I recently picked up Crafted With Pride. It is basically a directory for brands who actually manufacture stuff in America (with a section for Canada, too). There are many many tiny brands making great stuff that you'll never hear about because they dont advertise. It's not "BIFL" necessarily as much as it's "buy local", but obviously there's a lot of overlap in those sentiments. A lot of them are literally 1 man shops.

The book is just clothes, bedding, shoes, bags, and other accessories. It's arranged by category, but there's also an index by state.

The appendices are great, though, because they also have a section for private label manufacturers (so you can have stuff made if you want), material suppliers (including a dedicated "union-made" section), repair shops, advocacy groups, and educational groups.

The appendices are mostly aimed towards businesses, but I'm going to go through my copy and mark which suppliers sell direct to consumer.

I wish they had an online index, cause that would make it way easier to search for stuff, but this book is clearly a labor of love from a small team, so I understand they want to make some money on sales. If you want me to look anything up for you (e.g., a leather goods company in Alabama), leave a comment here (or message me) and I'll get back to you.

It's the time to harvest green black walnuts. Typically, I'm able to get a handful per tree that are accessible from the ground. I just came across a tree that had the top blown off in a storm, so I was able to collect ~10 kg almost entirely from one tree.

This is probably way more than I need, so it's time to track down some alternative uses for them.

Last year I made nocino and walnut syrup. This year, I'm going to do more of that as well as some vin de noix.

Let me know if you have any other suggestions.

Cross posting this here if anyone has thoughts.

I replaced my fridge ice maker a few years ago because part of the circuitry burned out. The replacement has also now burned out (though not nearly as badly). For reference, the burned part is supposed to hold onto the end of a copper peg that leads to the heating element (which melts the ice slightly so it can be popped out of the mold).

It seems silly to spend $60 on a new one when it's just $0.05 worth of copper that needs replacing. Is there a safe way to fix this? Unfortunately, I can't just solder the connection because it is enclosed when assembled. For reference, those tabs aren't just fouled, they are burned completely through. My first thought is to pull out the whole trace, solder on new tabs (not sure where I'd get the material), and put the trace back in.

A post about the problems with climate change leading to extreme rainfall events reminded me of this concept. I saw a great video about it years ago, and I couldn't find it, so I am just linking a journal article about the concept.

The TL;DR is that we need to be doing as much as we can to slow water down on the land.

Giant dams across rivers, while useful for flood mitigation and power generation, are ecologically harmful. Small structures, essentially providing resistance to flow of temporary streams, have a whole giant host of benefits, from decreased erosion to increased water infiltration and water sequestration.

If you live somewhere arid (or honestly in many places that are now experiencing more eratic rainfall), you should think about where you could potentially use one or more of these strategies.

Like much of the world, the weather is getting much more inconsistent where I live. Unreasonably warm weather starts earlier, but the risk of a frost still stays relatively late.

If I have plants outside right now, some days it's too hot for cool season plants, and some nights it's too cold for warm season plants.

I'm still very jealous of people who have space for a traditional garden, but one benefit of balcony gardening is that almost all of my plants are movable, so I can really dampen the effects of the weather.

Plants that can't survive the cold, I can bring in at night. Plants that can't survive the heat, I can move to a place that's sheltered from the midday sun.

This has allowed me to grow for a much extended season. I have pepper plants that are already forming peppers because I've had them outside for over a month now and just brought them in when they needed it.

It's the time of year to collect green walnuts for making nocino or vin de noix. Ive never done it before, but figured I should try since I have so many black walnut trees growing near me. Apparently, you should only use nuts you've picked yourself, not the immature fruit on the ground because the tree has rejected it, and it likely has pest damage.

I made a fruit picker out of a plastic bottle cut to have a notch at the top to hook around stems. What I've learned so far is that most walnut trees are either too tall to reach the nuts, even with a long pole, or they are too young to produce nuts. It seems like the best place to gather them is on the edge of fields/paths/etc, where big trees may have low branches. Standard fruit pickers will likely not work, either, because they are designed for larger fruit like apples, so they cant grip something as small as an immature walnut. Since they are not ripe, the tree also does not want to release them. I was only able to get a few to start, because I need to modify my picker to have a cutter or something like that.

Since I only gathered a few, I figured it wasn't worth doing nocino as it takes 6 months, so it did "walnut molasses" while I figure out how to modify my picker.

https://foragerchef.com/green-walnut-honey/

I recently booked some backcountry campsites in a national park (in the USA). My plan is to hike from one town to another over a few days, and the camp sites are by reservation only. These sites are not accessible by road. When i made the reservation, it required me to put in the make, model, color, and license plate of my car. I will not have a car with me, nor could I (since there are no roads), yet this information was required of me (no opt-out).

I'm assuming this is just because the system (recreation.gov) is run by a giant defense contractor (booz allen hamilton), and they want to harvest as much information as possible. It made me wonder what other government services are only available for car owners that are completely unrelated to car ownership. I'm inspired by seeing a post about while ago that talked about government services that require you to have social media accounts.

I'm sure there are other examples of this phenomena.

P.s., luckily, the sign up form is dumb, and it didn't use dropdown menus for car make/model/color, so i just put in gibberish.

I have a 100 W rigid solar panel including a charge controller that I currently only use for camping to charge batteries (also useful in an emergency at home). It strikes me as a waste that I could be generating more clean energy with equipment that I already have, but I don't have anything in mind to use this energy for.

Obviously I could try to tie it into my home to run more of my household on solar, or buy more/bigger batteries to charge, but with 100 W of generation, it's probably not worth it without a significantly increased investment.

I tried searching around online, and I found plenty of discussion for what to do with a whole house that generates excess capacity (mainly sell to the grid), but nothing really on what to do with small scale DC generation.

Anyone here have thoughts?

Does anyone have a good method for dealing with plant debris? I'm thinking about things like stems from plants, or even just pruned bits. I don't have a place to compost effectively. My normal method for woody debris is to cut it to little pieces with garden shears, and for leafy stuff to just let it dry out and crunch it up. After, I'll just stick it in the bottom of a pot that I'm going to put a new plant in. It gets a little broken down, but not as well as I'd like, and I can only do it when I have a new plant to pot, so I end up with a random pile of stuff that sits around for a while.

I wish I had like a tiny woodchipper or something.

I've been using my grinder (Baratza maestro plus) for ten years now, and I got it used. I've replaced some parts (e.g., burrs), but I'm wondering if it's finally time to let it go. It seems like it's not grinding as consistently as it once was, but I'm thinking it would be good to quantify it.

I've seen sieves used to classify ground coffee, specifically, the brand Kruve seems to be a nice implementation. It's $90 for the cheapest version, though, which doesn't quite seem worth it to me. It seems like it'd be better to just spend the money going towards a new grinder, but I figured it would be good to ask for anyone's experience here.

Hi everyone,

I looked through this community, and I didn't see much discussion of the use of CAD for woodworking, so I figured it was worth a post. I learned CAD ages ago, and I've used it sparingly in my professional life since then. I'm working on a project now that would benefit from CAD, so I figured I'd try to get up and running with a software for personal use.

I know sketchup and fusion360 have long been the major players for woodworkers, but I am wary of "free" personal use licenses that can be removed or degraded at any time. As this is Lemmy, I'm sure plenty of you are interested in FOSS options as well. I know there are some programs out there specifically for woodworking, but if I'm going to learn a new software, I want it to be more general purpose so I can use it to make things for 3D printing, etc, if needed. I also want something parametric to be able to easily change designs. For those of you unaware of what that means, it basically means that you can design things with variables instead of exact numbers. That way you can punch in numbers later on to easily update your design. In my case, I'm making cabinet doors in a few different sizes, and I'll be able to generate plans for different doors with only 1 model. Theoretically, I could upload the design for anyone else to use/modify as well on a place like thingiverse (someone give me a shout if they are secretly horrible or something, I'm generally wary of providing value to a corporation for free).

This all drove me to FreeCAD. FreeCAD is a FOSS CAD software that has a huge range of different capabilities. The different tools are divided into "workbenches" of different uses such as architectural drafting, 3d printing, openSCAD etc. There are also user created workbenches that you can install. There's even one specifically for woodworking (that I haven't used yet).

I've started into some tutorials, and most of them are focused on building a single widget. While that's great if you are planning on making something to 3d print, us woodworkers are usually assembling different parts. The tutorials for woodworking specifically I've followed along with so far seem to follow the same workflow:

First, a spreadsheet is set up to establish all the parameters you want to be able to change, then, each part is designed individually. Finally, all of the pieces are brought together and assembled.

While this is great if you already have a design in mind or an object, and you are trying to make a model of it, it's not the way I would ideally go about conceptualizing a new design. To make a nightstand, for example, my preferred methodology would be to assemble some simple rectangular panels to represent the top, bottom, back, front, left, and right. After those are in place, I'd start adding joinery, details like routed edges, and cutting out space for a door. It doesn't seem like freecad is necessarily set up to do things that way, though I could be wrong. This might even be how the woodworking workbench does things, I just figured I'd start learning the default workbenches first.

Anyone else use freecad or another CAD software? What's your workflow like? Want me to report back once I've had more time to play around with it and learn some stuff?