zerowaste

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16216407

> I'm sharing this because any reduction in unnecessary packaging waste is good for the planet - and because I think laser-etching avocados is funny. 🙂

It doesn’t take long for mold to grow on empty beer bottles. Considering beer bottles get returned for a refund, you have to assume that the brewery will make an effort to reuse as many as possible.

I toured a brewery once and they showed us the big industrial bottle washing machine. They said the bottles get scanned for cracks using a laser, and rejects obviously get tossed. The question is: what about mold, which adheres quite well to the corners of the glass? I wonder if the laser also detects bottles that didn’t get clean. Or if they just figure the temps would kill everything and just be considered safe enough from there.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/9263490

> Pictured: three glass bottles in a row. On the left, it's a full bottle of soy sauce. In the middle, it's an empty bottle with the label removed. On the right, it's another empty bottle with a rooted pothos cutting in it. > > My workplace provides snacks and some condiments for folks. When the soy sauce runs out, I do my best to snag the bottle. It looks like it ought to have a potion in it. A plant is the next best thing!

Article in French. Feel free to use a transaltor.

A french speaking zero waste community has opened : !zero_dechet@jlai.lu

This is my first step-by-step post using our local movim microblog rather than imgur. I'll upload it to imgur later as a backup but I'm seriously impressed with movim, very glad to have a noncorporate place for my projects. Let me know if there's any issue with the link.

This is another quick one but at least I remembered to take pictures for most of it. I don’t enjoy oil painting as much as I do photobashes and other digital art, but it’s still a lot of fun in the right moment. I needed a picture frame for a recent one, to complete a gift to a relative. It was on a stretched canvas, rather than canvasboard, so the frame had to be deeper than normal. So decided to just make it from scrap lumber I had squirreled away.

I started with this stuff. These 1 ½” by 1 ¾” boards were part of a kind of disappointing haul I got from my local Everything is Free page. I don’t remember what it was I thought I’d find there, but by the time I got to it, all that was left was this tangle of busted-up boards from inside some kind of homemade builtin cabinet. They were cracked from their demolition, and full of wood screws, but I took them because there was still plenty of good material and I think I wanted to justify the trip.

I pulled all the screws and used them in another project, and when I went looking for material for the picture frame, they were pretty much perfect. Plenty of material, and I didn’t have to worry I’d use it for something better. The painting was of a rustic cabin, so the frame was going to be a bit rustic anyways, so a little battle damage was no big deal.

I measured and marked them based on a picture frame my grandfather had made (I would have used it instead but it wasn’t deep enough for the stretched canvas). I cut them to length, then down to 45 degrees on my miter saw (it makes squaring up lumber and doing corners absurdly easy, I used to do them all by hand and getting them to fit was much more art than science back then.)

Once I was looking at it, I realized the frame was a bit too thick, and decided to remove about half an inch in depth from the four pieces. This would be quick work on a table saw, but I don’t have one, so I marked a line and used the band saw. Then I sanded up all the sides on a belt sander until they looked good. There was a bit of stain left in deep spots from the original project, and I tried to keep some of it – I like a little character and history from the life of the piece. This wood was a part of someone’s home, they knocked it out with a sledge hammer, a weird goblin man came by on trash day and took it, now it’s a picture frame hanging on a wall.

Then I had to use the router to notch the back of all the pieces to hold the actual canvas. My router was a recent junk store find, it’s the old craftsman kind that’s a hand router bolted to the underside of a little fiberglass table. I screwed it to the workbench over the lathe, down on the far end, since its out of the way and that’s my heaviest workbench. I have plans to rewire the router, so you can turn it on and off with a proper tool switch, like I did for the drill press, but I haven’t done that yet, so turning it on meant reaching underneath, feeling for one of the handles, finding the trigger and the locking button, and setting them, at which point it begins to spin. It’s awkward and I wouldn’t want to have to do that in an emergency.

This was my first time really using a router on my own projects, so it wasn’t quite as pretty as I’d like, but overall it looks fine. I definitely want to replace the small, two-part fence with a taller one that runs end-to-end and gets closer to the blade. That would reduce the piece’s ability to wobble when its only braced against one of them.

Once the notch was cut I found the 45 clamp didn’t work that well so I stuck each joint together with a big dab of wood glue and a couple small dabs of super glue. The super glue gives you just enough time to get the pieces where you want them, and sort of acts as the clamping force for the wood glue, which takes much longer to dry.

Once it was dry, I stained the frame with Sedonia Red, it came out a sort of pink color but I think it’ll be a good fit for the white cabin with red trim in the painting, and the recipient can always hit it with a second coat of a darker stain if they choose.

The last step was to add a cable to the back. They make little metal picture frame hanger things, and I thought about just cutting and bending one from a soda can, but to be honest, I kinda hate those hangers. I don’t think they work well and they feel unreliable to me. Usually I just use a strand pulled from some damaged CAT 5 wire, but this time I happened to have this metal cable left over from… somewhere? I honestly can’t remember what it came from. But it’s the sort of thing I keep because it doesn’t take up much space and it’ll be useful eventually, and sure enough it was! The loops had already been cut, so I just drilled a hole through the little aluminum clamps at either end, used the vice to squeeze them down on the wire a little extra, and used them to attach the cable to the painting. I measured both holes from the top, and predrilled them with a thin bit to make driving in the nail easier (since I didn’t want to break the picture frame.

As a very last touch, I cut a tiny sliver of wood and glued it into a notch where the miter saw ripped out a bit of wood at the top left corner. A little stain blended that back in nicely.

Overall, not bad for my first picture frame. It’s a little rough, but it’s supposed to look that way.

>The tribe will also install a small biodigester, which will use bacteria to break down organic material in the absence of air — referred to as an anaerobic environment — and turn it to methane for cooking and fertilizer for the tribe’s community garden.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/14508843

> Here is a map of current free stores in New York. > > https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1LiHVRiKFOtkx0LwDIczp4KoseLhdDg9n&ll=40.75095081144914%2C-73.95967585&z=12 > > Also a similar project called the freecycle network lists towns across the world. > > https://www.freecycle.org/find-towns

There's also Buy Nothing and Everything is Free

At the height of the pandemic, farmers were forced to dump millions of pounds of perfectly edible produce. Four years later, they still need help with their surpluses.

This is the machine translation (Argos Translate) of Lidl’s “zero waste” announcement:

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The revenues generated by this initiative will be fully donated to the Belgian Federation of Food Banks

Monday, 10 February 2020 — The Lidl supermarket chain launches the "Good appetite, Zero gaspi" project in all its Belgian stores. The goal of this initiative is to limit food losses and to allow Lidl to reduce food waste by 25% (as compared to 2015) by the end of 2020 and 50% by 2025. The discounter sells products that are always consumer-friendly at broken prices such as cartons of fruit and vegetables of 3kg for 1€, meat and fish to be consumed the day for 0,50€. Revenues generated by "Good appetite, Zero gaspi" will be donated to the Belgian Food Bank Federation. Broken price products to stop food waste

The "Good appetite, Zero gaspi" initiative will significantly reduce the food losses of the ensign. “By 2020, we aim to reduce food losses by 25% compared to 2015 and 50% by 2025. Since today, the "Good appetite, Zero gaspi" project has been implemented in Belgium, where every day we present to our customers different food products that are always consumer-friendly at a small price:

• 1€ for dry products with slightly damaged packaging and cartons of 3 kg of fruit and vegetables

• €0.50 for all types of meat, fish and pastries to be consumed on the day

• €0.20 for dairy and ultra-fresh products (compound salts) to be consumed on the day. »

Philippe Weiler, Lidl Sustainability Manager

Lidl Belgium has a structural agreement with federation of food banks in Belgium. The revenues generated by this initiative will be donated to these two associations. Lidl wants to be a state-of-the-art sustainability supermarket by 2020

Lidl has recently presented a new sustainability strategy composed of 20 ambitious goals by 2020, and a goal is dedicated to food waste. Philippe Weiler: "To achieve this goal, we must both fight food waste and revalue food surpluses. »

---

Ideally the staff should notice that something expires today and put a zero waste sticker on it which marks the price down to €0.20 or €0.50, depending on whether it’s meat or veg. The problem is they are not diligent about spotting the expiring food. And worse, there are inconsistencies:

• Lidl store 1: if you point out an expiration date of today to the cashier, they will ring it up under the zero-waste pricing (€0.20 or €0.50). The sticker is not needed.. just there to highlight the low price customers. So while standing in line it’s wise to check dates for stuff expiring today to lower the price.

• Lidl store 2: they are apparently deliberately not putting the zero waste sticker on things expiring today. If you point out the expiration to the cashier, they refuse to alter the price. They even called the manager over who said “no zero waste sticker, no discount”.

• Lidl store 3: sloppy about which sticker. Sometimes meat gets the veg price (€0.20) and often veg gets the meat price (€0.50). And the cashier refuses to correct mistakes.

So unfortunately every store is different and #Lidl HQ says that’s expected.

I have no idea what happens when something expires on Sunday, when they are closed (I saw a pastry on Saturday that expired on Sunday but didn’t think to ask for zero-waste pricing). They certainly will not sell something that is past the date under any circumstances.

update --- I’ve found there are differences based on the item involved as well. Shops are not at all fast and loose with the zero waste discount if it’s a pie which goes from €5.50 to 50¢.

• Lidl store 1: Refused to give me zero-waste pricing on a pie first thing in the morning, but they allowed the zero-waste pricing on a salad and some pasta. They said they will only markdown the pie in the afternoon. Next day I found another pie expiring that day. It was 1pm but they blocked me again, saying it had to be after 4pm. The goal posts keep moving!

• Lidl store 4: Refused zero-waste pricing on a pie mid day, but said after 5pm they would.

• Lidl store 5: Was there shortly after 5pm and happened to find a whole pie with the zero waste sticker (50¢). That must be very rare.

update 2 ---

• Lidl store 1: found an item on Saturday that will expire on Sunday. Zero-waste pricing refused.

update 3 --- None of this matters because we should be boycotting Lidl anyway.

The article is in french. Feel free to use a translator.

One of my hobbies is fixing up old furniture to give away. This one was interesting because I was able to combine two pieces of damaged furniture to produce something decent.

(This is a somewhat challenging one to write up because despite having the thing taking up most of my basement for months, I somehow failed to take any in-progress pictures of the desk itself. This is probably because almost all of the work was done on the desktop instead, but it's still kind of annoying. There's still a bunch of photos of the project in the imgur link though)

So almost a year ago, someone on my local Buy Nothing page offered up a mid-century desk. The kind with two file cabinets, pull-out writing surfaces, a central drawer, and a panel in the back. It even had the feet. The only problem was that it was missing the top.

It seemed like a fun restoration job, so I stated my interest and they let me know where to pick it up.

Once I got all the parts home and took some measurements, I put up a few posts on the page over the next few weeks asking if anyone had an old tabletop with the right dimensions. And someone did. She had the absolutely perfect top for this project. It was an old ikea table of the exact right dimensions, which had been stored in an open-sided garage for years. The finish had weathered off, the wood had bleached silver, birds had dumped on it, and the metal legs had rusted to the point where even I didn’t think they were recoverable. In short, zero guilt for taking the top and redoing it to match the desk (I always hate ruining one thing to make something else, but this wasn’t very fixable as a table).

I spent the next few weeks sanding it down until I just had bare wood, and had removed most of the water damage. Then I stained it, in two coats, of two different shades of brown, trying to hit the sort of medium shade the rest of the desk was made in. All my stains and urethane are also secondhand. The top came out slightly redder that I'd have liked. I’d say the desk has a more yellow-brown tinge, but all in all, I was quite pleased with it.

I applied several coats of polyurethane (using a brush because I’m a furniture refinishing monster). This was somewhat tricky because I was working outside - the local bugs decided to explore it and I had to keep chasing them away/rescuing them.

Once it was dry, I removed the rest of the table hardware (boards that ran width-wise across the underside, and which held the screw-in metal plates for the table legs to attach to). I saved the hardware because it’s always useful eventually, even if I don’t think I can fix the rusted-out galvanized table legs.

Assembly was as simple as putting the desk together, marking my drill bit for depth with some tape, and predrilling holes for some short screws, to attach the metal brackets on the desk cabinets to the underside of the top.

Finding a home for it was a little more difficult but the Buy Nothing page came through. I offered it to a person who was acquiring furniture for their neighbor, who was planning to host refugees in a spare mother-in-law type apartment. They ended up not needing it, leaving her with a pile of disassembled desk stuck in her garage. She was a good sport about that though, and a month and a couple posts later, we found another taker, who was happy to get it all set up. So now a incredibly sturdy, absurdly heavy old desk, and an old ikea tabletop are back in use and hopefully will be for many years to come.

My SO's company handles food. Sometimes that food goes bad. In this case, they got a whole shipment of milk days away from its expiration date (at which point they can't serve it, and local food pantries very sensibly won't accept it). Luckily, they're not committed to dumping it down the drain, and they'll let us take it.

Sometimes it's still okay to drink, but usually we take it so we can make farmer's cheese. This is a soft, mild cheese which makes an awesome dip/spread, or which is useful as an ingredient in other foods. It's super easy, and requires no aging, just heat and vinegar. This was our biggest batch yet.

We normally use this recipe: https://www.olgainthekitchen.com/homemade-farmers-cheese/ though we add additional seasonings depending on how we plan to use the cheese.

Step one is to bring the milk up to temp. The recipe will have more details, but the important thing is to stir it to keep the milk from burning and not to bring it all the way to a boil. We wait until there's a sort of bubble froth along the edge of the pot.

Once it's hot, its time to mix in the vinegar. You want 1/2 cup of vinegar per gallon of milk. Stir it and you'll immediately see the milk separate into clumpy white curds, and the thin yellow whey. If it doesn't separate, hey just add more vinegar.

Strain it through a siev or cheesecloth. You can speed things up by squeezing it a bit, but be careful since it'll be hot.

Let it drain a bit and you've got farmer's cheese. You have tons of options from here. You can keep draining it in the fridge if you want it kinda crumbly, or you can run it through the food processor with a bunch of seasonings to make a nice smooth, spreadable dip. We have a cheap jalapeno cilantro mix we really like for making a dip for crackers. You can also use it as a filling for stuffed shells, or mix it into a white sauce for pasta.

Alternatively, leave it unseasoned and use it to make syrniki, a kind of traditional Russian cheese pancake which is really good. (I've posted about this previously here: https://imgur.com/a/vqk4r4B and the recipe is here: https://www.alyonascooking.com/syrniki-recipe-cheese-pancakes/ )

Like I said, this is our biggest batch yet. Five and a half gallons of milk condensed down to one large bag of cheese. Our plan is to portion off enough for any meals that'll use it this week, and then to freeze the rest.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/6224624

> If you incorporate these ingredients in your cooking, your left-overs will last longer: > > * honey > * salt > * garlic > * sugar (only in high amounts according to feedback; small amounts shortens the life) > * ginger > * sage > * rosemary > * mustard > * cumin > > From other articles: > > * black pepper > * mustard seed > * turmeric > * cinnamon > * cardamom > * cloves > > Acids mentioned by others: > > * vinegar > * citric acid > * lemon/lime juice

Lots of potatoes, some bell peppers, strawberries, a leek, tomatoes, 3 apples (1 not pictured), and 1 apex predator. This food will give us apple pie, grits and curry with the tomatoes, stir fried peppers, strawberries in oatmeal, leak soup, and a bunch of meals from the potatoes.

If you're interested in trying this yourself, the easiest place to start is by asking grocery store workers if they throw out any food, and if you can look through it. Some stores will be happy for you to do so. There are even some people out there on an exclusively freegan diet.

Over the counter remedies are costly in Europe (€9 for a bottle of cough syrup). And like prescription drugs, they just slap an arbitrary expiration date on the pkg.

My bottle of cough syrup which expired Dec.2019¹ is nearly empty. I took a risk and took swigs from it over the past few days. No issues. Potency was likely reduced but it wasn’t useless - coughing frequency cut down noticeably for a brief period.

I did everything wrong and got away with it. It’s dicey that it’s in liquid form (which ages quicker than meds in solid forms). I also stored it in a room that gets quite warm in the summer. I always drank straight from the bottle.

Research

It’s interesting to note that the US military doesn’t want to stock up on meds and throw them away upon expiry. It would be a huge cost waste impacting public money. So the “Shelf Life Extension Program (SLEP)” was undertaken by the FDA for the Department of Defense. The findings go as far as to test drugs that are 28—40 years past expiry:

• Based on stability data, expiration dates on 88% of the lots were extended beyond their original expiration date for an average of 66 months. Of these, roughly 12% more lots remained stable for at least 4 years after the expiration date. Of these 2652 lots, only 18% were terminated due to failure.

A lot of the advice is what you would expect.. vaccines and biological meds don’t hold up. Anything that’s crumbled and stinky is toast. Perhaps not so obvious: some anti-biotics can become dangerous.

Freezing cough syrup is a bad idea but refrigeration is sensible.

1. The Dec.2019 is technically irrelevant the moment the bottle is opened. Manufacturers only guarantee expiration dates on unopened packages.

It is now mandatory but lots of people still don't have access to a collect point. Some progress have been made in 2023 but it is far from being enough for the whole population to start separating compostables.

For most people around me there is no difference in the way they handle their waste and many are not even aware of this regulation.

As I entered a building supply store someone was smashing all the ceramic tiles that were on the wall. He was about ¾ through them all. I said: hold on.. I’ll take those sample tiles that are still on the wall. I can find a purpose for them even if each one is a different color. He said he could not justify to his boss giving them away and that he would get in trouble. He asked if I wanted to buy them. But a mixed bag of random tiles is worth close to zero to me without having a project in mind. Of course the problem is the business makes nothing off them if they give them away and they risk losing a sale if someone does a project with them that otherwise would require a purchase.

The bizarre thing is this happens every year because (like clothing) the tiles go out of fashion annually. Most are solid colors so hard to get my head around how a solid color tile would go out of style so quickly especially when a vast majority of them are very neutral colors (which are quite forgettable). Who walks into your kitchen and says “dude, you’re out of fashion.. those tiles are over 1 year old?”

Along the same lines, Amazon destroys copious amounts of goods that are still new in packaging instead of selling them to an overstock specialist or donating to charity. An Amazon insider told me it’s because the warehouse space is limited and they prioritize whatever stock moves the fastest. So the slower moving stock gets destroyed just because of a space issue. They told me management is very strict about who has access to the area where these products get staged for disposal. They make sure to select someone who will follow through and won’t take the stuff home or give it to someone who will put it on eBay (they don’t want to compete for sales with a competitor selling their own dumped stock).

That’s like reason# 50 why I boycott Amazon.

This is probably the best use of Christmas trees (though it’s up for debate whether it’s a good idea to cut down spruce trees to begin with).

Side note: it was hard to find this story on a website that’s not exclusive access or enshitified. Even the company who built the turbine (#Modvion) has a tor-hostile website themselves.

According to the BBC Newsroom they use glue instead of bolts to hold it together.

I love wrapping Christmas presents. But I haven't bought wrapping paper in over a decade. Even before I found zerowaste as a concept, I enjoyed the thrift and challenge of reusing old paper, working around tears, tape, and crinkles. I've always been kinda weird so my family went along with it, until it's now part of our tradition and they help me gather up the big scraps after everything's been opened.

My advice, if you want to try this:

• Tape the paper to the present first so you can sort of cinch the paper tight. That pulls a lot of the wrinkles and folds out of it and makes it look nice.

• Fold it at the corners for a sharper look.

• Use the gift/name tags to cover any damaged spots. I use the ones charities send in the mail after you donate once five years ago. Or blank bits of the sticky paper from the sheets of mailing labels.

• Consider other sources of paper - I've also used posters that didn't print right and regular newspaper

Benefits/reasons my family puts up with it:

• It can be surprisingly nostalgic to see paper from last year and remember projects and things we gave back then. I've kept some pieces going, showing up again and again in smaller pieces for like five years now.

• Fancy paper: I try to prioritize the really fancy/pretty stuff from years past, the shiny foil papers etc. it's nice to get extra use out of that.

• Humor: most of us live separately now so everyone tends to wrap their presents with their own paper, which kinda indicates who it's from. Except me - my presents look like they came from everyone else, which is sometimes surprising or funny.

Fish skin is being sterilized and used for skin grafts on burn victims in #Brazil and #Colombia (on both human and non-human animals). It’s superior to gauze and ointment. IIRC, pig skin was used at one point. Apparently fish skin is better at sealing moisture in?

Anyone taking bets on whether folks in the Goth scene will start grafting fish scales on for fashion?

This BBC episode covers it (among other unrelated topics):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct4wkk

This (⚠enshitified) ABC News article covers how the fish skin is used on wildlife rescues:

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/fish-skin-heal-burn-wounds-work/story?id=57122126

^ ⚠warning: that shitty website plays videos automatically, thus drains bandwidth for those on limited connections. (And wtf.. why isn’t there a conventional way to tag such URLs to spare us from verbosity?)

My mother-in-law made these from her mother's bottle collection. The bottles were found near old cellar holes- they were discarded by the people who used to live there. We think they're somewhere around one hundred years old. Cleaned up, they make a beautiful display for plant cuttings!

This is a quick one, not an impressive repair, but maybe a nice demonstration of the perks of keeping stuff until its useful. I found a multi-socket extension cord/usb charger while digging through ewaste (I fix up laptops and give the stuff I find away on my local.Buy Nothing -type group).

Someone had really yanked on it (probably the plug was stuck behind something heavy) and when it came free, two of the prongs were bent, and the ground prong was ripped out altogether.

I had a spare 120v plug - about a year ago, I took some old extension cords from an estate cleanout. Awhile later, while helping a friend build an arcade cabinet, I dug one out and cut the socket off it to wire the cabinet up for electricity. Unfortunately, the sheathing around the individual wires inside the cord had crumbled away to almost nothing, and it wasn't safe to use. I gave the copper to a friend who sells metal to a junkyard, and kept the plugs from either end.

The actual rewiring isn't difficult, just stripped the wires and attached them to the correct terminals. I used an old neon tester my neighbor gave me to check my work. It lit up just fine and I didn't trip the circuit. Later I plugged a bricked, ewaste 1st gen ipad into the usb socket and it started charging just fine. So it looks like this worked out

So there's my excuse for why I keep all these odds and ends.Even when it's something as simple as this, there's something wonderful about being able to take multiple pieces of junk, combining them, and suddenly having a useful item.

I saw a street market vendor with a pile of ~20 or so old TomToms. The price: 50¢ each, must buy in multiples of 2.

I would have loved to be able to flash them with some OSM-based app, but it does not exist AFAIK. It’s half-tempting to buy some if I see that vendor return because it could be fun to have some of the world’s smallest spinning patter hard drives. Indeed, if you open up an old #TomTom there are CompactFlash sized hard drives with tiny spinning platters which use a CF card interface. Probably of no practical use.

IMO, in a forward-thinking world TomTom would be forced to finance porting OSM to those obsolete devices. TomTom’s excuse for obsolescence is that their maps have outgrown the storage media capacity.

I’ve been kicked out of local junkyards ½ dozen times or so now. It’s a tricky game of trying to reach the waste pile when no one is looking, and also seeing who is on duty in hopes of at least ensuring that the same person doesn’t experience the pattern of kicking you out multiple times. Perhaps they would get aggressive and even block you from dumping stuff if you’re kicked out too much.

Strictly speaking, it’s theft to take stuff from the junkyard. To be clear, the junkyards in my area do not sell parts. They just melt and refine the waste. The melt value is naturally less than the as-is value to someone who would repair or reuse.

IMO, the #rightToRepair movement needs to expand to give the public access to junk before it’s recycled or dumped into landfills.

Meds often expire long before they actually decay. There are a variety of reasons for this:

• the drug makers want waste; just like printer ink makers they want to sell you more than you need in part by encouraging waste.
• performing rigorous tests on the rate of decay of drugs to get an accurate expiry date is costly. It’s much cheaper to skip the testing and choose an arbitrary date that is obviously safe. The excessively big safety factor that results supports the 1st point.
• liability for overestimating the expiry is costly.

So I rarely use even ½ a prescription following an incident. But then I’ll often take expired drugs knowing that the expiry date is often arbitrary anyway. Many drugs do not become more dangerous past the date; they just lose potency and need more of a dose (depending on the drug). Anyway, I digress.

The main problem is the excessive controls. You can’t openly resell what you don’t use. Pharmacies don’t want it back and you’re stuck with it.

India has started a “shared doctor appointment” scheme. The idea is that if you have a dozen people with the same medical condition and the doc’s time is limited, they have introduced an option to have everyone meet at the same time to learn about their condition, almost like taking a class. Some patients then establish friendships with other patients with the same condition. Well why not share the meds considering these patients would often have the same prescription?

This one is nothing fancy, but it fit our workflow well. My SO has always saved recipes to a pinterest board - normally she brings a laptop to the kitchen and sets it up on a chair.

We finally took this tablet (came from corporate ewaste) and stuck it to the wall. It's too old for most apps but it seems to work well for this. We installed pinterest, and a podcast player. Eventually I'll check if there's a good replacement OS for the expired android version, but I figure we'll do a bit of a trial run, see how it's working for us and what we need, before starting with that.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/3586855

Parts used:

• Raspberry Pi 3b, found in an ewaste bin
• Secondhand microphone
• Leftover arcade button
• Old computer wiring
• Old computer speaker
• Secondhand extension cord
• Wood screws from an estate cleanout
• Board from Everything is Free (used to be a floorboard in an attic)
• Plywood speaker grille cut by my spouse at the makerspace - the only new material
• Python code and tutorials from the internet

After working on a bicycle or an engine, hands covered in grease, I can confirm that coffee does the job. Spent coffee grounds are gritty like sand so they work amazingly well to get the grease off. I use a bar of soap at the same time which causes coffee grounds to get embedded in the bar. It’s a good thing too because it always helps to have the soap bar a bit gritty.

That much is proven for me.. been using coffee for years to wash greasy hands instead of buying the special purpose heavy-duty hand cleaners.

Coffee is now being used to make clothing and one of the claims is that it gives odor control. I’ve cut back to showering once per WEEK (a pandemic side-effect that became a habit). Even though I’m back to leaving the house regularly the shower habit did not change. So my armpits get quite rank after a week. 💡 If coffee grounds have a deodorizing effect, why not use them on arm pits? I’ve not heard of anyone doing this but thought it’d be worth a test.

So I brought spent coffee grounds into the shower and after one scrubbing with them my armpit odor was gone. Coffee grounds work better than shower gel. Normally I scrub with shower gel, rinse, & sniff. The first iteration is usually not enough.. I have to repeat that process 2 or 3 times with shower gel to get the stink off. Coffee grounds worked on just one iteration. I think what happens is the deodorant is sticky & waxy which then gets coated with sweat then the sweat-loving bacteria. The abrasive grit from the coffee grounds scrapes the sticky waxy nasties away faster than soap can dissolve it.

Coffee seems to work on its own but I only did this experiment once so far so I followed with shower gel anyway for good measure.

(stop reading at this point)

nsfw begin

Of course arm pits aren’t the only area that stinks after a week. The groin doesn’t smell too good either. What develops to maturity is what’s called cock cheese¹. I’m not flexible enough to do a proper scientific test. The nose-crotch proximity is what it is. It stunk before the coffee treatment but not after. So it worked at least to the extent that I could confirm. I guess my next partner will have the noble scientific task of assisting with the close proximity sniff test mid-shower and indicate whether shower gel is still needed.

footnotes:

1. Sorry folks. Indeed it’s not the most elegant nomenclature. IMO there’s a language deficiency here. That’s the only name the stuff has AFAIK. Be sure to forget that term whenever you’re eating cheese. Or alternatively it may not be a bad idea to just cut cheese out of your diet at this point.¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You were warned.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/3036509

> There is apparently a printer that can use spent coffee or tea leaves to print. I love this idea but I would not buy a printer when so many are being thrown away. I pull them out of dumpsters with intent to repair them. So the question is, can they be hacked to work with coffee or tea? > > Canon actually disclosed how to hack their cartridges as a consequence of a semiconductor shortage due to coronavirus. So this suggests #Canon could be a candidate for this hack. Has anyone tried it? How precisely do we have to match the viscosity of homemade ink to the original ink?

I think I need a sewing machine that can do a variety of different kinds of stitches. One use case is to repair holey socks by cannabalizing fabric from other holey socks. Thus the stitch needs to be the kind that can stretch and ideally not create an awkward feeling on the foot.

Some sewing machines have a fixed number of stitches they can do. Would it make sense to get an embroidery machine and use #inkStitch (an Inkscape variant)? I’m not sure if that’s strictly for embroidery -- or does that give the ability to do a variety of stitches using FOSS?

The inkstitch.org website steers people toward taking a basic sewing machine and modifying it using 3d printed parts. That’s too ambitious for me. I don’t want a hardware project. I just want to buy hardware that’s ready to go and use free software to control it. Is that possible with things that exist already?

#askFedi

This table was in pretty rough shape, the top was missing, the varnish was flaking, and the wood had greyed in the weather. There was some discoloration I suspected was mold.

I had a scrap of particleboard left over from an arcade cabinet I helped a friend build, which happened to be a good fit for the top, so I decided to combine the two and put them up on my local Buy Nothing -type group. I sanded off the finish, posted a picture asking if anyone would like it once I fixed it up and what color they'd like it painted (normally I restain them but I wanted to get this one done quickly to clear space, and I didn't love how the wood looked (it had a lot of those zigzaggy joints they use for cheap lumber).

A couple people were interested, one picked white, and I painted it up. The paint is the only reason this isn't a completely zerowaste project. I needed more white paint to get this done, and I was in a hurry so I didn't want to wait for asking around on the group. I felt like it was worth it if it gets the table back into service, and out of my basement.

I laid out a dropcloth and set the table upsidedown first so I could get all the spots underneath the joints, then I flipped it and painted it standing upright.

Some of my yellowjacket buddies came to check out what I was doing but we managed to coexist. Nobody got stung and nobody got sprayed with paint.

I turned it four times so I could see how each side looked in direct sunlight, and made sure I hadn't missed anything.

While it dried, I used some white acrylic paint on the sanded edge of the particleboard, to seal up the material. Once that was ready, I flipped the top so the good side faced down, flipped the old table base so it was upside down on top of the upside-down top, measured the distance to each side and adjusted till they were even. Then I drilled through the existing holes in the base, just through the plastic veneer on the particleboard, and drove six drywall screws through.

The finished version is solid enough, and the recipients were happy with it. It'll do it's job for a good many years yet.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/09/dont-throw-out-those-used-coffee-grounds-use-them-for-3d-printing-instead/

There are bats living around my parent's house. I wanted to build them a house of their own. They seem to like the barn - we think the scratches on the wall below the eaves might be from bats landing and climbing their way up into shelter. They only seem to exist below the eaves, so I'm hoping that's a good sign that they'll notice their new house quickly.

If you've seen my other posts here, you'll know I try to make everything I build out of old materials, stuff I find on trash day, pull from construction debris, or get from my local Everything is Free page, so that was part of the challenge of building this one. I pretty much managed it - the only thing I bought new was the caulking I used to seal the joints, everything else, wood, stains, screws, bituthene, etc was all old stuff.

I started with a kind of motley collection of materials but I like the challenge of finding secondhand stuff that'll work. On the uphand, I didn't have to cut up bigger lumber just to make the spacers, they were all small scraps from other projects. I don't remember where I got the nice piece of half-inch cabinet plywood. The 3/8" plywood came from a fellow I met through Everything is Free, and the pine boards were found on trash day.

I followed this guide: https://www.mass.gov/doc/build-a-four-chamber-bat-house/download from the state of Massachusetts as closely as I could since we're in a similar region, though I had to make it slightly narrower than the specified 17.5 inches because of the dimensions of the 1/2" plywood. I also made the roof slightly wider, because the board was already that length and it seemed like it would offer additional protection, so no need to shorten it.

We had access to a laser cutter through a local makerspace, so my SO and I decided to burn a paisley pattern into the smaller panels just as a quick flourish. I'm actually very pleased with how that little detail looked on the finished version, and it's something I'll play with in future furniture building projects. The sides were slightly longer than the laser cutter's working space, so I had to carve a little of the pattern by hand, but once it was stained they blended in pretty well.

The instructions tell you to cut groves into the interior surfaces to make it easier for the bats to climb. For most of them I did regular horizontal lines, 1/4" to 1/2" apart, but I got bored a couple times and cut climbable murals instead. I tried to emphasize lots of horizontal handholds, and I made sure that each compartment got at least one regular 'ladder' too. Given that they seem to already be climbing the wooden siding of the barn, I think they'll still find this pretty usable.

The instructions all said to stain it with water based stain so the fumes/smell wouldn't bother the bats. I did all the interior surfaces with a can of expresso water-based stain and the outside surfaces with two coats of oil-based stain for improved water resistance (and because I ran out of the water-based stuff). I left all the panels leaning upright on our porch for several weeks so they could offgas with good ventilation, prior to assembly. All the stains came from Everything is Free.

I decided to stain the paisley panels with red mahogany stain and the rest with two coats of ebony to give them a little more contrast. This left the roof and front stained black for maximum sun-warming. On the front paisley panel, which had a frame around the pattern, I did my best to do the inside in red and the frame in black, to match the sides. It was all pretty much hidden by the very distinct grain that piece of plywood happened to have. A prestain might have helped, though I mostly wish I'd had more of the cabinet plywood I used for the upper front and back.

I started assembly by attaching the back to the sides, and started that by caulking the joint. The silicone caulking was the only thing I bought new for this project. I could probably have kept asking around until I found some, but I settled for giving the rest of the tube away on Everything is Free because I didn't think I'd use it for anything before it expired. The directions emphasized that you really want a good seal everywhere except the specified vents, because the bats need to be warm and dry, so I made sure to seal all the exterior joints well.

Once it was all assembled, I added a coat of oil-based urethane to the top and sides of the roof to help with water resistance. If it warped, that could allow drafts and additional moisture intrusion. I also added little bits of trim to the sides under the roof, after sealing that joint a second time.

We hung it partly using some metal strips my dad had from past projects, for attaching chimneys to the roofing around them. They were galvanized and a kind of corrugated pattern. I found two sets of two where the existing holes lined up, and drilled two new ones in each set so they all had four. Then I painted them and attached them to the back.

Another relative provided a scrap of bituthene which we stuck/stapled to the roof for additional waterproofing.

Once it was ready, I pushed it to the top of a tall ladder leveled it against the wall, and put two screws through each metal bracket, then two screws through the landing strip at the bottom, and two toenailed in through the vents on the sides. I'm told that was overkill but I really didn't want any bats we housed to fall off the wall someday. At this point, if it goes, it'll take the siding with it.

You'd be surprised how many stores sell bleach, soda, baking soda and citrus acid. It's cheap, very low in waste, and less to carry from the store.

The ones I have even describe how to use them for different use cases. Basically you just put it in some water. A package costs like a euro and lasts you a year if not years.

Edit: Here's the list:.

• Water: Helps you mix and rinse; cleans almost everything. :)
• Washing Soda: Great for tough stains on clothes and hard surfaces.
• Baking Soda: Sprinkle on carpets or scrub sinks; it's a gentle cleaner.
• Bleach: Need to kill germs or whiten whites? Use bleach, but carefully!
• Citrus Acid: Makes your kettle or showerhead shine by removing scale.
• Rubbing Alcohol: Perfect for glass and wiping down surfaces; dries fast.
• White Vinegar: Mix with water for an all-purpose cleaner; good on glass too.
• Borax: Boosts your laundry detergent; helps keep bugs away.
• Sea Salt: Scrubbing a pan? Sea salt helps scrape away the tough bits.
• Castille Soap: Wash floors, dishes, or even pets; it's mild and versatile.

I've noticed that the Nivea roll-on deodorants I'm using are pretty easy to open after used up, but haven't found any refill fluid on the market.

I know some people use powders etc, I'm not willing to try that, but does anyone know of a reasonably priced refill?