Solarpunk Travel

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/22064287

More and more people are using this form of travel to get around the continent, using high-speed routes and a network of night trains that continues to expand. We traveled from Madrid to Prague and witnessed how the future of European transportation is clean and fast

That kind of plane could very much fly trans Atlantic with stop overs in Iceland or Greenland or further south from Kap Verde or Guinea to Brazil.

Originally posted at Hacker News.

I would be stoked to get to join this trip as a kid.

Only bummer is they won't have all-vegan restaurants.

Just wanted to run this idea past folks.

If you generally boycott Boeing over their safety scandals or over their extreme right lobbying contributions that support that climate denying political party, but you find yourself taking a Boeing anyway (e.g. your employer books you on one), why not show up to board the plane wearing a wing suit?

The idea is to convey the idea that a panel can fall off at any moment, inconveniently suck you out, and you have a sudden unplanned need to fly on your own. A parachute is likely too bulky. It’s kind of a way to make a statement.

I’m not sure if the wing suit can be comfortable enough to sit in and actually simultaneously somewhat functional. Would we have to choose between sufficient comfort and sufficient gliding capability, or could we have both?

It doesn’t have to be ugly. Consider those Nepalese and African pants with knee-high crotches. Those are borderline wing suits for the bottom half. When legs are spread, it could reveal something like “Boeing passenger safety pants”.

I suppose the big question would be: would a Boeing pilot exercise their discretion and refuse to carry such a passenger?

Met this guy walking across France in the cevennes, he started walking with his two donkeys at his home in Colmar, Alsace and was on his way to visit his kids at their farm at the foot of the Pyrenees. He was following the GR7 hiking trail.

The problem I have is on long trips (via bicycle or on foot) my phone’s battery hits 15% remaining and screen dims mid-trip, which is essentially blank in daylight when navigating. I’m in airplane mode with wifi also disabled. So the only power consumers are the screen and the GPS receiver. Yet I’m still forced to power down, swap batteries, lose the clock time (which GPS strangely fails to correct), and wait to reacquire a GPS signal. Then OSMand remembers the route parameters but forgets the route (a bug). And because the phone’s time is 1am, I have to either update the time or force OSMand into daytime mode.

Big hassle and unwelcome interruption. I see 3 fixes:

1. Repurpose an old phone to receive the GPS signal and feed the lat/long over bluetooth to your navigation phone. Since a bluetooth radio in receive mode consumes around ⅒ the energy of a GPS receiver, the main phone battery will last much longer. The GPS phone need not power a screen, so it can obviously run quite long if it’s only powering GPS chips and bluetooth in tx mode. (refs: GPS uses 13-38%, bluetooth uses ~1.8% / 17.9mA on one chip; math-intensive research I didn’t read because it would make my brain explode)

2. Attach an external USB battery. I reject this because I don’t want to strap another box to my arm and run a cable into my water resistant phone strap.

3. Get an Android-compatible phone with a dual mode LCD, so a low-power e-Ink mode can be used in daylight. I reject this because I boycott Russia and IIRC only Russia has phones with dual mode displays. I would perhaps be open to buying just a raw dual mode screen (not from Russia or Israel) and then use it to replace a cracked screen on a 2nd hand phone.

I guess it’s debatable relevance to solorpunk travel. Two phones in case 1 consumes a little more power overall but it keeps a phone out of the landfill and makes it useful.

update

Found an f-droid app that looks good for this. It will even run on AOS 2 which means quite old phones can be used to feed GPS coords over BT. This app could be useful as well.

Question: I always disagree to “Google’s location service” nag -- (using towers and/or wifi APs) to supplement navigation (no idea what gets shared with Google and also don’t want wifi or GSM eating battery).. but if a separate phone is feeding the fix, then the power problem goes away. But there’s still the sharing problem. Is there a way to harvest the tower info before a trip anonymously and use it without feeding Google?

update 2

I tried using an external bluetooth GPS device -- one that is dedicated to that purpose from the palm pilot days. I was able to pair to it over bluetooth but after pairing it would not connect to it for any kind of session. It’s as if the android does not know what to do with a GPS server.

Some instructions out in the wild say: “In the Android playstore fetch ‘bluetooth GPS’ or ‘bluetooth GNSS’ App.” Well, I don’t do Playstore.

One step is to go into settings → “Developer options” → Debugging → Allow Mock location → enable. That makes no difference for me.

The instructions also say: “Before you launch your GPS software, launch ‘bluetooth GPS/GNSS’, click “connect” and check “Enable Mock GPS Provider” -- which is a non-starter for those not inside Google’s walled garden. Guess I need a free-world variation of this app which apparently uses the external GPS device to feed a mock location. I found these two apps:

• GPSTest - this is an apparently useful test app but seems unable to use external devices
• RtkGps (abandoned¹) - claims to make a connection over bluetooth to an external GPS, but does not work for me. Mentions SiRF IV but not SiRF III, which may be my problem. IIRC, RTK was a SiRF III competitor.

¹ This repository has been archived by the owner on Mar 28, 2023. It is now read-only.

The Byron Bay Railroad Company runs the world's first 100% solar-powered train. It wouldn't work everywhere - but in the bright sunshine of Australia, it might just be the right tool for the job.

More about the railroad: https://byronbaytrain.com.au/

Though this photo fits the theme kinda nice.

Was in croatia, last summer.

I like travelling by bike, but i am not the biggest fan of doing roundtrips, i much prefer moving further and further away. So on longer trips i will end up way far from home, and since travelling by train across Europe, can be a real ordeal (especially with a bike), i sometimes take a plane back home. I guess busses would be an option too from some locations, i personally absolutely hate travelling by bus though. Weak excuse i know.

I am able to rationalize to myself that it is ok to take that flight, i spent now weeks doing low impact travel and can end it with a boom and still probably had less impact then with my regular life at home (i have not really done the calculation tbh). Of course, if it is reasonably easy to get home by train i will definitely prefer that, and i absolutely don't always end up taking a plane.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you ever take a flight?