Solarpunk

The video is scored by Studio Ghibli I believe. I just wish it weren’t a Chobani advertisement lol

Edit: thanks @cerement@slrpnk.net for the decommified link, updated

[A collie enthusiastically running while wearing seed-distributing pouches]

Based on the excerpt from this Discworld book, what other items do you use regularly that would fit in this theory? (Boots and shoes are fair game!)

Text transcript for people who want it:

[The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.]

Bonus: suggest ways you can repair/restore your item/other people's items.

Hey punks! I would appreciate some creative input from you.

I am developing a small solarpunk workshop right now with the goal to get people to imagine a solarpunk future for their local region (a city in germany, but could be anywhere). My idea is to give a quick overview about solarpunk principles and then give them some materials to get creative with.

Now to my questions for you:

• What resources could I use to spark the solarpunk mindset in the participants?
• What materials could be used for the people to sketch their ideas with? (I tought about local city map, pen and paper for small stories, poems, drawings and sketches).
• What would you wish should be included in the presentation of the solarpunk genre/movement?

Thanks a ton for your thoughts!

Has anyone here ever made their own solar oven? I've cooked with a small portable one while camping but Id love to build my own backyard model I could make a few meals with at a time.

Most of the DIY solar oven projects Ive see out there are made out of cardboard and materials unlikely to last long. Id really like mine to last and be durable. You can buy nice ones I know, but Id really like to construct my own if possible.

Just looking for tips, thoughts, or resources you folks might have seen. Any suggestions on building it, using it, etc. are welcome!

I'm still experimenting with what is the easiest way to crosspost things I see on Reddit here. I'm currently just linking to reddit's server for the image. Let me know if this creates any problems.

[If I type here, will alt-text readers read this? This is a picture of a lush fantasy-style cityscape with a large pond surrounded by forests and chromed-out buildings.]

Old NFB film on sustainability in PEI, Canada. An earlier post with an AI generated image reminded me of the PEI Ark, a structure erected in PEI to research sustainable food growth in colder climates amid the OPEC oil crisis in the 70s.

Thought it might be of interest to this community.

Wanting to add high value content to this community consistently to keep it alive and interesting for new subscribers. Am excited for the future of this Lemmy community

Hope everyone is having a great day so far!

Branching off from my previous blog, Post Food Scarcity, I wanted to more deeply explore something that I eluded to in that post, and that is the Community Kitchen. How a shared space amongst the community fosters a sense of togetherness while also helping to reduce the redundancies of appliances and tools since not everyone would need to procure their own. Is it possible for everyone to come together in such a way? And how does that impact the daily lives and spatial needs of the individual? Find out here:

Solarium - A Shared Community

What's your opinion on this take? Could you envision yourself living in such a community? If not, what would you change? Always happy to hear other opinions, ideas, complaints, and experiences, so feel free to share! The more viewpoints I can experience, the stronger the ideas! 💪

If you made it this far, thanks for taking the time to read and hope you have a great rest of your day!!

I just discovered a solar project run by my electrical provider, that allows me to pay for a number of grids, and will offset my usage and electric bills. This is a multi-state large publicly traded electric company, not a fly-by-night outfit. Essentially, this is similar to having my own panels, and being plugged in to sell excess kWs, but the panels are in their solar farm, managed, and maintained by the electric company. The break-even is 12 years, and the life is 20 years. The breakdown risks are insured by them. The negatives are that at exactly 20 years, I would have to do it again.

You are the experts. Are there other risks that I do not see?

This is AI-generated, made to start the conversation about resources for building a solarpunk backyard.

I'm curious if I can post reddit-hosted content here without a redirect to the site.

For apartment dwellers, people with HOA restrictions, etc

What easy steps can we take to live solarpunk?

Can anyone recommend any good novels or short stories set in a solar punk setting? I read a lot of sci-fi but somehow have never read anything set in this setting, I guess The Culture books could be considered solar punk in some ways but it's almost too futuristic.

Since there was some complains about a country like Singapore controlling the narrative of Solarpink design, I thought I share an intressting project from Hamburg. The main structure is a massive WW2 era bunker. The walls are 3.5m thick concrete and steel, so demolition is not easy nor cheap. But it also means putting trees on top of it, actually is somewhat sensible. The bunker will house a permanent Nazi history museum, focussing on the reason of construction, a hotel at the top, a large concert hall and an art exhibition space. The green platforms at the site allow visitors to walk on top the structures to enjoy the views.

Obviousy this has some problems, mainly the capitalist hotel, but still a fairly intressting project and the aesthetics are pretty solarpunk.

Removing weeds is a chore few gardeners enjoy, as it typically involves long sessions of kneeling in the dirt and digging around for anything you don’t remember planting. Herbicides also work, but spraying poison all over your garden comes with its own problems. Luckily, there’s now a third option: [NathanBuildsDIY] designed and built a robot to help him get rid of unwanted plants without getting his hands dirty.

Constructed mostly from scrap pieces of wood and riding on a pair of old bicycle wheels, the robot has a pretty low-tech look to it. But it is in fact a very advanced piece of engineering that uses multiple sensors and actuators while running on a sophisticated software platform. The heart of the system is a Raspberry Pi, which drives a pair of DC motors to move the whole system along [Nathan]’s garden while scanning the ground below through a camera.

The Pi runs the camera’s pictures through a TensorFlow Lite model that can identify weeds. [Nathan] built this model himself by taking hundreds of pictures of his garden and manually sorting them into categories like “soil”, “plant” and “weed”. Once a weed has been detected, the robot proceeds to destroy it by concentrating sunlight onto it through a large Fresnel lens. The lens is mounted in a frame that can be moved in three dimensions through a set of servos. A movable lens cover turns the incinerator beam on or off.

Sunlight is focused onto the weed through a simple but clever two-step procedure. First, the rough position of the lens relative to the sun is adjusted with the help of a sun tracker made from four light sensors arranged around a cross-shaped cardboard structure. Then, the shadow cast by the lens cover onto the ground is observed by the Pi’s camera and the lens is focused by adjusting its position in such a way that the image formed by four holes in the lens cover ends up right on top of the target.

Once the focus is correct, the lens cover is removed and the weed is burned to a crisp by the concentrated sunlight.

It's the season for steam's summer sale, so here's some solarpunk-y games I've been eyeing, for anyone who's looking for something new to try this summer! (I haven't played most of these, they are just things that I've seen around that give me solarpunk vibes.)

• Terra Nil : an intricate environmental strategy game about transforming a barren wasteland into a thriving, balanced ecosystem.
• Pan'orama : a relaxing puzzle simulation game that allows you to create breathtaking landscapes using different types of tiles.
• Summer in Mara : a summer adventure with farming, crafting, and exploring mechanics set in an alien tropical archipelago.
• No Place Like Home : a cute and relaxing farm sim where you restore the environment around you.
• Cloud Gardens : a chill game about using plants to overgrow abandoned wasteland dioramas.
• Station to Station : a minimalist & relaxing game about building railway connections across a beautiful landscape.

Bonus, Games in Early Access:

• The Wandering Village : a city-building simulation game on the back of a giant, wandering creature.
• Coral Island : a vibrant and laid-back re-imagining of farm sim games, set on a beautiful island you must work to restore alongside the local community.
• World Turtles : a wholesome colony builder with the primary goal of sustainability, all set on the backs of giant space turtles.
• Diluvian Winds : a community management game set in a small hamlet at the foot of a lighthouse.

Got any other recommendations?

This is a cement factory turned into a residential building and art study. I love how they turned this brutalis functional factory still into something close to a gothic cathedral. Imho much more of a solarpunk vibe then many projects in Singapore.

Honestly I haven't tried it but I wouldn't mind certain things containing bug parts (on purpose) to make up for protein in them. And honestly that crunch sounds quite good.

Vertical farming, the best solution to support an ever growing population or just a scam?

IMHO it has a lot of potential but not being able to grow grains really is something that should be tackled sooner rather than later. But I could see this being used by self sustaining communities to provide lots of food while using very little space. And it's technically more environmentally friendly than just using vast stretches of land to produce the same amount of food.

TL;DR the world is running out of easily extracted copper at an alarming rate