zevon

It is happening all around the world. You can go look at it. You can go participate in it. Just last week I held a workshop where we did it. I also never framed these activities as an "alternative" to other 4R efforts. That is a completely unnecessary dichotomy. Not everything is either-or.

Huh? Football fans regularly produce significant costs for the tax payer by way of the huge police and cleanup activities needed for big games, for example.

Even if you take the stance that PP is art - artists have asked for money for as long as there has been art. Doesn't seem unusual to me.

Are you referring to the land in Portugal that they also made available to the public and that they made a lot of YouTube videos and other documentation about? I would hardly call that "unmentioned".

A lot of comments here seem to assume that the goal of PP is to provide a complete solution for the plastic waste problem. It's not and it doesn't have to be. I may be off base a bit but I think the amount of plastic that is actually being recycled is only around 10% on average (with substantial spikes in both directions if you look at it on a country basis). So there is more than enough headroom to do something useful with the stuff that would otherwise have been burned or buried.

I kind of sort of agree with your points about the manual machines but Aliexpress was not as prevalent as it it is now 10 years ago and it's not as if there were already lots of open source blueprints for injection molders, extrusion machines and the like (unlike for example in the 3D printing space), so the knowledge built up and shared by PP is still useful.

I guess it's also a pretty human thing to want to tinker with making your own machines and share them (if not, there also would not be a bajillion static site generators, notes apps and whatnot in the software world).

I don't really agree about your points about the industrial injection molding machines, though. Sure, if you want to produce many of the same parts, that's ultimately the way to go. However, if you want to do small-series stuff, experiment with different ways of making molds, do educational hands-on stuff and so on - which is what PP is much more about than maximizing output - a manual machine is much more appropriate.

Anecdote: I regularly had people from (university) departments who have all sorts of professional injection moulding equipment use our - in comparison ridiculously primitive - setups. Because it was much easier, much faster and the "vibe" in a Precious Plastics lab is usually also very different than in a research lab (and that's also not to be underestimated if it's more about development/experiments/learning than about maximizing output).

Also: Fucking around with old hydraulics can be a rather dangerous activity and requires some safety considerations not relevant in manual machines.

Health concerns are important - which is why the PP knowledgebase and PP workshops include quite a few infos about the safety aspects of different plastics and how to work with them.

The laser cutter is not necessarily a good comparison for safety considerations. By definition, a laser cutter burns the materials it cuts. With equipment that melts plastic - like injection molding machines or FDM 3D printers - burning the material just means that you did it wrong, your temperature was too high - and you will not get a useful product.

What people do on their own is another matter - but hey, that's apparently just human (see all the chainsaw heroes in safety flip flops, the people running SLA printers in their dorm room, all the soldering that goes on without a fan/filtration, ...)

What is there to "believe"? Precious Plastic collects and creates some knowledge, furthers the education of many people around the world and transforms some stuff that would have otherwise gone to waste to useful things. I really do not understand the mental contortions one needs to undertake to judge such things as somehow negative. Is no project that doesn't scale enough to solve all the problems in a domain worthy of undertaking?

And how is it useful or respectful to be judgemental about what other people engage in and form communities around? Is being a Football fan, an archer, a woodworker or whatever in your spare time somehow more valuable or more useful than engaging with recycling, upcycling, tinkering with machines, doing community work and all the other activities that go into a project like PP?

It's not really clear to me why it is better to build the required infrastructure, transport things to an incinerator and destroy them than have at least some of them locally recycled into useful stuff and spread some knowledge and experience to more people about materials and techniques involved... It's also not clear why you think the downstream products are suboptimal.

This. No matter your stance on economic base model or plastic and recycling in general the decade-long effort of Previous Plastic is very commendable, was a lot of hard work and produced quite a bit of actual output. That doesn't warrant the amount of negativity in this thread, IMO.

Interesting. I have used Precious Plastic and similar machines in educational settings and I know a few people who have set up more or less permanent workshops. There were never any problems getting materials (one's own trash, old plastic furniture and other plastic things from classified ads, have participants bring their own materials, ...).

Could you elaborate on how the machines are expensive? Did you want to buy or build them?

Who or what is this "the Linux desktop" you speak of? ;)

Are they doing that in this case? The DMA is not targeted at Apple specifically. The clarifications linked by Gruber are - and I would assume that there are similar clarifications for other companies' products as well (especially if those other companies raised as much stink in the press as Apple does).

I also assume Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo would also face more targeted regulatory attention if their consoles were as ubiquitous and utility-like as smartphones are (MS certaintly has for Windows). I would even assume that a company could accelerate this process by being as persistent and public as Epic is in regards to Apple.

Don't they get the same scrutiny? Google certainly has had its troubles with regulations (Samsung, specifically, I'm not sure about but based on their size alone, I would assume as much). Microsoft as well, to name another (in)famous example of regulatory clashes from the past.

As to your question: I personally think you should be able to install and use whatever you want on whatever platform you want. I also think that is the general direction these EU regulations are aiming, so I'm not entirely sure what your point is, exactly?

Is this supposed to be irony?

John Gruber's mental gymnastics are a fascinating read sometimes. Here, he basically says 'Apple (and the other giants) will try to not comply with the spirit of the EU regulations, so less regulation it is better for customers'. Weird argument, IMO.

Get old stuff. It's possible to acquire old oscilloscopes and all sorts of (once really expensive) lab equipment for free or for cheap from trash bins at universities or from the Craigslist equivalent in your country.

"How to Diagnose and Fix Everything Electronic" often gets recommended as a very useful book in that regard.

I would not want to touch 120V with wet hands, for example...

See if there are Repair Cafes around you. Tinkering together with other people can be motivational and there usually are retired craftspeople (such as electricians) around who are happy to share knowledge.

Of course sewers are amazing but they are used for a lot more than toilets. My point was: Composting toilets do not need to take up much more space than water-based toilets and it's entirely feasible to use them in many living settings. It's also possible to make use of the "waste" by composting it further, using urine as fertilizer and so on.

Not "in the ground" in the strict sense, but I'm pretty sure that composting toilets would scale to population density. Same basic idea as shitting in a hole (and probably more useful than water-based toilets).

Maybe also an option and an educational little project about electronics and (re-)using "old" devices: There are lots of used iPods around and many of the old hard drive models are pretty easy to retrofit with flash-based storage (there are also lots of options for aesthetic customization as well as more involved modifications such as adding Bluetooth, USB-C and whatnot). As others have mentioned, the software side also still works well with iTunes on Windows and Finder/Music integration on MacOS.

I've always been rather happy with Android in the form of certain versions/ROMs like Cyanogen in the past or GrapheneOS nowadays. The latter is lean, not bloated, secure and - IMO - very usable. Installing it is easy and there are also easy and well documented methods included for enabling all sorts of Google functionality which (some) users might be missing from the default state (like the Play store, "enhanced" location services and all those sorts of things).

I also have an iPhone as a work device and I've had different personal iPhones in the past. iOS is fine but Android can be much more flexible (and easy access to an open source "App Store" like F-Droid is awesome).

Can anybody explain to me in simple terms the argument about opening the floodgates for spam on iMessage if Apple would lower their restrictions? I just don't get it. If true, wouldn't this mean that every other messenger app with fewer restrictions or even alternative clients would have a massive spam problem? Anecdotally, I can't really confirm that.

Sure it would and there are existing Pebble time tracking apps. Here's a search for "Time Tracker" in the Rebble store but I'm sure you will find more with other search terms: https://store-beta.rebble.io/apps/search?query=time%20tracke...

No questions but a comment: I rarely get emotionally attached to devices, especially since I have to handle a lot of fancy hardware for work and it gets old quickly. However, there are a few pieces of technology like my Walkman or my Thinkpad X61t that I really liked and was sad to have to let go when their time had come. The Pebble is another one of those devices for me and I'm quite happy that I won't have to it let go for a lot longer that I thought thanks to your new project. Thanks. :-)

The only way to install the old iOS Pebble app is by sideloading via something like AltStore (or doing it manually every week). Maybe you can also still re-install it if you had it installed when it was available in the App Store but I'm not sure if that still works.

Wow, those guys are moving fast. :-)

I own and use a Pebble Time Steel and a Pebble Time as my only watches. I'm not really missing anything and I'm very happy with my old Pebbles - yet, I'm still quite tempted to pre-order a Core Time 2 to support development and out of curiosity. I'm looking forward to seeing how the touchscreen is implemented. Intuitively, I'd consider a touch-based interface almost an anti-feature on a Pebble, but given their software/UX quality, maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

It's been a very long time since I was involved in teaching basic coding but were I to plan such a course now, I think I would not even consider including automated grading. In fact, I think I'd focus even more on individual and group feedback, lab sessions, remote/office hours and the like. Those things become even more important the easier it is to produce and hand in something you don't really understand.

It's configurable. As per their FAQ:

https://delta.chat/en/help#why-can-i-choose-not-to-watch-the...

https://delta.chat/en/help#why-can-i-choose-to-only-watch-th...

I'm using it under Wayland right now. Though you are right that there are apps that don't populate it.

KDE has a global menu bar that works like the one in MacOS.