Always regretted giving my original away, the typewritten text and hand-drawings had a certain charm which the updated single leatherbound hardcover lack.
The Gingery Book Store is shutting down this year, and not reprinting any books, so one wonders what will replace it:
https://forum.makerforums.info/t/google-post-by-marcus-wolsc...
Another effort along these lines was the "Multimachine" which attempted to create a metal-working equivalent to the woodworking shop's ShopSmith using an engine block, taking advantage of the fact that they are readily and inexpensively available from junked vehicles. I believe it was on the "Opensource Ecology" site linked elsethread.
Perhaps Chris Borge's series of machine tools made with 3D printed shells filled with concrete and arrayed with hardware store components?
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/13/3d-printed-milling-machine-i...
That said, as various machinists have joked, I am still "shaper curious", and have been sketching up a hand-operated shaper --- debating on saving for a set of castings, making my own, or going the hardware store route....
I always liked the WiFi catenaric (instead of parabollic) reflector for it's simplicity,though I think drawing parabolas shouldn't be that difficult either to get a more directional reflector
(I know there are actually a few projects in the categories I mentioned but they are, largely, underwhelming)
Edit: There is also https://pureselfmade.com/ which uses Piggott turbine designs.
It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That way if something breaks, they have the skillset to fix it.
If you go to villages in developing nations, you'll see these kinds of innovative solutions all over - things that don't seem like they should work but they just do after lots of trial and error.
Lots of really interesting tidbits, and a great lemonade recipe, among lots of other gems.
Here's a decent post about the idea: https://waldenlabs.com/compost-water-heaters-from-jean-pain/
Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally. They do not require previous certification of the user. Their existence does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning in action.
Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others. Most tools today cannot be used in a convivial fashion.
These tools might be useful in war, weird remote situations or maybe when no capital/investors are willing to inject capital in some remote poor african village. But I can't see why any government that can borrow money should do that.
Any usage, even minor, is at too great a cost.
It is not about aesthetics but functionality achieved with cheap avaiable material. That looks seldom beautiful.
Refrigerator would be a traditional root cellar such as my uncle had --- he was also fortunate to have a spring on his property which he encapsulated in a rock structure which was a wonderful place to be on a hot summer day/evening.
I have friends who use it in their apartment which doesn't have AC and doesn't allow installation of one.
1. Identify a locally viable deciduous tree species.
2. Plant this species on the afternoon aspect of the sun in your location. So for northern hemisphere plant to the southwest. For southern hemisphere plant to the northwest.
3. Enjoy shade in summer and sun in winter, plus cleaner air.
Another option depending upon your architecture is to take advantage of forced air within a roof cavity. Buy a large diameter fan with an electronic control, install at apex, and set it to operate when the temperature exceeds a certain point. This will result in a house wide temperature drop with no need to expend $$$ setup plus dollars per hour per room on air conditioning.
Another option is simply shading. One of the simplest and most traditional approaches here is the drop awning. A drop awning consists of a retractable material expanse which can render a building surface in shade and thus promote rapid air movement and cooling in the hottest periods.
Two final options include internal forced air: passive variant (open all the windows and doors) or active variant (ceiling fan, solar works) and insulation or thermal mass.
As for local innovation, it think it very much depends on where. I've visited and lived in many communities in developing nations in Latin America and there's a distinct dearth of not just innovative solutions, but even just basic and seemingly obvious ones. Upon seeing and feeling this 7 years ago, I decided to dedicate my life to it. I'm hopeful that in the coming year I'll finally be ready to share what I've been working on to facilitate it in a more scalable way...
That said, I'm also disgusted by the fact this is necessary at all. We designed and/or let an inherently unfair game go on unimpeded and give the losers some scraps so they may survive and continue to play along with can only be called the naturally occurring and less entertaining variant of The Hunger Games.
Any changes to the status quo will have to contend with powerful questions because why build bonds with people you distrust? Why bother including insignificant nations in your decision process? Why not be top dog and trample everyone under your righteous boots? Why not exploit and generally harvest the shit out of everything in sight and retrieve resources for the absolute minimum you can get away with? These sound annoying and they are, but they are really tough questions and they demand a good answer. Just "be a good person" is not cutting it. We need systemic solutions.
In case you're wondering I have the answer: sadly I do not, but I am convinced a couple of you do so please enlighten me.
Since materials can be scarce and inconsistent, much of it is improvised. That in no way diminishes their efforts, results, or knowledge. If anything, that's way more impressive. Lots of engineers in the first world will throw a tantrum if they can't have things exactly their way and probably still make something that doesn't work as well. Entire businesses have shit their pants and gone bankrupt the moment a part is discontinued.
Trying to do better than the people who live there is not only arrogant, but it's own variation of Chesterton's Fence.
EDIT: I can't help myself and have to post an engineerguy video. It's too important of a topic to not drive this point home crystal clear by someone who is far more respected than me.
"Building a Cathedral without Science or Mathematics: The Engineering Method Explained"
If anyone else has pointers to low cost sensor network appropriate for small scale farms please share!
- The astounding Low Tech Magazine https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
- Appropriate Technologies wiki https://www.appropedia.org/
- Global Village Construction Kit https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ (blueprints for 50 open source technologies that are fundamental to civilization)
Essential reading alongside the Illich (also linked by others), Pye's Nature and Art of Workmanship [1], and Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" [2] for those interested in.... Let's call it an ecology OF technology?
And also the Papanek was probably the book that felt most like a forbidden text in undergraduate architecture school...
[0] https://archive.org/details/designforrealwor0000papa/page/n6...
The power drill required for it isn't especially low tech. A cheap used solar panel is a better solution in 95% of situations.
So similar to a good zoo, that does both active conservation work, and at the same time public education (e.g. in the form of guided tours for school trips).
> I guess that's why it seems to languish in obscurity.
I think even in a well-executed form, it would likely still be quite obscure, as there is next to no need for it in western societies (apart from emergency preperation).
In India there is a word for this kind of thing Jugaad
Years ago I remember reading an article about Russians making a living in the USSR. A man in a town wanted to mow his lawn but could not afford a mower (or maybe he could not easily obtain one?) His solution was a scavenged washing machine motor mounted to an old kids tricycle spinning a home made blade.
https://worldbicyclerelief.org/mechanics-of-mobility/
One product which I can still remember back from when Banana Republic was still an obscure and cool and independent company with a charming hand-illustrated catalog was pairs of slippers/shoes made in 3rd world countries where the sole was a repurposed worn-out bicycle tire.... Interesting inversion of the usual order of things.
Counterpoint: the bits of a bicycle that are likely to wear out or break are not the pipes that you can find just about anywhere, but difficult-to-make things like chains and bearings.
Not everyone everywhere are "engineering oriented", and having people with the skills and eye for practical solutions based on available materials, can help tons, and also open up people's imagination for what can be done.
In fact, this goes for northern Europe too, just that more people can manage without home-built solutions and can "buy away the problem" here.
Also, people where immensely thankful e.g. when my quite clever and crafty father managed to repair a water tank tower that'd been broken for months and years, by sourcing some local material, coming up with a repair design, and having local welders create it, etc etc.
As I elaborated on in another comment, it is commonplace to find that people who have little to no education and resources are missing countless opportunities to implement simple improvements to almost everything.
This mindset of "locals know best" is, frankly, toxic. (just think about the locals wherever you live to see how incompetent they are as well)
What is needed is genuine collaboration and communication between people living in whatever situation and others who are fortunate to have more access to information, resources, education on critical thinking etc...
Buying and shipping X amount of Y to <country> is easy to calculate the cost. And it's a fixed one time cost. Perfect for PR OP, and humanitarian operation with limited budget and/or available work hours.
Teaching takes the most valuable resources of all: Time. And it's harder to predict how long (and therefor how much $$) it will take before having sustainable results. And it requires on-premise staff and usually to setup some building for the staff, for the teaching grounds, etc.
Tl;DR teaching can easily be 10X the time and money budget of a quick 'send stuff' operation. This is why these are usually big operation handled by big non-profit.
The counterargument is, of course, "but what's in it for me?"
Also I think OLPC was a misguided project, as most of these things are. Its out of stem with maslows hierarchy of needs. Folks who are subsistence farmers with drought, smoke filled homes and stomach parasites don't need a laptop and academic education. They need practical and actionable tools and techniques to better meet their basic needs, a state from which they could better pursue academics etc
I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but the realities of a situation guided by those who more deeply understand it can very quickly prune the possibilities that an engineer sees. Many engineers would just get frustrated and give up. Many leaders would become impatient with those engineers.
I think to get people's heads out of the clouds and produce real results requires a very special kind of engineer. That is most likely going to be someone local, not an outsider. One can definitely help on the education side of things for the locals, but I'm not convinced that's where the real problems are. It's more likely political and economic. Not even the best engineers in the world are going to solve that.
Im not going to put effort into turning those other people in another country into a new cash crop for billionaires.
It was comical to see the celebrity "assistance" in the form of e.g., a music production studio + school set up by skrillex, neighboring areas where people lived in shipping crates with stolen electricity jumpered directly from main, and with water tapped off city lines and bucketted in.
They dont need djs, they need plubmbers, carpenters, and electricians first! Fires and water loss were endemic. Almost everyone lived off government assistance, stole / smuggled resources, and blocked traffic/protested when the illegal resource taps were shut down or a government job didn't manifest. The people who made money where they lived usually washed cars or sold trinkets to tourists or brewed bucket beer.
This is insane.
There's no meaningful/competent oversight. It's all just about feels and optics. And thus no real progress has or will be made.
Anyway, yes, I agree that competent and genuine people (who are extremely rare) ought to try to make a meaningful impact in the world. But there's generally more money in something else.
(one rare exception that comes to mind, though i haven't visited them, is The Ocean Cleanup project. They seem to be experimenting and succeeding towards the worthwhile goal of making effective engineering interventions for cleaning up waterways and oceans)
It goes deeper than that if you ask me. It's rarely about "helping" in a lot of cases in the first place, and there's no incompetence at play either.
Just look at food aid to Africa. You know, the campaigns with banners of emaciated African children holding empty food bowls. These aren't primarily about helping African children, but about diverting European (or American) oversupply towards Africa to stabilize prices in the domestic markets - and they all but wiped out African food industry. Simbabwe was known as the "corn chamber of Africa" but lost that in a matter of decades as the cheap food from Europe was cheaper than they could produce. Or clothing donations, these ended up as "mitumba" in Africa, and wrecked local supply chains so hard that, by the time the Chinese came around, there was nothing left to fight.
He's teaching proper engineering with commodity parts and accessible technologies.
What do we care more about? The present? The current generation? Or future generations? Our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren? The perpetuation of human civilization? The perpetuation of human civilization with a set of values that that supports the growth and happiness of all?
That's the first question, right? Alignment. Sustainable alignment.
From there, it's all about sustaining those shared values, and minimizing risk. Build bonds: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Or establish trust. It works out better in the long run; people don't usually Like to stab each other in the back Trampling starts cycles of revenge, and that's no fun for anyone involved either Exploitation prioritizes short term gain and screws you in the long run, more often than not.
- platforms
- boxes
so if one can build a drawer box, one should be able to make pretty much anything --- it's just a matter of working out how to cut things to length/width and possibly reduce/adjust thickness and what sort of joinery one wishes to use.
See my top-level post elsethread for the metal-working angle.
I see what you did there
See for example https://oneacrefund.org/ [0] where they have a revolving loan fund.
OAF lends materials and teachers to farmers to make the more productive, by the end of the program they got productive enough to pay back the loan and OAF can lend the same money to someone else.
It's super capillary, with many boots on grounds and quality problems.
Embedded into this there's a good feedback channel: farmers who don't think are getting a good service stop paying back the loan. This allows OAF to go and audit what's failing there.
[0] The person who started also appeared in a podcast where they explained the basics https://foreveron.com/podcast/episode-035/
Source: I've literally seen this with my own eyes
Because no one is willing to pay them for it and they have bills to pay.
My name is Daniel Connell. I prototype and develop basic technologies which anyone can make using recycled materials and simple tools.
The aim is for everyone everywhere to be able to build and maintain their own infrastructure; producing their own energy, food, clean water, communications, and anything else they need.
All designs are open source and license free for any purpose, and full construction tutorials and how-tos are available here.
The Facebook group is also a good place to ask questions and post results from your own builds.
Featured In:
Al Jazeera ¦ The Guardian ¦ New Statesman ¦ Le Monde ¦ Makezine
https://www.heifer.org/blog/historic-gift-from-south-korea-a...
I'm sure there's plenty of incompetent nonprofits out there, but there's plenty of incompetent for-profits as well.
People who ask this have never gone above and beyond to help someone, expecting nothing in return save for the gratitude they receive. It's a damn shame.
But local people at least have the benefit of knowing their own situations, which puts them ahead of some other rando who doesn't even have that and presumes to know better.
obviously it's a different technological and economic today compared to 2005, but still, "the global poor don't need computers" is questionable just based on the fact that they are spending their own money to get them
Setting aside cynicism is one thing but what answers are there for skepticism besides the very common moralizing personal attacks?
When I see a lot of nonprofit leadership improving their own lot much more reliably than the people “they serve”, I wonder if the handouts are just being politically diverted to the best and most politically valuable promoters.
If UBI is off the table, competition for gatekeeping resources becomes a dark market.