Direct Link to the website and book download.

A few years ago I came across ultra-insulated high efficiency fridges, like this now discontinued SunFrost design.

Extra thick insulated walls are only part of the reason those are so efficient, but I figured, is it possible to at least get kinda close by adding extra insulation to the outside of a normal fridge? For many fridges, the answer is yes!

This old post from a 2012 eco-modding forum claims that, using just regular old styrofoam, they were able to cut down the energy use of their old energy-hog fridge from 274kWh per year down to 128kWh per year! (And they wrote a little guide on how they did it too).

Those sorta numbers kinda blew my mind. Not only is it possible to save more than half in yearly electricity costs, it also keeps an old fridge out of the landfill instead of being replaced with a modern, more efficient one. And bear in mind, that's just with styrofoam, which according to this handy little chart, has an R-Value of 4 per inch (High density EPS, i.e, Expanded Polystyrene, is what is usually referred to when we say styrofoam). Imagine what sort've numbers they could've got with proper insulating foam with an R-value of 10 or 13 per inch!

I was able to find another post on this topic over on reddit, which brings up the biggest downside of doing this modification: It's ugly.

I think that could be negated somewhat if you're creative and painted the foam (it'd probably look cool if you painted it white or black and sprayed a solarpunk logo with a stencil on it), but I suspect for most, this will be a dealbreaker for a main kitchen fridge (not to mention, you may not have enough clearance for the extra foam in your... Fridge slot?)

Still though, those power saving numbers are difficult to ignore, and I could see people going for this on secondary a garage fridge, like the dude in the second link did. It would have a dramatic effect in energy consumption if the ambient temperature around your fridge is usually pretty hot, as hotter outside temps dramatically increase energy useage.

Now you can't do this to any 'ol fridge or freezer. Some designs dissipate their heat through the metal skin of the fridge itself, and covering it with foam would quickly destroy it. But if your fridge has a visible condenser coil somewhere, either on the back of the fridge, or underneath, you're probably good to go as long as those coils remain uncovered and can get adequate airflow per their design specs.

I think this modification is probably best suited for older, less efficient fridges, where it'll give the most noticeable benefit in energy and cost savings. But if you did apply it to a modern high efficiency fridge, you could probably get near the efficiency of a factory-made ultra-insulated fridge (which currently go for a whopping $2,150!) for a fraction of the price.

EDIT: Found some more numbers in this video. Using 3/4" foam (less R-value), the guy in the vid achieved a 20% reduction in energy use. In comments, another person reported a 45% reduction in energy use after applying 1" foam.

So I'm going to an evening event which requires clear concert bags if you wanted to bring one. The max size is 12"x12"x6".

If I was going clear I at least wanted RGB, so I looked it up and it was $75CAD... Ouch, bags are like $20CAD.

So I thought about it and I wondered if I could make one.

So I got this bag and a 16.5ft string of fairy lights. I busted out the misses sewing needles and stitched in the wires to the fabric seme and this was the result.

I am extremely pleased with it. Next time I think I'd move the battery pack to the edge where the zipper starts or ends. Otherwise would recommend.

Bag was $19CAD and the LED's were $13CAD

After Event Edit:

So we came, we saw, we kicked it's ass... OK I did no such thing but adding LEDs certainly was a benefit. I made 2 of these bags, and honestly having big glowing somethings on your friends makes them insanely easy to find in a crowd. Especially for a night event which I went too.

The LEDs were even helpful when I was looking for a specific color of candy in the bag, or illuminating people for pictures.

My stitching was good and the wiring didn't get loose, but the same cannot be said for them bags themselves. As one of the straps on the bottom which holds a loop deteriorated and almost came off. I expected this, but it does sting non the less.

Going forward I am making these bags for everyone I'm going with. They are just so helpful.

I'm a mechanical engineering student with a fairly open brief for a short project. Have to draw a 3D cad model of a mechanism and do some motion analysis. So i thought i'd ask the fine folk of slrpnk if they had any projects that need a bit of ironing out.

Probably best suited if you have an idea and want see how the parts might move in 3 dimensions. I'd be able to tell you stuff like how much force/torque is in a particular part, letting you know how strong bits need to be.

Has to be a mechanism of some sort that i draw from scratch - let me know what dimensions i need to accomodate. And i have to present it to the class.

Experimenting with making cat litter out of biodegradable newspaper. It was pretty easy. Found a large strainer out on trash day.

1. Cut or shred recycled newspaper into ribbons.(above)

2. Soak in water with a little biodegradable soap

3. Strain and soak in plain water.

4. Sprinkle with baking soda and squeeze out water.

Let air dry for several days. I'll report back on how it worked. :-D

Eventually, I'd like to compost with mycoremediation for non-crop plants.

This is basically my most traditional bookbinding project. I used regular fabric cloth for the cover, and followed the traditional steps. The interesting (to me) change is the use of a CO2 laser cutter to mark the fabric. Here's the steps to making it:

I think it's fair to say that this book is extremely rare. The author has told me that the one physical copy I've made is the only one in the world, aside from an 'ugly stapled proof [he has] in a drawer somewhere.' The book was released on patreon as serialized fiction, with each of the six sections being made available as early drafts to a certain tier. The plan was that he'd put them up briefly, take them down again, then compile the drafts and eventually release a full published version. For life-happened reasons, the last step never got done (though the author was kind enough to repost the six sections on a discord channel when I asked).

Just the same, it was one of my all-time favorite stories, so if it wasn't likely to end up somewhere I could buy it, I was at least going to make a copy of my own.

So I took the six pdfs and started editing them using whichever online tools seemed like they'd do the best job. I started by cropping the files so they'd fit the correct aspect ratio for 8.5x11" letter paper folded in half, but started getting fancier as I went. I removed pages of bonus content from the back of each one so it'd flow better as a book. I merged them all together into one file (to reduce the number of mid-book blank pages from turning it into folio signatures). I even added a second set of page numbers to the bottom because the ones in the top right restarted in every section. I manually added some blank pages front and back.

By the time I was done, I had something to feed into https://momijizukamori.github.io/bookbinder-js/

I used that to create letter page folio signatures (with sets of 4 and 3 pages per signature). Now I had something I could actually print. We did so on a regular office photocoppier, and I can't recommend printing each signature separately and organizing them with paperclips enough. I would have lost my mind trying to sort them otherwise).

We start off the actual bookbinding in a pretty familiar way, taking each signature, folding each page of it in half with the bone folder, nesting them, and adding that signature to the stack.

Then I used my template from the previous bookbinding project to punch holes through each signature. One really nice thing about not having to trim whitespace from my pages is that the overall page size (and thus most dimensions of the cover except the spine) will remain the same no matter what is printed on the page or which printer I use. So I can reuse things like this template.

Here's my template with its measurements in case you want to reference it:

Eventually this left a nice stack of signatures ready to sew together:

As before, I sewed it together using waxed thread, following the Penrose Press Pretty Perfect Paperback Guide. I know there are a bunch of ways to do this, but I quite like this technique.

The next step is to clamp and glue the bookblock together. My clamp is pretty crude, it's just a 2x4' screwed to a piece of particleboard, with a couple ragged sheets of wax paper keeping the book from gluing to the clamp.

The goal is to get it as tightly pressed as possible while keeping the book block nice and square.

I didn't take a picture of this step for this project, so here's one from the last book. Note how the signatures are jumbled along the edge. I've gotten much better about lining them up recently.

I usually use my finger to work the glue into the gaps these days, it's faster and makes less mess than the brush. I think it gets into the gaps better too. I do three coats of glue on the spine. For hardcovers like this one, I then glue on a strip of mull or cheesecloth which is a couple inches wider than the spine on either side (front to back), and like an inch or so shorter than the top of the spine (heightwise).

Then I glue on a strip of watercolor paper (it's supposed to be manila paper but I don't have that).

Now it's time to start on the actual cover. I size the bookboard so it'll overlap the book block by 3mm on the top, bottom, and open edge. You're supposed to make it 3mm wider for that overhang, but then remove 6mm for the hinge by the spine (so that's actually -3mm) but I haven't had good luck with that, the open edge always seemed too close to the book block, so I just leave it the same width as the book block and slide it out 6mm. Somehow that works.

To get the spine width, you're supposed to measure the spine of the book plus one thickness of bookboard, but my spines often come out a bit thicker than the rest of the book so I'm sure about that guidance either.

That's the basic layout but I wanted the color to be darker. I was reusing fabric I bought for a halloween costume, but I was picturing more of a maroon color. I didn't want to buy new cloth when I had a bunch on hand I wasn't using, so I decided to dye this piece.

I started off trying to use some very old, expired, dark roast, decaf coffee, but the cloth just wouldn't take the stain, likely due to not being natural fibers. So instead I switched to using some old rit dye I had. I took lots of pictures for the coffee and almost none for the rit dye, so just pretend it's slightly blacker and in a different pot. And that I'm using a stick instead of a wooden spoon.

The nice thing is the rit dye isn't really going to go bad, so I just poured it from the old pot I used (we stopped cooking with it because the nonstick lining had started to flake) into an old jug. I've actually reused it since and it worked fine!

After a lot of hassle, the rit dye finally made the difference.

I ironed the cloth to smooth it out:

And glued the bookboard down onto it. Make sure the gaps between the spine and the front and back is 6mm and that they're square/in line with one another.

The next step is to trim 45s off the corners (leave one bookboard's thickness between the corner of the bookboard and the cut edge) and to clean up the edges.

Then I applied glue to the bookcloth and bookboard and wrapped each edge over:

My attempts at this look kinda crude, but you don't really see this once the endpapers are glued on, so it doesn't bother me yet. Someday I'll probably look back on it and wonder why I thought this was good enough, but for now, it works just fine.

(You might notice that I glued the cut-off triangles to a scrap of bookboard, that'll come into play later)

When you apply glue to the endpapers they'll kind of liquify a little and stretch, so trim a couple mm off the leading/open edge. It'll look better.

Okay, final assembly. This is where it all comes together or goes horribly wrong.

To do this you place the bookblock inside the cover and get it positioned how you want it. Open up the cover again, slide a piece of wax paper and a piece of scrap paper in between the topmost endpaper and whatever's underneath it. Make sure the scrap paper is on top.

Get your brush soaked with glue and then dab it on some scrap until its not really soaking where it hits. Use little vertical jabbing motions (Psycho style) to stipple the top paper so its completely glued. Apply glue under the mull/cheesecloth, then put the cloth in place, then apply glue on top of that.

When there's a good layer of glue everywhere take a deep breath and close the cover onto the page. Open it just a crack, look for wrinkles and smooth them out as best you can. If you open it too far the paper will pull away from the cover.

When you think you've got it as good as it's going to get, remove the scrap paper but leave the wax paper. Close the book, put something heavy on it, and hope for the best.

When its dry, flip it over and repeat the whole process.

We've now hit all the usual steps (except the end ribbon thing but I don't see the point of that). I was honestly very pleased with the results.

But lets get fancy with it. I had some time on the CO2 laser cutter at my local makerspace, and I'd seen online that people had managed to etch bookcloth, so I wanted to try finishing things that way.

We started with some tests, on very low power and working our way up. We weren't sure how well the poly-blend fabric would handle the laser, or what kind of damage it would cause.

We started with the settings for printer paper (95 speed, 10% power) and worked up by 5% increments, finding that the quality improved each time.

Once that was done, I banged out a quick cover layout by measuring the book, drawing a vector rectangle in those dimensions, and positioning the raster title in the middle.

We ran it with the lid open (runs as a test with just a visible dot) and made sure the rectangle followed the edges of the book.

I had to prop the cover open a little so it'd be more level (I used one of the little connector things we use to pin warped things to the work surface). Then it was just a matter of hoping for the best and rerunning the file with the lid closed.

It was kinda high stakes but I'm very pleased with how it tuned out.

#diy #bookbinding #lasercutter #etching

My bathroom tub fixtures have seen better days. Pretty sure they're original to the house (~60 years). We have fairly hard water, and the prior owners were not the best at maintenance so no clue how long these slow leaks have been going on. But the shower handle is stuck hard on the valve, and the bath spigot is crumbling away and similarly fused in place. Hot and cold come off easily.

Does anyone have any tips for freeing the one handle and spigot? I've tried light tapping with a mallet on the back of the handle to no avail. The spigot seems bound pretty tightly, to the point where I'm concerned about damaging the pipe if I apply too much torque.

As for the leaks, I haven't decided if I'm going to just replace the valves, or try fiddling with/replacing the packing nuts. This is my first time messing with plumbing, but either way seems straightforward enough after watching a few videos.

Any tips/tricks/suggestions appreciated, thanks!

I bought this cheap bathroom vanity off of amazon and we assembled it. We cannot get the drawers on. These silver things get in the way. When I get them mounted in a way I feel is correct they prevent the drawer from closing all the way. I haven't dealt with anything like this.

Does anyone know how to mount it? I'm sure once its done Ill feel like an idiot for how simple it is.

Thanks

We have an electric cargo bike that’s served us really well. We bought it second hand at a pretty affordable price because the battery was shot. Fortunately we found a great local repair shop that could replace it, and we now have a pretty great bike.

Unfortunately the drum breaks on the front wheels are getting really bad after about 12 years or so, and our local bike repair shop is at a loss for finding new parts. The front wheels are mounted on an axle that’s controlled by hyudralics (which gives the bike a great turning radius), so they’re a bit special. The original hubs are Sturmey Archer XL-SD’s, but they don’t seem to be available anywhere.

Does anyone have suggestions for what I can use instead? Has anyone hacked their way to one-side-mounted front wheels for a three-wheeled bike, eg by using a through axle?

So I have this silly idea/longterm project of wanting to run a server on renewables on my farm. And I would like to reuse the heat generated by the server, for example to heat a grow room, or simply my house. How much heat does a server produce, and where would you consider it best applied? Has anyone built such a thing?

One of my hobbies is fixing up ewaste laptops and giving them away. I actually do lots of ewaste electronics, from TVs to space heaters, but the laptops are where I put in the most work. Some are new, intact, and ready to go with nothing more than a OS reset. Others have had parts removed or damaged, and need more work. Most of these computers I give to a local refugee resettlement organization, but some of them are old enough, or otherwise weird enough that I wouldn’t feel right about giving it to someone who already has a lot of problems to deal with. I try to make sure they get fast computers with familiar operating systems whenever possible. So far, I’ve always had enough decent machines to pass along that that hasn’t been an issue.

Through this project I made friends with a guy who works at the local recycling center. He does a similar thing with TVs, though covering even more organizations and moving more equipment than I do. He helped me up my game a lot. He provided some old Windows multi use keys, a ton of cables and USB hubs to give away with each laptop, an almost endless stream of power bricks for any model I needed, and recently he was able to get the management there to agree that he could take laptops too, if he caught the people who dropped them off and asked if they were okay with it. Otherwise the site policy says they need to be securely destroyed.

So suddenly I had two sources of hardware, which was a huge help in providing computers to everyone who needs one. Not all of them are great though – sometimes you get a laptop with a single DDR1 ram slot (can’t go above 1GB), or in this case, a couple chromebooks with expired, insecure OSs. He wasn’t sure I’d be able to do anything with them, and asked me a few times if I was sure I wanted them, but I didn’t feel it was a big risk. I’d try fixing them up and if there was an issue, I could always put them back in recycling. Neither one seemed like a great fit for the refugees, they only had 2 gigs of RAM and 16 gigs of on-board storage space. No hard drives. But the hardware was nice, lightweight, with a nice screen and keyboard, and the batteries were awesome. I hate to throw something like that away.

I started with reading about my options and settled on MrChromeBox’s script for replacing the ChromeOS and firmware with a proper BIOS. The website and instructions were thorough and worked perfectly for me.

Step 1 was removing the hardware write protection. All chrombooks have some kind of write protection that prevents you from paving over their firmware. In some it’s a jumper wire connecting two contacts. On others its a lack of a jumper. Sometimes they use a screw to bridge those contacts, and on some, the battery itself acts as the bridge and you can only reinstall the BIOS when the battery has been disconnected and the laptop is plugged in.

Mine was an easy one, enabled with a screw. The website didn’t have a photo for this model, but it wasn’t hard to find since it looked different than all the rest. (I’ve since sent this photo to MrChromeBox in case he’d like to use it.) Once that was out of the way, I followed their instructions to get to the correct command line interface and entered the commands to run their script. Very satisfying. A great ratio of ‘feeling like a hacker’ to actual effort involved.

Once the script completed, I had basically a regular laptop. Probably closer to an old netbook in terms of hardware. I could install Linux Mint but it would take up most of the storage space. I received a bunch of microSD cards as a gift, so I bought a super low profile microSD to SD adapter and stuffed a 512GB microSD into the SD slot. That’s going to be a pain to get out some day.

The BIOS is happy to boot to the SD slot, so I installed Linux Mint there. Suddenly I had a regular laptop with plenty of storage space, a bit light on RAM, but it’s a perfect little computer for carrying around the city and going to write-ins, etc. Light weight, good keyboard and touchpad, awesome battery.

I know I could have used a lighter weight OS, but Mint is sort of my default, its super convenient, has wonderful compatibility, good community support, and just works well when I want a computer that isn’t itself, a project. Between the web browsers, the preinstalled Libre Office, and the writing tool Wavemaker Cards, I have everything I need for most of my projects.

A few days into using it we had a makerspace night, and since I had access to the laser cutter, I put together a quick solarpunk stencil. I love using the laser cutter to cut stencils. It turns hours of work into minutes, and it can do intricate designs with narrow bridges that I’d often have to glue back together after tearing or accidentally cutting. Plus, it works best when cutting thick cardstock paper or thin cardboard, which makes for better stencils, but is a pain to cut by hand. To reduce waste, I used an old cracker box for my stencil.

Once it was cut out I saved the bits and pieces in case I wanted to do this design as a reverse stencil sometime.

To make sure the size was good I laid out the bits and pieces on the center of the laptop. Eventually I corrected the tilt so it followed a line from the top right to the bottom left corners. Once I had it in the right place, I lightly taped the gear part in place so I could use it to position the actual stencil later on.

With this one there wasn’t any reason not to use some temporary spray adhesive, so I spritzed the cardstock with that, let it dry enough not to leave residue, stuck it down, and peeled up the gear. I usually use old return address stickers, the kind charities send you forever after you donate once, to cover up any gaps on the stencil, and to keep the other masking stuff in place. The stickers are great whenever you need tape but don’t care how it looks.

I used the same yellow graff paint I had from years ago and recently used on another project. I tried to hit it straight down, mostly to avoid anything slipping in under the edge of the stencil and because I hadn’t masked the rest too well. With such a simple stencil it wasn’t really a big deal. Once it was done I had my traditional moment of panic as I realized I hadn’t really checked that I’d applied the whole thing right-side-up, but it worked out this time, saving me a lot of hassle. As paranoid as I am about other measure-twice-cut-once preparation tasks, you’d think I’d be better at this one.

And that’s about it. The laptop’s working well, I’m actually writing this post up on it at the moment. Overall it’s a good little writing laptop, and I’ll probably set its sibling up the same way soon enough.

So I was finally able to get back to work on the sound recorder. The general gist is that this is meant to be an audio recorder with transcription and email capabilities, which is also ruthlessly simple to use. There's one button. You push it, a recording says "recording" and it starts recording. You push the button again and it stops recording and says "stop". It now runs the audio file through a speech recognition program, and then creates and sends an email with the transcription in the body and the wav file as an attachment. Relatives can figure out what to do with the content from there.

Progress so far:

I'd planned to follow step 3 of the Pi Spy tutorial but found that DeepSpeech was no longer supported(?) and hadn't really been made with anything less than a Pi4 in mind (I'm using a 3b). Luckily, a bunch of other speech recognition options are available, and I settled on spchcat mostly because it was the first one I found that fit my use case.

If you're going to install it on a raspberry pi, I very much recommend their issues page for getting through dependency hell. Especially if you put a 64bit OS on your pi. (Remember to get the :armhf version of whatever library it needs.) Pulseaudio also seems to help.

This is a pretty short post, I mostly just wanted to make my updated code available. It's... not great. I'm not a programmer by trade, and I'm a strong believer in 'finished not perfect' even when I know what I'm doing. It seems to be functional, that's about all I can promise. Maybe don't let anyone shout bash commands around it. There's also still no error catching around the length of the recording, or the transcription, though that at least doesn't seem to cause any issues when it fails.

This is definitely more of a jumping off point than a proper finished product, but hopefully it'll be useful to someone who's trying to make the same thing or something similar. Even if it's not perfect, maybe it'll save you from repeating some of the work I've done so far.

We're going to do another trial run, see what her feedback is, and update from there.

The updated code is here: https://mega.nz/file/LQlz1BjQ#3R6E9_k1jfmjzFUcBXq_Qi3IGf46iuYtZ95fQlAO-HI

Seems interesting as a YT alternative for show-casing DIY projects.

https://anarchosolarpunk.substack.com/p/offgridinternet