The pics are a bit deceiving. They make it appear as if you get uniform thicknesses, but is that often the case? I doubt it. When a building is demolished, it’s disturbing how sloppy and chaotic they are. They just smash it to bits, producing all different sizes and shapes. I wish they would think about reuse. They could take a cutter and cut uniform blocks off the building which can then be used like building blocks. Instead you got a gnarly mess of blobs with rebar sticking out.
Anyway, I think it’s common to buy much less concrete than you need for a driveway, then mix urbanite with the wet mix so a large portion is reused. I’ve not done it myself but probably entails soaking the urbanite in polyvinylacetate (PVA aka wood glue). I once had to repair a broken concrete step as well as patch some existing stucco. If I had just put new concrete where needed, it would not stick to the old concrete well. So many bonding layers are needed. You water down PVA and paint that onto the old surface. Then when that’s ½ dry you do it again but with a little concrete in it. It’s like a sloppy slurry… gets everywhere. Then again with a thicker layer. Then you also add PVA in the new concrete mix. That’s how to make it bond. So it’d be the same idea with urbanite. It would only trust that for non-structural projects though. Probably wouldn’t want a foundation relying on it.
The right to repair (at least in the EU) is being written to facilitate both people who have the ability to repair and those who do not. If you do not have the ability to repair, the law will entitle you have the device repaired outside of the warranty for a reasonable price.
If you have the ability to repair, the law entitles you to manuals and parts, and the parts must be at a reasonable price.
I had a proprietary valve fail in a boiler. The valve should be under $10, but because the manufacturer bundles the valve with many other fittings people are forced to buy a kit that’s no less than $100. That’s one thing the right to repair should solve.
fwiw, here is an emacs version:
https://codeberg.org/martianh/lem.el#headline-11
I think what would be most useful would be a usenet→lemmy gateway, so that rich catalog of usenet clients can be leveraged on Lemmy.
Enshitification warning: #Arstechnica manages to push bandwidth-wasting autoplay video in a way that bypasses Firefox’s setting to disable autoplay.
I’ve wanted to play with packet radio for a while now. It’s a shame the article pimps a Cloudflare site (winlink). It’s fitting in a sense though because there is a ban on using encryption over the ham radio bands. So the emails over packet radio must inherently be exposed to the world anyway.
50cc scooters are the worst, actually. Nothing like hearing the high-pitch squealing sound comparable to a leaf blower in your ear at 3am. I’d gladly see them banned from the city.
In that case, someone should work on my idea instead: drones that use an array of microphones to pinpoint where a car horn comes from, and launches rotten eggs at it.
The barrier preventing science fiction from becoming science fact is discovery of a drug that suppresses shivering that’s compatible with the cocktail of drugs they’ve already derived for hibernation. Are you saying that’s unlikely?
You will still be able to fly but the price will be much higher because the bigger market is in economy travel, which will eventually be people in hibernation moving along the surface.
You don’t need air travel if you can go into hibernation for a lengthy period on slower travel methods.
Also worth noting one of the main drives for human hibernation: nutrient/food intake is cut to like ⅙ when hibernating, so you can be shipped to Mars and that hugely weight-sensitive payload allowance can be cut down to a manageable amount. IIRC, 1 person eats 1 ton of food throughout the whole trip to Mars (3 years). That food weight is a substantial hinderance in sending people to Mars, at least in numbers.
EDIT: also consider that room + board on a cargo ship is currently ~$100/day, making it much more costly than air travel in addition to having to tolerate the length of the trip. Your cost of travel in hibernation would surely fall to more like ~$20/day, making it financially more attractive than flying.
PBR ran a documentary that showed how solar panels were made: by “smelting” quartz with coal, and the harmful emissions from that process which are overlooked in most conversations around solar panels. So indeed this older design of just using two dissimilar metals seems superior in terms of production.
If solar energy is collected from such remote areas, is there perhaps a show-stopping problem of transmitting that power out to city? Transmission has huge losses over great distances.
There was a recent proposal to cover train tracks and (I think) some segments of rivers with solar panels. One of the problems IIRC was transmitting the power. My memory is a bit fuzzy on it… not sure why they couldn’t just directly power the electric train that runs below them… but whatever the issue was, it might be the same issue as the desert would have.
Your examples - forest mountain, pasture - wouldn’t be called desert - at least not in english (the interpretation may vary with language)
You can’t really trust layperson’s common English here. There are vast forests which are not being tagged as “forest” because a majority of trees don’t reach a certain defined height. These non-forests are useful for decarbonization but they’re being cleared on the basis that they are not technically a “forest”. So now there is a movement to protect these non-forests.
I’m printing stuff every week and it need not be archive quality. Examples:
Why stop at composting? Spent coffee grounds can be blended with plastic from bottles and under high pressure form a yarn to make fabric (#coffeeFabric). The fabric could be the medium the printer prints on.
external GPS server
GPS → old phone (calculates position) → bluetooth → current phone
This relieves your current phone of the workload of tracking and calculating a fix, which costs energy. Bluetooth uses much less energy so your current phone only burns energy keeping the LCD lit. It would increase navigation range on a charge because effectively you would be using two batteries. Also avoiding the battery performance hit due to heat because the processing is distributed. The problem is I think no FOSS nav apps support external GPS. There are FOSS apps and drivers to feed and read the mock gps but the nav apps don’t use it.
bluetooth radio receiver:
Old phone has bluetooth enabled and pairs with whoever at the party wants to be the DJ. The headphone output goes to a channel on the (otherwise bluetooth-incapable) mixer or amp.
fake hotspot:
Setup a hotspot with no internet uplink. Use the SSID as a bumper sticker (e.g. “ImpeachTrump_optout_nomap!”). You could theoretically run a web server on the phone which redirects all access attempts to a captive portal that broadcasts whatever msg you want (e.g. anti-Trump memes or announcements for neighbors). It need not give WAN access.
Maybe incorporate Rumble: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.disrupted.rumble/
cryptocurrency:
It could serve as an offline/airgapped cryptocurrency wallet.
car telemetry:
Keep the old phone permanently in the car and attached to the OBD.