Solarpunk Travel

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?

Just heard a quick blurb on BBC that another panel fell off a Boeing mid-flight which landed in Oregon. No harm done.. wasn’t noticed until after they landed. United Airlines.

I think it’s important for these stories to continue getting attention because there are Boeing patrons who think “they’ll fix that problem and get it sorted”. They seem to have a lot of loyalty as they proudly claim Boeing is safe to fly on.

Or maybe I should ban myself from posting about Boeing here. My rationale is that Boeing is extra harmful for the environment because amid their #greenwashing they are an #ALEC member who finances #climateDenial. And bashing ecocidal travel is fair game for a sustainable travel community. And I guess this community is low volume enough that it’s good to have a heartbeat of sorts to give a sign of life here.

update

I just heard Boeing still sells t-shirts that say “if it’s not Boeing, I’m not going”. Surely they must be having a hard time selling those now. Someone could probably make a fortune selling a modified version of that at airports with one of the “not”s striken (~~not~~).

If you scroll down to Torleif Stumo there’s a quite interesting story. I was amazed that an aircraft that started to taxi returned to the gate and reconnected to let a passenger exit who discovered he was on a 737 max -- and that the airline rebooked him at no extra cost. Then I realized after my speed-reading what I missed: this guy was the brother of a passenger who was killed in the Ethiopian Airlines flight. I wonder if it was Ethiopian Airlines that he was gave him the extra sympathetic treatment.

The article starts with another passenger demanding to exit after the gate disconnected, upon finding he was on a 737 Max. They omitted how he was treated w.r.t costs. I’m sure all airlines probably have in their contract of carriage a clause that allows them to change aircraft and presumably the passengers have no rights. I say that because you aren’t even guaranteed a layover. E.g. if your ticket is from New York to California via layover in Vegas, and for whatever reason the airline needs to reroute you last minute connecting in Detroit instead, the contract of carriage allows them to make changes is substantial as that and passengers have /no rights/ in that regard so long as the airline reaches the final destination on the correct day.

booking sites withhold aircraft

It always annoys me when a air travel booking site withholds the aircraft info. I used to be able to find the matching flight on matrix itasoftware but that site seems to be getting less reliable (random acts of tor hostility). The article mentions an effort underway to change that.

Relevance

Superficially this article seems unrelated to sustainable travel. But Boycotts on Boeing are actually inherently pro-environment because Boeing is an #ALEC member and ALEC finances the #climateDenial movement. Boycotting all air travel would be as well, but some are forced to choose the lesser of evils in which case avoiding Boeing is at least more sustainable (avoids supporting a green-washing ALEC member).

Not sure if commuting really counts as “travel” related but hopefully it’s interesting enough.

⚠ Link #enshitification warning: #euronews has a forced agreement type of popup in some browsers (TB). I suggest either Ungoogled Chromium or lynx. Lynx warns “bad html” but it renders fine.

This is being cross-posted to several places so I won’t bother to list them here.. but there are a few discussions on this if you look around.

Solarpunk travel is intended for /sustainable/ travel, right? So where can we discuss travel with no sustainability relevance? I only consider proper decentralized non-Cloudflare instances. This is what found as free world venues for travel chatter:

• !solarpunktravel@slrpnk.net ← sustainable travel focus
• !traveltips@feddit.uk ← Europe focus
• !travel@eviltoast.org
• https://lemmy.globe.pub ← whole instance devoted to travel (⚠but note there is an instance-wide no politics rule)

The places other than !solarpunktravel@slrpnk.net are ghost towns but that’s nothing that can’t be fixed with a bit of cross-posting. I suggest putting them in the sidebar as related communities.