cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/58764195

I was in the non-profit shop of a local charity. They accept donations of used computers then resell them to the public. The profit goes to charity. I asked for their oldest machine. It had an AMD chip from the 16h family. Thus, a spychip.

So their oldest machine was still too new for me. I asked why don’t you have anything older? They said the general public would not accept anything older, and so the shop also does not accept anything older. When machines are rejected, they go to a factory that destroys them and recovers the raw metals.

It’s sad to see that pre-spychip machines are being destroyed and that even 2nd-hand customers are being limited to anti-consumer spychip hardware.

It's running the 32bit version of Bodhi linux, but a 2009 netbook has risen from the grave.

From Seattle to Houston to Asheville, North Carolina, (and beyond!) tool libraries and other sharing hubs are saving people money, preventing waste, and building spaces for resilience.

No privacy orgs have bothered to test and publish AMD CPUs that were made in 2013 which were not compromised by AMD’s PSP. This means if you want to avoid the spychip, you’re compelled to undertake a project of sorting through guesswork, heresay, and vague documents. AMD only vaguely identifies some microarchitectures that have the PSP. There is conflicting information about whether the Kaveri APUs have spychips.

And from there, even if you have a concrete list of chips, laptop and desktop manufacturers have scrubbed their websites of useful specs of that time period because they only want you to buy their new products. So it’s hard to know which machines have the precious resource of a trustworthy CPU.

If a privacy org or FOSS org were to investigate and publish lists of spychip-free processors and also lists of devices that contained those chips (perhaps in collaboration with an eco org like Greenpeace), it would drive up demand for machines that are being discarded for being “too old”. It would inspire some consumers to acquire or hang on to used machines rather than buy something newly enshitified.

I bought a Lenovo laptop charger with USB-C connector. There was no mention of USB PD but the label listed voltages (5v, 9v, 12v, 15v, 20v), which encourages us to guess that it may possibly be USB-PD (what else?). But since there is no incentive for Lenovo to disclose whether it’s USB-PD compliant, it chooses to minimise its legal liability and write nothing about USB-PD (as most PSUs do, even aftermarket ones).

Since I bought the PSU from a dodgy street market where people sell dumpster-dive products, I needed to quickly test it. I attached it to a simple USB-C bicycle light which has an LED to indicate charging. It did not charge. So it appeared the Lenovo PSU was dead. I tossed it into a box of e-waste to decide later whether to repair, harvest parts from, or dispose of.

Some manufacturers apparently believe when the USB-PD standard says “5v is the default”, it means 5v should be delivered in the absence of a handshake. Other engineers have interpretted “default” to mean both sides of the negotiation should conform to 5v /if/ the handshake negotiation yields nothing higher -- but that a handshake is strictly required nonetheless. No handshake → no power.

Couple that discrepency of USB-PD interpretation with the fact that manufacturers resist claiming to conform to USB-PD anyway (as the law does not demand it and consumers don’t either), we have a recipe for disaster. I am sure a lot of functional USB-PD devices will be thrown away because of this kind of shit that I encountered. Perhaps the Lenovo PSU I have was already in a dumpster and fished out by whoever sold it to me.

I almost tossed the Lenovo PSU but decided to try powering a 9v device with it, and it worked. I almost didn’t do the experiment because I originally thought if it cannot power a 5v bicycle light it’s probably dead.

Worth mentioning this thread which shows how consumers are blindly overrating USB-PD unaware of the pitfalls.

(cross-post of a thread in !food@slrpnk.net originally posted by someone else)

I always eat whatever thing in the fridge is closest to spoiled to ensure I waste nothing. And it’s a race because food is often already on the edge when I bring it home, to prevent waste and also save money (as it gets marked down because of the age).

I found out a friend does the opposite. She eats the freshest veg she has because she says vitimins deplete as the veg ages. She wants to maximise her nutrition.

Is freshness really significant for vitamins? Someone in my family does the same thing. Always eats the freshest food. And as a consequence she is frequently tossing food that lost the competition to be eaten early.

publication croisée depuis : https://lemmy.world/post/48861413

Scrappiest of scrap wood projects.

The proportions are odd, but it's designed to fit under the landing of the stairs going into the garage. Makes a good use of an otherwise awkward space. Like everything else in the shop, it's on casters to allow for easy movement and cleaning around.

Most of this wood was from the big lifting tower I used to get the dust collector motor into place.

I airdried skins of oranges, blood oranges, pommogrenades and lemon and dehydrated skins of red and yellow apples. That makes a very flavorful pot pourri that I placed in a reused sealed bad to make it into a one-hundred percent zero waste gift.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/38855728

Hi all. I'm an extremely colorful person and fashion means a lot to me and my mental health, so of course figuring out how to be bright and fashionable but still solarpunk is very important to me! I was playing around earlier and made myself this little hair clip.

• The purple flat part is an old bottle cap painted with nail polish
• The bow is made from ribbon that I've had for ten or fifteen years by now
• The clip is an old one I had laying around
• The beads and string are from an old half-used kit I found online.

I think reusing materials rather than buying new is very solarpunk and those of us who enjoy fashion can simultaneously avoid fast fashion and overconsumption while not limiting ourselves to only natural earth tones!

The only part of this I don't feel good about is the hot glue, which I object to both on the basis of quality and on the basis of it being essentially plastic and I had to use a lot of it. I'll be figuring out something better for my next attempt. I think a little dab of super glue would work fine for attaching the bow, and I think I could punch a small hole in the bottle cap to attach the strings rather than gluing them, but I'm not sure how to attach the clip. If you have any ideas, please share!

I editorialized the article title, and I realize the article is a year old. But I only just found out about this buy out yesterday.

I have been using Wild's refillable deodorant for over 2 years. It has been great not throwing away a huge chunk of plastic, and instead tossing a small bit of cardboard into the compost. But now they are part of a mega corp.

I got my wife and daughter switched over recently, and my wife has been using their chapstick too.

My daughter found Fussy as an alternative. I saw a video showing that Fussy's refills fit into Wild's cases.

I will be making the switch as soon as I run out of my current stock of Wild refills.

Like the title says I am trying the boycott the US thing hard, so I have gotten rid of a lot of services. After my iPhone and iPad give out I will be looking into alternatives my homepods are going to need to find another forever home sooner or later.

Anywho that brings me to why I am posting here. A few months ago my place decided to flood and damage a lot of things I have just been hoarding! So I will get to start with a much cleaner slate of things, I get to decide what is coming back into my place and what is coming back or being replaced. It just really clicked for me that this was going to help me embrace this lifestyle some more.

I wanted to share it with the community on the book of Faces, but I do not use it anymore and I was not going to go through the effort to download the app sign in and mention it in the group I was in. Only to then decide to uninstall the app and not see any comments or anything. So I thought Lemmy, I already have a Lemmy account that I use why not post it here. I may not get the same dopamine hit but at least I will hopefully get some.

Tl:dr: Best way to clean out crap from your place is have you single floor suite flood, and Facebook is no good.

Expansion foam is like superglue with air bubbles. You spray stuff and it works wonders for gap filling and insulation. But the big cans of the stuff often self-seal after the first use because the foam sitting in the outlet hardens. You can use the stuff once and then the rest of the can must be tossed.

Chemical waste treatment centers have a special device to safely discharge discarded cans of aerosols. They strap a discarded can to a machine that punctures the can from the side. The contents rush out into a barrel.

Can’t we be smarter? Consider how pros have a pistol for expansion foam. There is a special interface between the pistol and the can that it’s made for. Of course those pistols are useless on the cans that are not made for them.

In principle, I don’t see why there couldn’t be a generic pistol that works on any canister. It would have a spike kind of like the scooper-like needles they use on blood donors, but stronger of course. It could have a vice that punctures the can with the spike. The strap-on pistol would be able to salvage the contents of self-sealed expansion foam cans.

Found laptops on the street fully abused and often smashed to bits. Recently pulled a 160gb SSD out of one. That’s worth keeping, as well as the RAM, often.

TV tuners/media players: they sometimes have internal hard drives. I recently pulled a 320gb 2½″ HDD out of one. Even though that’s likely too small to serve as someone’s laptop system, anything bigger than 120gb is big enough to store a copy of the whole Debian system including all apps (5 blu-rays merged these days).

All DC powered electronics: it’s useful to cannabalize the female barrel connector. There are many universal PSUs with a collection of male tips, but never female tips. The female tips are useful for making your own barrel adapters, instead of cutting and soldering your OEM PSUs.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/36021551

As a zero waste OCD nutter, I end up with a lot of TV and radio devices pulled from dumpsters and 2nd-hand markets. The remote controls (RCs) are almost always missing. For many devices, the whole fucking device becomes totally unusable without the RC. Which is probably why many devices end up in the trash -- because the remote was lost or chewed up by a dog.

Apparently humans have not evolved to be smart enough to create an open standard mandating that all appliances with remote controls have a published manual containing the IR signal specs for every function to then enable the signals to be reproduced.

Palm pilots (somewhat viable)

In the 1990s, Palm pilots had integrated infrared sensors w/LED. There was a very useful third-party app enabling physical remote controls to be copied. You could design your own button layout and have a tab for every RC. Of course the problem is that you needed the original RC as a source to copy.

Smartphones (nope)

Smartphones are worse than Palm pilots. IR sensors are RARE. There are IR dongles that can be attached to a smartphone (either USB or headphone jack). It’s a bit redicious if you have to have a dongle hanging off the edge of your phone wherever you go. The phone would not likely slide into an arm strap w/the dongle. So you wouldn’t carry it around, which means you have to keep track of it. It’s something else that can get lost (manufacturers and sellers love that feature).

Universal RCs (nope)

Like OEM remotes, these have a fixed set of buttons. But of course they have to try to guess what buttons will be needed. They include a database of hundreds of signal sets, but you are likely fucked if the device is an obscure or rebranded no name generic. I have radios that have the branding of the grocery store that sold them, FFS. No chance that would be in these preset DBs. I also have 4 different models of the same radio brand, and the RCs are incompatible w/each other same brand device (WTF).

The collective solution

Lobby for policy to force an open standard and then mandate the use of it.

The quazi individual solution (using smartphones)

1. Derive a list of smartphones with built-in IR sensors and LEDs.
2. Port a FOSS distro of some kind to all those phones.
3. Code 2 FOSS apps, one for linux distros and one for f-droid for AOS forks. Or make one app that’s ported to both.

The app should be able to record existing OEM RCs. And in the absence of the OEM RC, it should be able to sync to an open data crowd-sourced DB (which means it should also be able to export datasets to the project).

The quazi individual solution (using dumbphones)

A lot of Sony Ericsson feature phones have IR sensors and an LED for the purpose of syncing the contacts, SMSs, etc. The FOSS Gammu app exploits this. If an app could be pushed to those phones it would basically repurpose otherwise wasted dumbphones to help salvage otherwise wasted RC-less appliances.

A friend was dumping stuff prior to a move. I took all his electro gadgets just to prevent it becoming e-waste.

In the pile of stuff is an Amazon Alexa. Fuck #Amazon. I boycott Amazon and also have principled objections to their snooping, business practices, etc. My choices seem to be:

• trash the Alexa
• donate the Alexa to charity

These are both lousy choices. Donating it as-is would ultimately put it in someone’s house which then feeds Amazon.

Is there another option? I did a quick search and see no FOSS to replace whatever garbage Amazon has on it. It could be attached to the LAN with an egress firewall that blocks cloud access, but I suppose then it is useless, correct?

(update) I added a link to an article that shows what the thing looks like. The article is otherwise irrelevent.

New extra requirement: the user must be able to say “Oh, yeah, no, for sure” without the thing exploding into flames.

(update 2)

There is no product ID info on the device itself. I had to go through a lot of analysis just to find out what the fuck the thing is. Apparently it is an Echo gen 2. So then I looked for a manual. Found this:

https://www.amazon.com/Echo-2nd-Generation-Manual-Guide-ebook/dp/B0793JNBYR/

No PDF manual! WTF. Amazon expects us to subscribe to some Kindle bullshit just to get the manual, or /pay/ the cost of a big mac to get a paper manual. Motherfuckers.

I don’t need it that bad.

(update 3)

related threads:

• https://community.home-assistant.io/t/hacking-using-old-amazon-echo-devices-for-voice/626351/28
• https://community.home-assistant.io/t/retasking-a-2nd-gen-echo/709084/5

Although a lot of chatter is about the echo DOT, which is something else.

(update 4) this thread is worth a look.

The research: Microbial upcycling of plastic waste to levodopa

Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse.

The ban on destruction of unsold apparel, clothing accessories and footwear and the derogations will apply to large companies from 19 July 2026. Medium-sized companies are expected to follow in 2030. The rules on disclosure under the ESPR already apply to large companies and will also apply to medium-sized companies in 2030.

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/689223

Most DAB radios I find¹ have text-only displays. Some even have no display at all and you must tune in blindly with arrow buttons. Apparently color graphical LCDs increase the cost of the radio enough to omit them from the design.

And yet at the same time people are throwing away quite functional smartphones in mass quantity (thanks to capitalism and designed obsolscence).

Also note that (most?) DAB radios have a USB port for attaching a drive holding music.

Wouldn’t it be sensible to create a DAB radio with no display, but with the possibility to connect a smartphone which runs an app to show station metadata? (Would also be useful if it could connect to the LAN to feed metadata and even accept commands, but that’s another discussion)

I also suspect existing radios could be hacked. That is, radio flashed to decode the signal metadata and (for ease) write it to USB mass storage, which a smartphone can mimick while running an app to display the data that lands on the SD card. The problem would be phones refuse to simultaneously mount external storage that is externally mounted. Could a rooted phone read-only mount an SD partition that is externally mounted? Perhaps the mass storage hack is a broken idea, in which case we would need to invent a protocol for this. Or does a suitable protocol exist?

¹ I say this as a locally buying (usually 2nd-hand) type of consumer. Online consumers might have a different experience.

I recently found out you can get foaming soap refills as tablets. I hadn't previously found a way to refill hand soap pump style dispensers without more plastic. These are from Meliora.

The algorithm served me a way to reuse my soda can. I don't plan to start a craft project but this showed me there is things I could do within my skillset that would be fun.

I'm now following this lady, which do a lot of cool craft projects with crash sprinkle with gore and environmental advice.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/30993218

Copious access points are deployed by naïve admins who are oblivious to the fact that not everyone runs the latest gear. The shitty practice of pushing wi-fi in an arbitrarily exclusive way needs pushback. The first step is exposure. We need to enumerate the various ways demographics of people are being excluded and collect a DB on it.

The wi-fi protocol is the first point of failure. E.g. 802.11b vs 802.11a/g/n.. All new hardware is backwards compatible with older protocols. When an 802.11b device cannot see a signal, it’s because some asshat proactively disabled 802.11b.

Most exclusivity occurs with shitty captive portals. There are countless ways to fuckup a website to make it exclusive. E.g.

• to impose SSL, which inherently imposes recent certs and CAs that exclude old devices. It’s essentially rock stupid when the captive portal is nothing more than a button that says “I accept the ToS”.
• to impose JavaScript, which encapsulates a whole industry of poorly trained people who have no concept of stability of standards and interoperability.
• to impose SMS confirmation, which makes the ignorant assumption that every single user has a mobile phone, that they carry it with them, and that they are willing to share their number willy nilly.

🌱environmental impact🚮

The brain dead practice of deploying public Internet access using needlessly exclusive tech is a form of forced obsolscence. It’s one of the factors that pushes people to throw away working devices in order to overcome these ecocidal Internet access deployments.

🔧the fix💾

An app that records SSIDs, their location, and all the detectable exclusivity characteristics. It should also take human input with notes to record exclusivity that is not auto-detectable. Ideally the local DB would sync with a central DB. It should also be possible to extract a GPX file for a given region which could then be imported into OSMand or Organic Maps.