Hi, I've recently started reading up on mesh networks and Reticulum, particularily over LoRa, really appeals to me. Unfortunately I'm having some trouble picking out hardware - they provide a list of supported devices but not much info on stuff like which ones are easy to use, range, best use case for each. Normally I find a relevant online community and read through old conversations until I have a better understanding of the basics, but I haven't had much luck finding a good backlog for Reticulum. I was hoping someone with more experience might be able to point me to a good starting point.

I think my goal would be to set up an RNode to act as a transport node, see if there's anyone else to connect to (I'm in a major city so I'm optimistic) and if there is, I might try hosting a NomadNet site (and maybe eventually a gemini capsule). Thanks for any advice!

It's been awhile since I shared a Postcard from a Solarpunk Future. I've been working on a fiction project which kind of got away from me in scope and scale - you can read a bit more about it here if you're interested. That said, it's nearly complete so I thought I'd share a mostly-standalone photobash from the interior art.

This one is from the beginning of the story, it shows an electric railbus traveling along an old rail causeway in a rural area. It's modeled on an Ecuadorian autoferro and it has a pantograph it's not currently using - I'll get to why in a bit.

The area I grew up in is crisscrossed with inactive train lines. These former short lines transported passengers and cargo and interlinked small, dense towns and villages for almost a hundred years.

The tracks, bridges, causeways, crossings, and right-of-ways are mostly intact but none of them have seen use since around 1970. Many are being converted to bike paths, though the local railcar clubs are keeping some of the tracks intact.

Getting into solarpunk has revived some of my childhood fascination with trains, and I routinely imagine a world where my hometowns' short lines are back in service and I can ride trains all the way from the major city where I live to the small towns where I grew up.

For now I accept that it's unrealistic, not for just logistical reasons but cultural ones. The car is so entrenched that most people in the region genuinely can't live without it. Their homes (most built since the 1940s) are spread out in a way that public transportation can't reasonably serve, and located at least a half hour's drive from most of the things they need. And too many people up there seem to believe that all public services (except repaving the roads almost annually) must somehow turn a profit. Abutters to the tracks would squack about noise and the whole thing would spend decades hung up in planning board meetings.

But in this fictional setting car infrastructure already collapsed decades ago, when war and societal crumbles broke the long, fragile supply chains that produced fuel, new vehicles, and replacement parts. Rural exurbs (bedroom communities where people live but don't work) are really only practical when perched at the very end of long, quick, plentiful supply chains. They're a modern invention. Historically, people here lived in a very different layout - the towns and villages were much denser, the land in between was clearcut for farming or left as wild habitat (though there was a lot less of this than I would have liked). People lived near their work.

I think that's both a more practical arrangement and a likely way things would reshape once the supply chains start to break down. I've written about this elsewhere a few times.

The important thing is that they're at a point where it makes sense to return these old tracks to service. As for what they'd use, I'd planned on a self-propelled railcar, but after talking to railfans on reddit.com/r/trains and lemmy.ml/c/trains I decided on a railbus. Specifically, an old electric bus converted to rail service.

Historically self-propelled railcars and railbuses were the last gasp of struggling railroads in low-traffic areas. They cost less to operate because they were smaller than a full locomotive, and were often easier to maintain. Because traffic was low they were still able to meet demand, and many railroads eked out decades running these machines on some lines.

I figure that the same features that make them appealing in those circumstances probably work in reverse. A collection of denser, rebuilding towns looking at a crumbling road network and the comparatively cheap cost of fixing the train tracks enough for light service might decide to start small, using a common old vehicle they could more easily salvage replacement parts for.

As for the pantograph rig, since this is a pretty ad-hoc rebuilding effort, I imagine overhead wires are another thing that are still in-progress, and each town or village has set up overhead cantenaries extending out as far as they can manage. In the long spans in between, the bus uses its batteries, and likely still has to stop and recharge at the end of its route. [email protected] was a huge help in figuring out if this could work and under what circumstances.

As with most of the postcards, I really like to focus on these in-progress glimpses of a recovering future. Looking for better, rather than perfect. This image, like all the postcards, is CC-BY, use it how you like.

Hi, I hope this is okay, I made some progress on a line art photobash to go with the scene I was describing and I was hoping to run it by you folks in case anything needs to change (scale, layout, etc) before I get into the detail work.

This is the text:

This train runs all the way up to the high speed rail network linking Canadian cities, but your itinerary has you stop at a branch line to board a railbus hauling freight and passengers deeper into New Hampshire. Once the last gasp of dying railroads in low traffic areas, these vehicles have seen a resurgence on restored short lines all throughout the region, where small communities are trying to reestablish rail transportation with limited means. Under the various modifications and sheet metal welded to the chassis, this one appears to be an old electric bus raised onto rail bogies. The driver is a cheerful older man wearing a grey-striped engineer’s cap and a pin from a railcar operator’s club. The interior is dated, in a corporate sort of way, but comfortable, and the vehicle moises along more or less silently. Now and then, the driver reaches a town with overhead wires and pauses to extend the pantograph rig.

If the players decide to talk to the driver, his name is Carl, and he’s a member of the hobbyist railcar club that maintained the tracks in the years when people thought trains would never return. They were the first people to operate a passenger service on these tracks, before the towns officially started helping.

The towns here are smaller, and the trackside places are a bit nicer. The last time these tracks saw steady use they bore coal-powered steam trains. Property values went up when those ceased operations in the interstate age and the tracks were temporarily reduced to a scenic bike path.

You disembark at the end of the train line, a village called Center Sterling. The last public transit route in the direction you’re going is a ropeway stretching off into the forest. They’re extending the tracks further out, but in a different direction, so presumably your destination isn’t getting train access anytime soon.

Thank you!

Hi, hope this is okay - for the last year I've been working on a solarpunk fiction project that heavily features deconstruction, environmental restoration, rewilding, and phytoremediation and I'd very much like to run it by anyone who actually knows this stuff before we publish.

It's a solarpunk premade TTRPG campaign and hopefully soon-to-be Choose Your Own Adventure book set in a mostly abandoned town where basically the whole place is being deconstructed and rewilded. The players are tasked with tracking down a hidden industrial waste dump so the blast furnace slag and fly ash buried there can be reused in the production of geopolymers. In that time they can visit deconstruction sites, an unlined town dump in mid-excavation, a once-badly-damaged rewilding zone, phytoremediation sites (including one where they're rebuilding a wetland contaniminated by bad fill), beaver dam analogs on rivers, an enclave of fuel-engine mechanics, former sandpits, and more. Watersheds and groundwater movement play a fairly big role in the story, as do salvage and reuse.

I've learned a lot from posts on this community and I've tried to get the details right but though I've helped with some land conservation projects I don't have any experience at all with restoring damaged habitats with anything but time. If you're familiar with this kind of work, or even if this project just sounds interesting to you, I'd love to get your feedback!

You can find the document here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_Ih5SXHQ6r5rQIAkPCzNjVEh921O3ceSN7FuYzEQ6aU/edit?usp=sharing

With a list of relevant sections on the first page after the cover.

And for those of you who would (quite reasonably!) prefer to avoid google services you can find an etherpad version here: https://pads.slrpnk.net/p/Buried_Treasure

Though I'd be happy to exerpt those sections in the comments if you'd prefer to avoid google services.

Hi, I'm working on a fiction project set in a rebuilding society 100 years out. It's fairly utopian so people are prioritizing restoring and improving train infrastructure and service pretty significantly. American cities have high speed rail connecting them, and because I'm building this story out of my daydreams, defunct short lines have been returned to service and even rural towns have some kind of passenger train running again.

The opening has the players traveling way out into the boonies, and part of setting up that 'traveling off the edge of the world' feel was having them leave whatever city they begin in by HSR, then take successively cruder public transit until the line just ends short of their destination and they have to figure the rest out on their own.

The second-to-last step in that chain is an electric self-propelled railcar traveling along a restored short line. I think the current doodlebug is a somewhat-recent thing, put together maybe within the last ten years, and probably planned to be temporary when they built it.

So my question now is: how would they build this thing? Would it be easier to convert an existing self-propelled railcar like the Budd RDC? Would it make more sense to start with a regular coach and retrofit in the batteries, motors, control station, pantographs etc? Or would it make more sense to start from scratch? Maybe use part of an electric bus or similar?

Reuse and salvage play a pretty big role in the story, so I'll probably embellish any option with details about where the parts came from originally.

Thank you for any advice!

Detection dogs can be uncannily good at finding things from scent. For me at least, the first jobs that come to mind are law enforcement related; cadaver dogs, drug dogs, or dogs trained to detect explosive compounds (and the various problems and abuses associated with these dogs' jobs) - but dogs are finding work finding all kinds of other stuff too! I was recently looking up examples of detection dogs searching for toxic waste for a fiction project and thought I'd share some exerpts from the articles I found:

https://www.washington.edu/boundless/conservation-canines/

Jasper is part of a new approach: He’s helping Seattle Public Utilities identify possible sources of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

PCBs, toxic chemicals once found in everything from electrical transformers to caulking, are said to have no known smell, but Jeffers often detected a sweet, chlorinated scent. He wondered if a dog could do the same — and possibly at lower levels of concentration.

When Jasper sits in front of a cheerful yellow storefront in Ballard, shoulders upright and hips square to the ground, he’s telling Ubigau he has identified PCBs. But he gets his reward — that coveted ball — only if he’s right. Standing a few feet away in bright orange jackets, a trio of inspectors from SPU’s Source Control and Pollution Prevention Division check the address against a list. They’ve mapped out suspected sources of PCBs in the area, but they want Jasper to verify. Neither the handler nor the dog knows the targets in advance. “Reward him,” SPU lead inspector Jeffers says to Ubigau. Jasper’s nose has led him straight to a target.

“Our goal was to see if we could train a detection dog to smell PCBs, and at what level,” says Jeffers about the successful pilot study. Since then, SPU and Conservation Canines have done about nine surveys, primarily along the Lower Duwamish Waterway — a designated EPA Superfund site, where PCBs from old industrial sources may have seeped into the ground or river. When Jasper detects PCBs, as he does on this day in Ballard, SPU coordinates with the property owner and state and federal agencies to clean up the site. The trained dogs often go beyond the call of duty by detecting previously unknown sources, making them an integral part of the fight to remove harmful chemicals from the environment.

https://www.wsp.com/en-us/insights/meet-louie-wsps-newest-four-legged-pollution-detective

Meet Louie [...] this former explosive detection dog is now trained with one specific task in mind: finding the sources of chlorinated solvents that are wasted or improperly disposed of in natural and built environments.

he might possibly be the first pollution detection dog in the world trained to detect chlorinated solvents—chemical compounds that are readily used for commercial and industrial purposes, including metal cleaners/degreasers, paint thinners, pesticides, glues, and dry cleaning applications. When handled, stored and disposed of improperly, these compounds and their waste can release vapours into the air, seep into soils and groundwater and even end up in homes or workplaces, potentially posing environmental or health risks.

“As chlorinated solvents are often invisible, they can be located using traditional methods such as photoionization (PID) detectors, a sensor tool that screens for the presence of gases, reads volatile organic compounds (VOCs) concentration levels, indicating too-high levels, but not necessarily by product type,” says Mette.

This is where Louie steps in with his acute sense of smell, working on all types of projects to find the sources of chlorinated solvents in surface water, groundwater, soil and air. His ability to smell and react on the smallest concentrations of chlorinated solvents is truly extraordinary, something that would be quite impossible to do using other tools.

For example, instead of drilling in different spots to search for pollution, through his keen sense of smell he can determine the spot that will be most successful for drilling. Furthermore, Louie can even find the sources of polluted water or toxic gases within a building, if built on a polluted plot.

There is a myriad of other benefits. With the use of Louie’s nose, sources of pollution can cover more space, in less time and with more accuracy. 

For skeptics out there, consider the following. Mette recounted a story about working on a project where the client’s house was contaminated. Before the house would be taken down, the client requested that photos be taken and suggested taking them from the garden. As the client, Mette and Louie walked through the garden, Louie went through his detection motions, making a mark on the grass. Though surprised, the client was adamant that his garden was not polluted. But Mette knew better. When the bulldozer arrived the following week, it never had a chance to reach the house. The ground gave way in the garden, swallowing the bulldozer and exposing a well that was contaminated with chlorinated solvents at the spot where Louie had pointed out.

“In other cases,” Mette adds “we’ve found exposure in parts of houses that weren’t flagged by traditional methods.” In all evidence, she says that “we actually get better site investigations when we add in this sniffer dog method. And, this is very important when we must do remediation, we have all possible sources for this indoor problem to consider.”

https://aegisenvironmentalinc.com/commercial/site-investigation-scent-dog/

Like dogs trained to locate chemical traces of accelerants for arson investigations, our scent dog, Piper, is trained to detect traces of petroleum such as crude oil, diesel fuel, and gasoline. It is estimated that dogs can detect scents 40 feet underground. When petroleum is found in numerous locations, Piper is trained to pinpoint the area where petroleum concentration is greatest.

Piper’s handler will draw upon his experience to develop a search plan, giving Piper the best opportunity to locate the desired odors. When, or if, anything of interest is found, the area is marked, and the appropriate professionals will take over. Dogs can detect trace amounts of materials, which would be almost impossible to find using other means. Piper is a valuable and unique asset trained to help site investigators locate the area where contamination is present. Ultimately it is up to the investigator to ensure the information provided by Piper’s search is valid and used in a valuable way.

There's also a ton of examples of detection dogs being trained to find invasive species.

Semi related, from the first article:

In a pilot study funded by the Department of Homeland Security, the dogs are being trained to detect minuscule traces of illegal timber in vacuumed air samples from shipping containers. “The beauty of this method is that we can search hundreds of containers really quickly, and we don’t even have to take them off the line,” Wasser says, noting that it could be a powerful tool for both law enforcement and conservationists concerned about habitat loss.

I was recently reading up on Beaver Dam Analogs for a fiction project and thought I'd share some of the links I found really interesting. I got started on it because I frequently go for walks in the woods and there's an old logging road/snowmobile trail the beavers frequently flood since it's a low spot between two water bodies. I don't mind and just walk into the woods below their dam to hop across but a nearby landowner keeps destroying their dam to keep the trail dry. I wondered if I couldn't build them the start of a dam on the uphill side of the trail so they'd build there instead and keep the guy from escalating.

Anyways, I read up on it and learned about BDAs and PALS and the way they can help bring the habitat, water table, etc closer to how they looked a couple hundred years ago and wrote them into a premade campaign guide I'm writing for the Tabletop Role Playing Game Fully Automated.

Folks here probably know about these already but I thought I'd share the sources I referenced when I was writing that section just in case.

https://www.science.org/content/article/beaver-dams-without-beavers-artificial-logjams-are-popular-controversial-restoration

https://americanclimatepartners.org/building-beaver-dam-analogs-bdas/

https://www.northwoodscenter.org/wordpress/how-to-build-beaver-dam-analogs-w-mwa/

https://www.beaverinstitute.org/get-beaver-help/damaged-streams/

I think the process and scope of the recovery in some areas is amazing and it's sort of reshaped how I see some of the region where I grew up. Some of the woods are the exact kind of beaver-based wetlands these articles describe as the sort of finished product, while some streams are deeply incised and I never even realized that was bad - it was just how they'd always been.

It's unpaid, but it's a cool anarchist lit zine if you're looking to publish in that scene.

https://kolektiva.social/@scrappy_capy_distro/115062523856049972

"Hello everyone

We have opened our call for submissions for our fourth issue of "Harbour - an anarchist literary journal"

This issue has the theme of “Defiance,” whatever that might mean to you, such as defying authority, expectations, or social constructs. We're looking for prose, poetry, and art with an anarchist bend to it.

We are now also accepting literary reviews. The books don't have to be anarchist but we're interested in how they influenced anarchist thoughts. Have you read a book that moved you lately, either in thought or action? Send us an essay or review!

Submissions will be open from September 1st to September 30th.

Full submission info can be found here: en.scrappycapydistro.info/subm…"

I recently started setting up an intercom system between my workshop and the kitchen using a pair of antique Leich 901 telephones.

These are old local battery, crank/magneto phones originally intended to be used on small co-op networks (sometimes run over barbed wire!) or other odd uses. Each one has a crank which generates AC to ring all the phones on the circuit, and a talk battery (usually in a separate case) to power it as it was assumed houses didn't have electricity.

I've been able to get them talking following these guides:

https://www.valhallatreefarm.com/magneto%20phone/phonemagneto.htm

https://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=5c899c410c9abe5eb18fde4aa5ed41de&topic=17372.0

Now I'm planning my next steps, which include setting up a nice display panel for the workshop phone (partly to make hanging it on the wall a bit easier).

One of the things I'm thinking of is adding a small voltmeter to the voice line, like in this picture:

From their description of "When you speak, the needle moves rapidly like a VU meter!" I was assuming it's a 0-5 Voltmeter (maybe something like this) but Im worried about the AC ringer power coming down the same line.

According to the best guide I've found: "It should put out about 75 Volts AC when vigorously cranked." While the talk battery is only 4.5 Volts DC.

I have some huge holes in my understanding of electricity (especially considering how often I mess with it) but I'm worried an analog 5v Voltmeter wouldn't like 75 volts. I've read Voltmeters are supposed to be higher resistance than the circuit they're measuring. Does that protect it in a situation like this? Otherwise is there a way to safely set this up? Bonus points: is there a way to rig a light that blinks or flickers using this circuit in case I can't hear the ringer over tool noise and earpro?

Thank you very much!

Hi, I've been looking for a chance to get a huge fresnel lens from a rear projector TV for awhile and I finally found one junked (and rained on) on garbage day and managed to get the screen off before the truck took it.

The problem is that the screen seems to be different in composition from others I've seen online. There was one dark tinted, but otherwise clear plastic sheet, and an opaque one that might be a fresnel lens with a diffuser layer glued on. The TV was a Mitsubishi which are supposed to be a good source for fresnel lenses but the overall design and wide aspect ratio of the screen suggest it was a newer model. It definitely did have a projector inside (a single one with a sort of bubble dome on it).

I'm wondering if anyone knows more about these tvs, or has any suggestions for getting the two layers apart - the thin sheet seems to be both adhered very well and brittle - it only pries off in tiny chunks. I'm thinking about using a heat gun, I don't know if there's some other truck to this I should know.

Thanks very much for any advice!

It appears to be a large pink cat surrounded by hearts holding some flowers in one paw

This is an unpaid magazine but I think they publish some good stuff (including one of my stories in their first edition!). If you have a solarpunk or otherwise anarchism-friendly story you're trying to find a home for, maybe give them a look!