hamtron5000

joined 1 year ago
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[–] hamtron5000 1 points 10 months ago

this is rad. i live in western Colorado, a desert part of the state that has a lot in common with the climate of the Middle East. if i could afford to build a house i'd definitely try to do one with these features. how gorgeous, and relevant!

[–] hamtron5000 1 points 11 months ago

i am not sure - that's why i installed Rustdesk, which is remote help tool. I'm IT in my daily life for an organization and also IT in my personal life for friends and family, so it's helpful to have something like TeamViewer for personal use.

[–] hamtron5000 5 points 11 months ago

lol, fair. we did Thanksgiving this year so Christmas is at my mom's. ha!

[–] hamtron5000 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

i have two old PCs refurbished as Ubuntu servers running the latest LTS version.

machine the first: - Taskwarrior - Taskserver - Docker and Docker Compose - local media and stuff on a 2TB NAS

machine the second: - Docker and Docker compose - Jitsi Meet server - Rustdesk server

coming soon: - PiHole - Unbound DNS - Plex (maybe) - Mealie (possibly with a dedicated ancient iPad that will live in the kitchen) - BirdNET-Pi

also possibly a home weather station built out of a Raspberry Pi 4B that is on order; i love the idea of having one of these in my backyard to track our microclimate.

[–] hamtron5000 9 points 11 months ago

from my wife and i: we relatively recently received some free bikes from a colleague of mine. i'm fixing one up myself to be an ultimate commuter, but my wife said she didn't really want the other one - so we're fixing it up to give to a fifteen year old we know who needs reliable in-town transportation. it should be done this week, and he's getting it on Friday. i hope he likes it!

also, we're decorating for the holidays but in a sustainable, old-fashioned kind of way. my wife is a really good fabric artist and has crocheted a long holly vine that wraps around our living room. it's well off the ground, and so that's where we hang our ornaments so our two energetic kitties don't succumb to temptation and danger. we did hook up house lights this year, powered by rechargeable batteries that i recharge using our Jackery and a solar panel. it's small things, but it's a start.

i've mentioned it before but we're still planning on our community building chili feast, we've just had to move it to January due to our schedules. and we still host weekly zazen (Zen Buddhist meditation) at our house. we have four folks outside our family who come almost every weekend, and last weekend we did our first all-day sit on Saturday, from 8am to 5pm. i just launched a website for our group, in the hopes that anyone in our rural western Colorado locale that searches for "meditation", "Buddhism", or "Zen" and our city name will find our site and, if they feel like it, join us.

[–] hamtron5000 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i've been looking at Surly's on Craigslist for the steel frame factor. and Shifter on youtube also has a studded front tire - i don't usually need one here in western Colorado where i live; i mostly deal with the cold and a bit more precipitation than any other time of the year.

[–] hamtron5000 2 points 1 year ago

I wish I had a photo of my setup but I apparently never did that, how odd! Anyway, it's a series of pallets tied together with zip ties to make bins. I keep a seal-able five gallon bucket with lid in the kitchen, and we toss any organic scraps in there. We don't have much yard yet so there are few grass clippings, but we have added some from neighbors before. Plus woodchips, leaves, etc. The smell issue came from unloading the buckets weekly in the pile - I would gag from the smell, though it was pretty mild all things considered. The pile itself didn't reek really, but the bucket did. I just need to clean it more but with my brain sometimes a tiny challenge becomes a Mighty Challenge and it's easier just to stop.

[–] hamtron5000 15 points 1 year ago (6 children)

To answer my own question, I'm working on restoring/modifying two mountain bikes I recently got for free from a coworker. I'm hoping to turn one into a sweet daily commuter for me!

I'm also a Buddhist and host weekly zazen at my house every Sunday morning. I feel like Zen/Buddhism and solarpunk go hand-in-hand - seeing the reality of interdepence, we can't keep killing the earth!

Finally, I'm also trying to get started composting again. I did really well last winter then got out of the habit when it got warmer (I have a thing about smells). I am hoping to get back into it now that it's cooler and maybe I can pay less attention to the smells for a bit.

[–] hamtron5000 2 points 1 year ago

answering my own question, i'm snagging a couple of old mountain bikes from a coworker and her husband who don't use them. going to fix them up a bit for myself and my wife, maybe make mine into a low-end bikepacking rig. i like that idea; we'll see how much stuff i can use from my own boneyard and what, if anything, i'll have to buy. good times.

[–] hamtron5000 7 points 1 year ago

to answer my own question, i'm installing some rainwater catchment barrels at my house hopefully this week. all but one (we have four) were sourced from local folks. once these are installed, i have purchased a zero-pressure drip irrigation system and am going to try to have that installed before the first big frost, usually about two or three weeks from now where i live. there won't be any water in it this season, but it will be ready to go in the spring - or so i hope!

[–] hamtron5000 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

lol, absolutely! it's a combination of this method (deep mulching, the Ruth Stoat method) and this method (lasagna mulching or lasagna composting).

what we're doing is laying down a double layer of cardboard, topping it with 3+ inches of wood chips, adding nitrogen in the form of grass clippings and, later in the year, leaves; and adding some manure, then seeding that mix with cover crops.

on the other side of our yard, we're going to do a more traditional lasagna method because we're running low on wood chips. this will be cardboard, an inch of woodchips, manure, and nitrogen. this will also be seeded.

in the spring, when our cover crops have bloomed, we'll chop and drop them where they are, adding more organic material to the soil we're building. finally, in that mixture, we'll plant the native wildflowers and food crops we're interested in growing and harvesting.

[–] hamtron5000 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

i've posted about this before, but here's our current progress on deep lasagna mulching our front yard. we just had an apple tree put in, and i have seeded the grass clipping-covered area of this part of our yard with cover crops. laughing wife for scale.

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