regular shower head, even without soap?
• How do guests react to it? Do they like it?

Thanks a lot! :)

Canonical YouTube link

A rehost of Linus' video YT

Piped

Welcome to the world of data colonialism, where the continuous extraction of data from our lives generates massive wealth for the few and suffering for the many on a global scale.

Andrewism at it again 🔥

Hi, I've had some good discussions here in the past, so I thought I'd reach out with an idea for a resource I'd like to try to put together for solarpunk writers and artists.

I was talking with A.E. Marling about a story he's working on, and one of the things he was looking for was uses for old cars.

I think the obvious answer you'll get from solarpunks (aside for limited use where it makes sense) is to melt them down for your society's steel manufacturing needs - electric arc furnace smelters running off a green grid, recycling, are about as close to zero emission steel as you're likely to get, and the metal is already refined so I think you could get pretty tight control over the quality on the output.

But I think reuse offers some much more interesting opportunities. I'm only just starting to learn about fixing cars, but I've already been struck by the fact that at least some parts in cars can go into other things. For example, it looks like certain old alternators can be used to generate a wide range of amperage and voltage, suitable for different needs, including welding: https://diysolarforum.com/threads/diy-low-cost-generator-from-vehicle-alternator-alternating-generator.1843/ so perhaps one could be hooked by belts (adjusting speed) to a waterwheel or something?

I feel like a solarpunk society with a really strong library economy might start cataloguing parts of more complicated machines (even salvaged from machines like cars).

And looking for parts commonalities and alternative uses strikes me as a really cool step towards building an open-source manufacturing sphere. Perhaps starting with a database of hardware/parts so they could be identified and repurposed, and alternatives identified.

So the actual proposal:

I'd like to try and put together a list of common car parts which can be reasonably used in other (more solarpunk) contexts. This doesn't have to be specific down to the model number or include a how-to guide, (though I recognize that some reuses might only be possible with a specific model) just something solarpunk writers could casually drop into a description of a room or workshop, or an artist could put in the background of a scene. Something that shows that this isn't a scratch-built future, but that they're repurposing stuff where they can. Think of all the weird ways postapoclyptic movies dress the sets with misused items from the present - we could offer something like that to solarpunk, but grounded in at least some practicality. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks!

edit: I've built out a list and it's located over here: https://slrpnk.net/post/13032570

Example: where wet bulb temperatures are the new normal, air conditioning is as vital as air and water because you will literally die without cooling. "You can buy all the electricity you can afford" is not good enough.

Little interview https://sfstandard.com/2024/08/23/holden-karau-fight-health-insurance-appeal-claims-denials/

Could a 3D-robotic loom be the answer to making fast fashion faster and more sustainable? Unspun's patented loom (so proprietary that we had to blur it for the video) can create clothing that fits you seamlessly every time, with just a scan of your phone, and far less waste than other clothing production methods.

Unspun is pioneering a different method of apparel production out of Oakland, California. By utilizing three-dimensional weaving, the start-up is building garments from the ground up, perfectly customized for the wearer's dimensions.

One other fact that stood out to me is that the weave uses more yarn (about 3x more, if my memory is right) than the average clothes today. That difference makes clothes more durable and last longer.

I doubt this will make the clothes more affordable, but the tech is interesting.

There's plenty of research around translating non-human communication into human language (https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/do-sperm-whale-calls-share-features-with-speech-or-song/), but what about translating human language into non-human speech? This is a fun little project from an interesting blog.

This is not just a "happy birthday" post for Linux, but also a reminder that despite it becoming big and professional, the freedom to tinker with Linux remains accessible.

I had to use this freedom recently when I discovered that V4L video pipelines could buffer up to 32 frames both on the encoder and decoder (unacceptable, we demand minimum latency!) so it was again time to recompile the kernel. :)

My previous time to recompile parts of Linux had been a week ago. Some hacker had discovered a way of tricking their WiFi card beyond the legally permitted power - with what I understand as thermal compensation settings. Wanting to taste the sweet extra milliwatts, I noticed that nobody was packaging that driver as a binary, so the only way to get it was to patch and recompile its kernel module.

Finally of course, thanks to Linux we have countless open-source drivers and if you want to venture onto the path that Linus Torvalds took - of building an operating system - congratulations, you have less obstacles in your way. :) Some people have taken this path with the Circle project and you can compile your homebrew and bare-metal kernel for a Raspberry Pi with reasonable effort, and it can even draw on the screen, write to serial ports and flip GPIO lines without reverse-engineering anyone's trade secrets. :)