I still truly miss the last car I owned that I could self-maintain,
though its emissions were dirty enough that it's probably just as well
that it's gone. I have a reusable shopping bag which I am disgracefully
bad about remembering to bring shopping. I am still working on
converting all bulbs in my house to fluorescents, let alone LEDs. My
only originally pedal-operated sewing machine (of the four I have in
the house) has an electric motor add-on, but could probably be
unconverted. I would also miss the zigzag stitch, though I already
hand-sew my buttonholes. I suspect a fountain pen in my hands is an
accident waiting to happen given the amount of ink I cover myself with
just using ballpoints. And I'm not sure I'm clueful enough to run
Linux, though I've been thinking about trying.

I do possess and use a hand-cranked flashlight!

When my current car dies I am thinking seriously of giving up car
ownership and shifting to a combination of Zipcar (available through my
day job) and rentals for my weekend trips. I live where I can walk to
work, so on a daily basis I don't need a car, and a little planning
efficiency could reduce my driving to once or twice a month on travel
weekends and once a week for errands. It would be quite a wrench
psychologically to give up the sense of freedom the car gives me,
though. And I love driving.

Books written on parchment or pre-twentieth century paper
last significantly longer than modern paperbacks written on pulp. I've
handled eight-hundred-year old codices that, rebound and stored
carefully, remain in far better condition than some novels I bought
five years ago.

Then again, sheep died to make those manuscripts.

"The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." - William Gibson

Susan @1:

We spent many years without a car, renting as required for big
shopping trips or houseguests (it averaged about once a month) and
taking the bus for everything else.

Thing is, once you have a car, you use it. It's actually
taken some self-discipline to do the Saturday recycling + shopping run
on my bike every week. It's not the travel time, which is roughly
equivalent, nor the weather (it turns out I don't mind biking in snow
and rain*). It's the time it takes to load the recycling onto my bike
that bugs me. I think I need removable panniers.

Next year, when we have both kids in the same school—one I can
shepherd them to en route to work—the car will become an occasional use
item rather than a daily tool. But I don't think we'll get rid of it.

Shorter me: good luck going non-automotive; I know how hard it can be, but how rewarding as well.

-----

* yeah, I'm weirded out about that too

The supermarkets I go to are now selling reusable bags, and will
give a bag refund if you use your own (including those they sell).

Groceries are easier to carry in cloth and paper bags.

(I'd pay for a treadle sewing machine. I think you should be able to
get a zig-zag attachment for them - my mother had one for her
old-but-electric straight-stitch machine.)

Manual typewriters.

Pencils. All they need are decent caps to keep them from puncturing
your pocket. (Mechanical pencils are okay, but finding replacement
leads is a non-trivial exercise.)

Susan --

My husband and I have been carfree since our car died last May.
There was a bit of an adjustment period, but at this point we're both
very, very happy about not having a car. (If I won one in a contest, my
first question would be "um... can I get the cash-value equivalent
instead? Because I really don't want the car, actually.")

I highly recommend getting rid of the car to anyone whose circumstances make it possible.

One thing to be aware of is that doing so seems to have a
significant Red Pill effect that spreads to other things in one's life.
At least, that's how it worked for us: You start by getting rid of the
car, and you wind up examining all kinds of things about how you live.

I do my best to avoid being an obnoxious proselytizer for getting
rid of the personal automobile, but if somebody mentions they're
considering getting rid of theirs, I just can't resist jumping in to
say "yes, it's great!"

By the way, did you know that Thoreau "developed for his family's business the finest lead pencil available in mid-19th-century America"?

By the way, did you know that Thoreau "developed for his family's business the finest lead pencil available in mid-19th-century America"?

#1: I overheard a conversation the captain of a Trader Joe's had
with a customer. Apparently, the first phase is that you leave your
reusable bag at home. The second phase is that you leave it in your
car. The third phase is when the bag finally makes it into the store.

I have a hand-crank flashlight too. It's great. When there's a power
failure, I know that my flashlight will work. It has its downsides, but
I don't ever run into them. (e.g., A hand crank is probably a bad
choice if you need steady, continuous light for hours.)

I haven't gone back to Linux yet, though. I really like handwriting
recognition. If there were a viable Linux based solution, that would
eliminate the only reason I have for using a Microsoft operating system.

As for sewing, I really need to learn how to do that. The extent of
my sewing experience is to repair a few tears with needle and thread,
using instructions I found on the web.

(I should also invest in a bicycle. Some places are just too close
to drive to, but too time consuming to walk to. Currently, I walk
anyway, but a bicycle would save time. I don't think there's always a
place to park the bike though.)

Lexica @7:

If I won one in a contest, my first question would be "um... can I
get the cash-value equivalent instead? Because I really don't want the
car, actually."

Right in the middle of our car-free time, we* actually did win a car.

Fuji Film put out a promotional film pack with a number of
giveaways: disposable cameras, iMacs, and four people carriers. We
bought it for the film, of course, but the ticket inside said we'd also
won a car. And it was signed in ballpoint pen (you could feel it on the
underside). That's what made it real for us, so real we had to sit down
for a bit.

There was no cash alternative, so we took delivery and sold it
immediately thereafter. The money paid for a drum kit, a digital
camera†, a wooden floor in our house, and more maternity leave time for
me after our son was born.

-----

* Technically, Martin won it

† irony: we stopped buying film

Websites of note:

Worldchanging

http://www.worldchanging.com

James Cascio's Open the Future

http://www.openthefuture.com/

Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools

http://www.kk.org/cooltools/

* * *

I keep my reusable shopping bags in my car. I remember them maybe 2/3 of the time.

I love and adore a good Alice's restaurant reference.

There are buttonhole-making attachments that work with
straight-stitch sewing machines. My Singer sewing instruction books
refer to them, and if the ones I'm finding on eBay are the right kind,
bidding starts at 99 cents.

I've got a treadle Singer, unconverted, and it does work, although I
confess I use it as a table to hold my electric-powered Bernette 440.

I wish I could go carless, but in my current location it's just not
practical. If I lived in the Boston area, I'd seriously consider it,
what with the T and Zipcar and rentals.

I have often thought I'd like to have a Mooncup in case of apocalypse.

Oh, duh:

MAKE folks do cool stuff with both new and old technology.

http://makezine.com/

pixelfish @15:

There is no requirement to wait for the apocalypse, or even a minor disaster.

Getting one and discovering you don't like it is a bit
expensive—there isn't exactly a brisk secondhand market in them. But
getting one and finding out that you love it and would never go back to
anything else works out very cheap.

It's a gamble, sort of. You have to ask yourself if you feel lucky.

It offends me that so many modern things are built to be trashed in
three years. I had a fine digital camera, it stopped turning on, there
was no place to fix it, I opened it up and couldn't figure out how to
fix it myself... Such a waste. I had an inkjet printer, it never worked
well, it was worthless as soon as I took it out of the store... I had a
microwave, it stopped producing microwaves. I had a MP3 player, it
stopped turning on.

I wish companies were required to send out circuit diagrams and
repair manuals with all of their electronics. I wish soldering and
electrical repair were required classes in high school.

Heck, we have a perfectly good digital camera (only 2.1 megapixels,
so not quite state of the art, but fully functional) that we may have
to replace because the batteries don't seem to be made anymore. We can
only take 3-4 pictures with the current battery before it fails. I
bought one online, but it was old too (not used, but these things have
a finite shelf life even unused), and we don't get much more life out
of it.

Digital cameras are an interesting cleft stick.

On the one hand, the sensors on a digital camera go bad after a
while. If enough of them do so, the camera isn't much use any more.
And, as Madeline points out, you can't repair it, nor bring it to
someone local who can do so.

But it's harder and harder to get black and white film, even 35mm
film, without going mail-order. And home darkroom work on color film is
space, equipment and chemical intensive, even more than black and white.

Good thing this is just an ideal, not an ideology we're discussing.

Just this morning, I found in a "take me, we're moving" pile a nice
SLR camera with filters, cleaning stuff, a remote plunger and two
flashes.

A film camera.

Dust in the wind.

I'm going to bring it to Goodwill at lunch.

The Amish have done a lot of adaptations of modern technology to fit
their needs. One of those is taking modern sewing machines - at least
basic models that aren't computer-driven - and fitting them for treadle
or airpower. I would assume those machines do zigzag.

In fact, it's possible to order such a machine, complete with zigzag and buttonhole, here.

Rymenhild @2: Then again, sheep died to make those manuscripts.

Yes but the sheep also fed and clothed the scribe who made the
manuscript. An animal that can produce food, clothing, tools and
publishing materials is so useful, you'd think it came form some
genetically engineering laboratory in the future, rather than from a
damp field full of mud in the past.

One of the fascinating aspects of the past is just how much
ingenuity our ancestors had when all they had at hand were a few rocks,
twigs and livestock.

And we wonder that some stone age McGyver was worshiped as a God.
How many of us could figure out, without ever having seen it done
before, how to make fire out of couple of twigs, a flat rock and the
power of our own lungs?

I've never had a driver's license, and own no car. Fortunately I now
walk to work. I also walk to the grocery store and take my huge
backpack; I have canvas totes too, but I nearly always forget them.

On the downside, if I have too much stuff to carry home, I have it delivered--and that's done in a bigass van thing.

I have the miniature version of the hand-cranked flashlight, which
is kind of the "jerkoff" flashlight (from the motion used to charge it
up).

Xopher @24:

"jerkoff" flashlight (from the motion used to charge it up)

You remind me that I have a pocket calculator that you shake in much the same way to charge up.

I bought it because the packaging told me that it worked without
electricity (though it doesn't look much like an abacus to me) and
without light (I presume it does, but I can't see the results).

How could I resist?

MamaDeb @22:

Your link is munged, and I can't retrieve it. Can you put the URL in
plain text, or make sure you use quotes around it if you use the <a
href=... formatting?

My mother's hand-cranked Singer sewing machine lasted her about
thirty years (she bought it when I was a small child in the late 50s,
and it travelled from England to Jamaica in the late 60s; it stayed in
Jamaica when she left for good at the end of the 80s).

Some technologies may last even longer, of course. When we lived in
rural Jamaica we cooked using a wood-burning stove rejoicing in the
name 'Caledonia Modern Dover' dating to around 1900 (possibly older)
that was still functional in the 1970s (I certainly had the blisters to
prove it). For all I know, it may be working yet.

I haven't made the leap over to Linux, but I have switched from word
processor to text editor, so just about everything I write is in future-proof ASCII.

And then there's "Amish computing" and the back-to-paper movement.

I've had the same cheap Black&Decker electric drill since
January 1986. It was a parting gift from my co-workers when I left
Québec. That thing has seen a lot of use.

Car maintenance is perhaps a bad example. We have a 1997 Saturn that
has 112,000 miles on it, and get 30 MPG even when it's way out of tune.
I figure it's good for another 50-100 thousand miles. My old Fiats and
the like were a lot easier to work on (and in some cases possible to
work on), but the flip side is that they had to be worked on. I
remember distinctly the point at which I stopped working on cars. It
was a Ford Escort that I had inherited from my father (he had won it in
a contest), and it needed its timing belt changed. Rubber timing belt
is routine maintenance, right? (You changed it religiously at 70,000
miles on the Fiat 131 engine, or you ended up with a valve stuck
edge-on in a piston.) Well. I didn't have a garage, and of course it
was 45 degrees (always is when you need to really sink yourself in the
engine). And here we are, trying to figure out how to get at this
thing, and we finally figured out that we had to put a jack under the
engine, and loose one of the motor mounts, and lower the engine a few
inches. And after all that I swore I would never work on my own car,
ever again.

Fragano 27:

Thank you for the reminder of stoves; another good example of simple, flexible technology is the Coleman stove. My parents have used the same one at the cabin for over 35 years; it sits there still.

Avram @28:

The back-to-paper movement? It's a movement now? In harmony, one hopes, and singing loud.

It's why I became a bookbinder. I realised I was done with my Palm V
and wanted no new gadget in its place. I just wanted really beautiful
blank books, nicer than I could afford any other way.

I still use dial phones bought at garage sales long ago. I have a
couple of extras, because they do fail eventually. Western Electric
built good stuff, because way back then, you rented your phone from Ma
Bell, so she didn't want it to fail. I also have an old touch tone
phone for those times you can't access service without one.

And I *like* dial phones. It's how I think of using a phone, and the sound quality is great. I also prefer watches with dials.

I've been trying to use shopping bags for a long time. The local
food co-ops used to pretty much require it, also your own jars and
such. Now they have bags available, but give you a nickel back if
you've brought one.

There was a time in my life I used flannel pads. Cups never worked
for me; gave me cramps. I bought enough pads to get through my period.
When it was over, they were tossed in the wash in cold water with a
long soak. Now that I don't need them, I don't know what to do with
them. But they gave several years of excellent use, much softer and
more comfortable than disposable.

Random thoughts on sustainability and technology.

---My uncle has a lovely singing voice. About 25 years ago he gave
us recordings....on 8-tracks. Unfortunately, that was the only format
he recorded. Which leads us to Unfortunately #2: a couple of years ago
someone in the family wanted to convert the recordings to some other
format (ah, but how durable??), but it appears that all of us have
gotten rid of all of our 8-tracks.

---when spinning wheels were first introduced, they were often
vilified as potential job killers. Interesting how perspectives on the
advantages of technology can develop.

---I wonder about tasks that are apparently efficient. Take
cooking. In my experience it really doesn't take that much time to cook
'real' stuff, as opposed to buying things prepackaged and/or
microwavable. Not to mention that my food processor's parts aren't
dishwasher safe; it's less hassle to use other more 'primitive' tools.

---Jen Roth @19, we had the same thing happen to our telephone. We
replaced the phone a few weeks ago before the battery gave up entirely.

---on the other hand, some appliances like washers and dryers have
gotten very energy-efficient. I'll be sad to see my 20-year-old washer
go, but will feel better about saving power and water with a new one.

---My 1910 edition of The Harvard Classics is in fine shape. My
'70's paperbacks (Science Fiction Hall of Fame, waaaah!) are crumbling.

--- re: the Amish. I recently linked to an article describing some of their innovations. Here it is again.

My sewing machines are long-lived - the two I use most often
(fraternal twin Singers) are both 40 years old and have never needed
any repair other than a single gear under the bobbin case that seems to
be a chronic weak point on that model. That's about a $30 repair every
couple of years. My serger, which I rarely use and which really ought
to be a candidate for disposal, is about 15 years old. My converted
machine, which I almost never use, is a 1920s model of some sort, and
works just fine provided I only want to do straight stitch. I consider
it a backup in case I manage to munch the gears on both my main ones,
as has happened occasionally, always at the most inconvenient possible
moment relative to some costume deadline.

Diva cups -- better than moon cups in that they have no latex! I
think they are not used so much in the US, though. US undergrads seem
to be very squeamish about some things, and not at all about things
that squick me no end.

I think most of those things are really obvious -- I started with
the bags when I lived in Europe, and have lots of lower-tech stuff. But
for a lot of people here in the US, non-car transport is difficult.
There are lots of spots between my home and work, for example, where
there is no pavement and the cars do not look out for bikers and
walkers.

On older books: My 1923 copy of Government of the West Indies
is still in excellent condition for what is, after all, a Wrong book.*
Quite a few of my 60s and 70s paperbacks are, shall we say, very
fragile.

*I treat it gently, on the other hand I have marked up my first American edition of Froude's Bow of Ulysses.

The use of disposable things, or short-lived things, can have its
own complicated ecology. Maybe ecology isn't quite the right word. I
mean a network of processes that depend on each other. I usually have a
reusable (as in luggage) bag with me when I shop. When I need paper or
plastic bags, I get one from the store, and put it inside my reusable
bag, to take it home. Why? Because if a person wants to recycle paper,
the local recyclers require it to be packaged in paper bags and taken
to one of their drop boxes, conveniently located every 1/4 mile or so.
(There's an exception for newspapers, which I don't read on paper at
home.) I use plastic grocery bags for trash. I've seen plastic trash
bags made for the purpose, but they're much thicker plastic, so if the
idea is to minimize use of plastic it doesn't seem like a good use of
money.

I overheard a conversation the captain of a Trader Joe's had with
a customer. Apparently, the first phase is that you leave your reusable
bag at home. The second phase is that you leave it in your car. The
third phase is when the bag finally makes it into the store.

If you're walking, you'll make the mistake of forgetting your bag
once or twice, tops. And if you're walking and you forget your bag the
second time, odds are good that you'll buy a second bag rather than
endure another walk with plastic ones.

Cars are very good at enabling some kinds of wasteful behavior.

Giving up the car was a lot easier than I thought. It started when
my partner and I figured out that we could do all (and I do mean *all*)
our grocery shopping on foot. Then he realized he could take the bus to
work and save himself an annoying drive every day. 18 months later, we
moved and decided to get rid of the car as it hadn't been used *once*
in that time.

We now use bikes for quite a lot - we each picked up one when we
moved. Mine is scheduled to be replaced, since I'm better at handling
cargo than it is! I know it's possible to get a bike that works better
than I do, so I'm comparison shopping for the replacement.

Pixelfish #15: you don't need an apocalypse to appreciate a mooncup!
I use the Diva cup (silicone, not latex) and I couldn't be happier with
it. It's comfortable, it can be worn all day with no leakage and no
changing, and you never have to worry if you've run out of menstrual
supplies. I've had mine for several YEARS now and it's more than paid
for itself in the supplies I haven't had to buy. Also, I think it was
the only thing that made having my period at Warped Tour a
manageable situation. I would not have wanted to deal with disposables
and Porta-potties -- something I could leave in and ignore until I got
to better facilities was ideal.

I've also used the Keeper (latex, while serviceable, can kinda smell
funny after a while) and the disposable Instead cups. Disposable
doesn't address the environmental or deep-value concerns, but there are
certain situations where the design of the Instead (it's like a
diaphragm, the Keeper and Diva sit lower down) makes it the optimal
choice.

Mooncups RULE.

Another Damned Medievalist @36:

Several of the cup anecdotes were American; that was when I found out
that they weren't simply a British phenomenon. I suspect many women of
my daughter's generation (she's currently 4) will use them as a default.

I confess, on the biking, that I have an obscenely, viciously unfair advantage. I live in the Netherlands.

When I show American bikers around, it takes me several hours to get them to relax and believe
that the cars are really going to give them the space that they need on
those few stretches of road that don't have a bike lane.

I've only been here eight months, and it still blows my mind. Dutch people don't even see how fantastic it is.

Susan @ 35... My serger, which I rarely use and which really ought to be a candidate for disposal

I gave you the best years of my life and this is what I get.

I've only taken a cursory look at the thread so far (I should have
left work by now), so I apologize if anyone's already posted this, but
the Group News Blog has this post about "The Real Deal" a couple of months ago that touches on just this topic.

I've only taken a cursory look at the thread so far (I should have
left work by now), so I apologize if anyone's already posted this, but
the Group News Blog has this post about "The Real Deal" a couple of months ago that touches on just this topic.

Rats! Double posts do not have deep value!

I am surely not the only Making Light reader who has a conflict of
values pertaining to reading choices. Too many things in new-book
stores are book-shaped objects, printed on very real paper. Ick! So I
end up reading and enjoying books from second hand shops and libraries.
That is very economical with the book-making energy, but tends to give
the book-makers (authors, editors, designers, publishers, etc.) short
shrift.

I'm hoping that an economic model will turn up that will make it
possible to pay the makers regardless of the distribution chain I
choose. And while distribution is important, I have no love for
particular distribution chains and no wish to support them; I wish
there were some reasonable way of rewarding/repaying authors and
publishers for their work even when I choose a different distribution
channel.

Debbie #34, on dishwashers: My parents recently got a new one,
despite my father's skepticism, but he tried handwashing a medium-full
sinkload of dishes and measured how much water he used, versus how much
the dishwasher would have, and apparently the dishwasher won out by
quite a bit. It startled the hell out of him, and me, and won him over
to the dishwasher side of things. Sadly, I don't have a functioning
dishwasher, and judging from the two years I've spent trying to get my landlord to do something about it, I might never.

On mooncups or diva cups or whatever: most of my ladyfriends have
switched over to them over the past few years, and unanimously report
satisfaction. They seem a dramatic improvement.

abi @ 41: you may be optimistic about your daughter's generation using mooncups as a default.

My daughter is 12, and although she was eager to try one, she can't
wear it comfortably right now. I advised her to hang onto it and try
again later.

I'm sure she can figure out the likely preconditions for "later," as I've also given her Our Bodies, Ourselves, but if I brought it up directly I'd just hear "Mo-om, you're embarrassing me!"

Going meta for a moment, I'd say that -skills- are very much one of
the deep value items. I'm always surprised to find people don't all
have some rough idea of how to weave, or make paper (or ink), or
sew[0], or butcher, (more recent) how electricity works, even in
general terms, or all sorts of remarkably basic ideas that underly
modern technology.

"The magic just happens" is a spectacular form of ignorance.

[0] Sewing... I'm beginning to think that (at 5 sewing machines (one
treadle, one hand-crank, one convertable power/handcrank, and one
powered) and a serger) I might have a problem... (but I've sewn with
all but the most recent of them - and that because the most recent was
found lonely on the curb yesterday, and needs a belt)

Rikibeth @48:

Perhaps, if cups gather momentum, they will come in more sizes. Have you fed back to either company?

Thing is, once you have a car, you use it.

This is why I resist every suggestion that my life would be easier
with a car (and given the sad state of public transport in small-town
Lincolnshire maybe it would). I enjoy travelling by train, meeting
interesting people and getting to know new stations along the way. But
if I was running a car, I wouldn't be able to justify train journeys
and I'd miss them.

abi 50: no, I haven't yet. I probably ought to. I wonder just how
small they could make the things, though, before they started losing
their advantages? I suspect that one made the size of a slender/junior
tampon wouldn't be very effective.

The first "Our Bodies, Ourselves" contained instructions for using a
diaphragm as a menstrual cup, which was my first introduction to the
concept, but which indicates it's been around for a while. Even though
I turned out to be incompatible with them, I love the idea and always
beam with pleasure when I see a new brand name on the market.

As for variations, the Keeper had a 'no child has passed through
this cervix' style and an 'at least one child has passed through this
cervix' size/shape. (I forget how they phrased it, but that was the
gist.) I *think* the Diva cup does too. For more variation yet, one can
return to the diaphragm which (as I understand it) is individually
fitted. More expensive, but it's not like one needs dozens of them.

Xeger @49 - I second that.

Moreover, skills are fun (well, probably not the butchering): make
tofu from beans & sea water... you may have to fight off the
paparazzi. Or knitting, spinning, crochet, and cooking. Etc.

I've found that not only is cooking fun, it helps keep out
ingredients I'd rather avoid. (I've been known to make muffins,
pancakes, and cakes without any of the following: eggs, wheat flour,
oil, sugar, and milk. Good muffins and pancakes. Ingredient-free
cooking - whee!) But I still find it surprising that cooking is
something that counts as a skill, like all those other ones. I mean,
how do people eat without cooking?

Instead cups aren't compatible with an IUD-- which is in itself a
Deep Value contraceptive, not requiring daily pills or other small
disposable objects.

(TMI warning for guys who would just as rather not engage with this sort of gynecology)

I've bought and tried all three types of reusable cups. So far, the
Keeper has lasted the longest; this may be an unfair judgement in that
I lost my Divacup within a few months of purchase, although I was not
unhappy to do so-- I had a lot more trouble wrangling it into place,
because of the shorter stem and slightly larger size (the cupmakers'
size recommendation is partially based on age, but this didn't seem to
work for me).

My Mooncup eventually developed some small holes/fissures in its
main body, which may be attributable to a brief but intense interval
when our two then-kittens decided that it was the Best Toy Ever; more
than once, after I'd pitched it into the bathroom sink before settling
down for a good read, I'd looked back up to discover that the Mooncup
had disappeared somewhere in the direction of an ominous set of little
red pawprints. It bounced real good.

I *have* had leaks with the cups due to overflow, even past a backup
flannel pad. But they've still served me better than even the largest
pre-toxic-shock tampons, which IIRC were once described by a comedian
who said that every time she jumped into the pool with one, the water
level went down.

And finally, there is the fabulous site http://mum.org/ , the online Museum of Menstruation.

The Keeper and Diva Cup both swear that if you've had a child, you
NEED NEED NEED their larger size to prevent leakage. The Diva Cup even
says you need the larger size if you're over 30, child or no child,
because of natural loss of muscle tone.

I'm here to tell you they're WRONG.

I'm over 30, I have a child, and the larger size was frickin' unwieldy. The smaller size is comfortable and leak-free.

I got to play with an old treadle Singer sewing machine when my dad
was fixing it for my aunt. (Inherited from her mother or grandmother.)
Once you get in the rhythm with the treadle, it goes at an impressively
fast clip! It had a box full of attachments that let it do dozens and
dozens of kinds of frills and furbelows. I don't remember if there was
a buttonhole attachment but I would be surprised if there was not.

One of our fundamental problems right now is that we have lots of
ways to put materials together, and very few ways to take them apart
again for reuse. If we can figure out how to make something that does
*that* the green revolution will become immensely easier and more
popular. Plastics, metals, and so on do certain jobs that natural
materials just can't, so people are not going to give them up.

For those forgetting their shopping bags at home, a recommendation. I use one of these
that I picked up at a co-op. It folds up wallet-sized and fits in my
purse, so I don't forget it (unlike the five string bags and the big
canvas bag that lives in my back seat). If I didn't have a purse, it
would snap around my belt loop. Since I got it, my disposable bag
consumption is down to what I need for my recycling and my lunch.

On sewing machines: I have an electric sewing machine that's a
couple generations old (human generations, not tech generations) and
much sturdier than the modern ones. I love it, but if I didn't have
electricity I think I'd just go back to needle and thread. Whereas I
would probably have to invent a treadle-powered word processor rather than go back to either manual typewriter or pen & paper.

This is only a placeholder for what I hope will be longer comments tonight or tomorrow.

I am troubled by how much deep value apparently depends on labor I can't add.
There are presumptions going on about what kinds of disabilities and
limitations apparently don't exist in people who'd like to be good
stewards of their chunk of the world's resources. There's lots I would
do, both physically and mentally, if I could, but it simply isn't going
to happen. It wouldn't happen even if I sacrificed all of my chosen
work and entertainment, in some cases, thanks to learning disabilities
rising from nerve damage.

Some of this, to be sure, is spillover frustration at healthy young
(generally male) bloggers who've done yeoman work analyzing the
screwing over that the working and middle classes have gotten and then
turn right around to enthuse about hiking the price of food and
transportation, knowing damn well that nothing like sufficient aid to
the needy will be forthcoming. And those who have even more trouble
holding onto gainful employment or finding healthy food will...what?
Blow away? Hire themselves out to each other laborers?

It's not that I disapprove of making things both lasting and
repairable. It's that I get leery of too much endorsement of solutions
calling for more physical labor and mental training without a good
sense of what kinds of burden that can be, nor any real sense of what
to do about it.

More later, though; this is not (in my intention) a completed thought.

I don't use a cup, as it is incompatible with the IUD I currently
have in place, but I do like my cloth pads and sea-sponge tampons
vastly better than their disposable alternatives. Right now, I can just
toss the pads in with my son's cloth diapers, which is very convenient.
Cloth diapers also seem to be making a comeback, and while we don't use
them exclusively, I now look at a disposable diaper and think "I'm
throwing out this big hunk of plastic and chemicals to take care of a
little bit of baby pee that would just wash out?" I guess that's more
of a "sustainability" rather than "deep value" argument, but they're
related.

abi @41:

In 1990, before and after ConFiction, I spent some time bicycling in
the Netherlands (and Denmark) (including a circumnavigation of the
Ijsselmeer). One of the problems I had, as an American cyclist was that
I was too cautious for the Dutch drivers, I'd slow and check at an
intersection. They were expecting me to fly right through. It didn't
help that I was extra wary since the bike trip was financed by the
settlement from having my collarbone broken when me and my bike were
hit by a car making a turn across traffic (Mass Ave, Arlington, MA).

I wanted a sign saying "Let Op! Amerikaanse Fietser".

Not only was there a bike path from the airport, it went in a separate tunnel from the auto traffic.

At one point on my long ride, a drawbridge started to go up in front of
me. The bridgekeeper saw me and gave me priority over the bridge (I
assume that he didn't actually have to slow the cargo ship down).

Rikibeth: Thanks for the heads up about the larger/smaller size
issue. I currently am on the Ring, which I adore, and I assume that
inserting a cup will be no more strenuous than inserting the Ring?

I'm posting this before reading past #20 -

Abi: I prefer a sewing machine that zig-zags, so that I can make buttonholes.

and

#5 ::: P J Evans :::

...(I'd pay for a treadle sewing machine. I think you should be
able to get a zig-zag attachment for them - my mother had one for her
old-but-electric straight-stitch machine.)

and

#14 ::: Rikibeth :::

There are buttonhole-making attachments that work with straight-stitch sewing machines.

I use a treadle sewing machine with a late-50's head that can do not
only zig-zag, buttonholes, double-needle, but a wide variety of other
built-in stitches and also takes cams for bigger/more elaborate
patterns. I own two of those heads, both of which came from Canada. The
second treadle cabinet I got from a company whose main business is catering to the Amish.

There are two versions of the clamp-on buttonholer, one for
straight-stitch and one for zig-zag machines. They make an extremely
nice buttonhole.

re: Mooncup

I used a version of these in the early 70's, until they stopped being
made (or, at least, marketed in Kansas, where I was living at the
time). If I were young enough to still need these, I'd buy a Mooncup in
a heartbeat.

Back to reading this thread -

I definitely agree with the sad disposable nature of so much of what
we have, but I find that a lot of truly good choices are
counter-intuitive (ethan @47's story is a good example). Reusing bags
is good, I will agree, but plastic shopping bags are apparently not the
demon that everyone thinks they are, see here,
and the cost of banning/taxing them might actually be counter
productive (leading, for example, to an increased use of trash bags
which, as pointed out above, are much thicker and less eco-friendly
than shopping bags).

I think it's interesting how eager we are to focus on a problem, any
problem, and totally ignore others (like, oh, the end of life as we
know it when the oil runs out)--it's one of the reasons I tend to be
skeptical whenever a people start cheering the latest environment
saving fad (like Nuclear power as the answer to our prayers) .

It is important to think about taking steps to reduce our impact on
the world, but deep meaning calls for deep analysis, I think. It might
be beyond some of us ( though the guys at Freakonomics do a good job of the kinds of analysis I think we need).

Tying in with what Bruce said above, there's sometimes an annoying
pain-in-the-ass factor that goes along with these old-timey Deep Value
items. For example, I notice that two of the items in that "Real Deal"
article Chris linked to -- the Pendleton shirt and the Hudson Bay point
blanket -- are dry-clean-only.

I am troubled by how much deep value apparently depends on labor I can't add

I have some bone deformities and a rotated hip. I've had arthritis
since I was 16. Exercise helps thankfully. Living 2 miles or less from
everything also helps. If I did things the way the average American
biker does, I'd be in terrible shape. Someone with more severe
disabilities might not be able to bike at all. Or WALK. So I don't tell
people to go car free, and I talk about the problems I've had. I talk
about the solutions too, since someone else might learn from me.

It's important to do what is sensible and maintainable for *you*. It
probably will not be the same as what I do, nor will it be the same as
what Abi does. And it won't be the same as what my sister does (similar
disabilities to me, and very different enviroment).

Pixelfish: I've never used the Ring, but seating a DivaCup is
simpler than positioning a diaphragm, at least for me. It's sort of an
intermediate complexity between tampon and diaphragm. It's basically
fold, insert, rotate (to make sure it's unfolded). Very simple.

A gadget to carry plastic bags

And if you're not shopping, you can go fly a kite.

Hudson Bay Point blankets were invented considerably before dry
cleaning. It's my experience that a wool blanket doesn't need washing
very often -- and it's got to be possible to do it the old-fashioned
way when it's actually necessary.

I wouldn't throw it in a modern washing machine and tumble dryer,
but a washtub, and mild soap, and spreading it flat on the grass to
dry? I'd be willing to risk it.

This seems to be today's conversation. I've already had it with two
friends. We all seem to be thinking along the same lines -- if things
go pear-shaped for a while, how can we make sure we can survive?

Having stuff that lasts and can be repaired is a big part of that. A
rumor about a truckers' strike led me to make a shopping list last week
of all the stuff we'd want stocked in case there was a temporary halt
to shipping. We ended up with a lot of dried beans, peas, and lentils,
canned vegetables, rice, and plenty of frozen veggies and meats -- and
also plenty of shampoo, conditioner, soap, toilet paper, and paper
towels. Because I have a Diva Cup, I did not have to put tampons on
that list, and I thought that was pretty cool.

(I will evangelize for menstrual cups to anyone who will listen,
actually. I've found that mine works a good deal better than the
disposable alternatives, and it's darned convenient to never worry
about buying stuff, because I'm always prepared.)

I would like to state for the record that those rumors were just
rumors, and I have no credible source. We figured it was a good excuse
to get a stockpile going, though. Turned out that it didn't cost much
more than a regular shopping trip -- beans and canned goods are cheap.

I really want a sewing machine, so that I can repair, alter, and
rework clothes as necessary. I have, in the past, stretched a pair of
jeans that were a size too small by opening the side seams and adding a
panel of colorful fabric on either side of the leg -- I got compliments
on those in high school. That was with my mother's sewing machine. Not
having to ditch clothes and start over when I go up or down a size
would help a lot.

And I am planning to switch to reusable grocery bags just because I
get extremely annoyed by dealing with the plastic kind. They pile up
and fall out of the closet, and then the cats get hold of them and lick
and bite them, and I have to take them away to prevent damage to the
cats, and then I get fed up and just put them in the trash anyway,
after which I feel guilty. A set of reusable bags is going to save me
so much irritation.

Rikibeth, you're not making a good case for those blankets being
easy to care for. Carting a wet blanket out to Prospect Park and
watching it dry for a few hours is hardly less work than just dumping
it in a washing machine and then a dryer. Leaving aside the question of
what to do if I need to clean it in winter.

Back when I was on active duty at DLI, I had the usual problems with
strings (the various pockets, flaps, gussets, etc. are prone to
unravelling; this is frowned upon).

The default solution was to burn them. After I'd lost my third, or
fourth, lighter one month, I said screw it, and bought a zippo.

It's been 15 years, and I still have the zippo. It was ten dollars as a lump, vs. a serial expenditure of 99 cents.

I wear the same knife today I bought 21 years ago. I'm planning to
buy a scythe. No more hassling with the mower. It'll be a couple of
hundred dollars, but it's less than a mower costs, has very little in
maintainence costs (maybe the snath gets damaged, or you hit a really
big rock; other than that, a new stone every ten years or so it about
it, that and polishing the hammer and anvil), makes no noise and
impresses the neighbors. One can clear about an acre a day; of wheat.
Grass is a bit quicker.

Madeline@18: I wish companies were required to send out circuit
diagrams and repair manuals with all of their electronics. I wish
soldering and electrical repair were required classes in high school.

Moore's law is a pain in the arse. By the time many electronic
devices break, they're also obsolete. And soldering a 200 pin surface
mount chip isn't exactly easy, or cheap.

digital camera: sensors keep improving, storage keeps getting denser. the technology hasn't neared an asymptote yet.

inkjet printer: The cost of new black/white plus color cartridges
for my printer nearly equals the cost of the printer with small
cartridges included. They give printers away at cost or at a loss, and
then make it up selling ink like it was a subscription service.

microwave: Well, I never felt comfortable monkeying around with radiation.

MP3 player: I'm surprised someone hasn't made a generic MP3 player,
with a USB port built in for the actual storage of music. As the price
of storage goes down, you can upgrade the memory, but keep the player.
Then the interface would be almost zero dollars to build, and the cost
of memory would be separated out. Of course, that just makes it more
replacable, not repairable.

The main problem is the economics of electronic products push for
more integration, which obsoletes older parts quickly. Combine that
with ever plummeting costs for chips with more features, and it ends up
costing you more to buy the old chip than to get the new one. I don't
think it's going to settle out for a while yet.

The other problem is that the NRE to make an asic is like a million
dollars, which makes it bloody hard for a mom and pop operation to come
in and make a generic MP3 player that anyone can build or repair.

Avram, I wasn't exactly saying they'd be EASY to care for. Just that
if dry cleaning disappeared, they wouldn't become entirely unusable. I
have to admit I was thinking with my re-enactor brain -- the blankets
are popular among Colonial re-enactors, and the house museum where I've
volunteered in the past has done laundry demonstrations. Children seem
to find it fun to play with the tub and washboard and the paddles for
stirring the linens -- I'm sure they'd find it less so if they had to
do the washing for a whole family, week after week.

I know that if my cat threw up on MY wool blanket (not a Hudson Bay,
just a common blanket from probably the middle of the last century) in
the wintertime, I'd sponge it off as best I could and drape it over the
shower curtain rod while it dried, rather than trying to wash the whole
thing.

Abi@26:

Sorry. Here.

Dena@46: Your mileage may vary, but personally I'm not particularly
concerned about using up paper when I'm buying new books. Yes, there's
an environmental cost to paper, but books use so small a portion of the
paper-stream (1/2 to 1/3 of one percent of paper usage, according to
Walt Crawford in the latest _Cites and Insights_) that I'm not that
worried about it. The cost to me, as I see it, for forgoing books in
the name of paper is higher. (We do buy used books more often than new,
actually, but that reflects our interests and budgets more than a
concern for paper.)

Seeing how much junk mail some other houses get, I'm pretty sure we
save far more paper than we use in books just from having put ourselves
years ago on the DMA's junk-mail opt-out lists. (It doesn't completely get rid of junk mail, but it reduces it substantially.)

Sometimes I think the most sustainable thing I can do is move
elsewhere. Hawai'i, for me, has meant having to own a car (even though
I prefer the bus) and eating mostly food grown in California, among
other things. On the other hand, I don't have to heat my house with gas
or oil.

I'd buy a treadle sewing machine without a zig-zag function - I
prefer to sew buttonholes by hand. It doesn't take me any longer, since
sewing them on the machine usually requires that I redo them.

When I lived in a town that had free recycling pickup (and charged a
fee for trash pickup), I had stopped using plastic shopping bags, and
didn't want to buy small plastic trash bag liners. I took the trash out
of the house more frequently and scrubbed the bins at least once per
week, which worked okay, but was really annoying to have to do during
the winter when I couldn't just use the hose in the yard.

This reminds me that I ought to order a replacement set of the
replaceable parts for my pressure cooker (see also: fast way to deal
with long-storing grains and beans).

Try finding resole-able shoes. They aren't common at all anymore, especially for women.

I can get my Birkenstock sandals resoled until the cork actually
breaks apart, but I haven't found a way to get my El Naturalista shoes
done. It's frustrating, because they're both good shoe brands, and
expensive, but one lasts up to five years, and the other doesn't.

Second for Chico Bags @58

We're carfree here in our little suburb of Seattle. Three years now.
We walk and bike and take the bus. We rent a car once in a while. More
often we borrow a car from one of our neighbors. Good neighbors are
about as deep value as you can get.

To improve bicycle carrying capacity there's Xtracycle, a bolt-on frame extension that radically increases a regular bike's utility. Here are pictures of the more improbable loads I've carried on mine.

Another old technology that's still wonderfully alive is woodworking
tools. For remarkably little money you can buy vintage human-powered
drills, saws, and planes that surpass anything manufactured today for
quality and utility. A good eggbeater drill is a joy to use--silent,
safe, fast, and the batteries don't run down until supper time.
Outrageous amounts of good information and help on this available on
the Oldtools mailing list.

Any loss of the machine culture and we all starve.

Sure, some people will survive, but to a first approximation, none of us are them.

Deep value... I think this messily conflates two things.

One is that actual human utility innovates a whole lot slower than
consumer products allege that they do; there are a great many things
that are simpler, less expensive, better for you, and so on. Having
stuff to do that has real, tangible results, of obvious or immediate
value, is a goodness.

The other one is that the machine society runs as an open loop --
there are inputs, stuff, and garbage -- rather than a closed loop --
there are inputs and stuff -- and this has to change to the closed loop
form as a matter of some urgency.

Me, well, no car, and have never owned one. Driver's license, and I
use it occasionally, for 'not the last calendar year' values of
occasionally. Linux since I got a computer that could run it, in 1997
-- I can claim no virtue for this; I learnt to use a computer on a VAX,
and only unixes seem natural -- and heavy reliance on large reusable
bags. (One of them has wheels.)

On the other hand, new digital camera I like very much; some things
are better, more effective, expand the realizable choice space
available to people. The problem isn't that consumer digital cameras
don't last; the problem is that the question "what eats those?" doesn't
have an answer.

(All that lives is food. Technology needs to live, is all.)

C. Wingate @30: That reminds me of the time I replaced the battery
on my 1998 Dodge Stratus. I figured it'd be a simple operation:
disconnect the leads, pull out the old battery, pop in the new one,
reconnect. Until I realized the battery housing was not in the engine
compartment but in front of the front left wheel. I had to turn the
wheel all the way to the left, squat down, reach under one handed and
unscrew the splash guard, yank that out from the wheel base, disconnect
the battery and then figure out a way to slide it out of the casing
without dropping it (still crouched down, fiddling in the wheel well,
mind). Once the old battery was out then I had to somehow fit the new
battery into the narrow recess with a tire in my face. Ever try lifting
a car battery from a squatting position and holding it out in front of
you? It really works those shoulder muscles, i tell you what.

In January of this year I moved from Raleigh, NC to Brooklyn, NY
because, in short, I felt like I was stabbing the earth - to live
somewhere sidewalks hardly existed, public transportation likewise,
bicycles had no place on the road, and where I had to drive absolutely
everywhere. Also because, even though my car gets good mileage, I felt
like gas prices were never likely to come back down.

I am astonished by how little I miss having a car; on the other
hand, all the steps up and down to the subway have given me Runner's
Knee. So, in these kinds of threads on certain forums, the discussions
seems to turn to You Could Do It If You'd Only Try Harder. What, it's
ten miles on busy highways after dark? That doesn't mean you can't do
it by bike! Be a man!

A person's willingness to make sacrifices turns into a measure of
their toughness, even their manliness - which I feel is not only
insensitive to older people and disabled people, it also turns the
focus to "who can endure the most sacrifices"... when maybe we should
be looking at how to change the infrastructure and the systems in place
so that you don't have to do those ten miserable miles in the dark to get to work.

mk @ #77, hey, if our illustrious singing mayor has his way we'll
have heavy steel-on-steel rail here in another ten years. Throw away
that car!

I bought a used GEO Metro with 13K on it in 1998. At last inspection
it had 49K on it, ten years later. It's not that I think about driving
less, it's just that I don't go very far when I drive.

My Diva Cup rocks the house, and I write in plain text because that
way I get the benefit of subversion's merge and conflict resolution
features. I wish I could bike to work. I suggest it every time we fill
up the gas tank.

Deep value - lasting stuff - good technologies...

*************

Cast iron pans - my mom is using her grandma's - still going strong
after about 70 or 80 years. Can be used with flame or electricity - put
in an oven as well.

Foot powered sewing machines (yes!) - I see them in use in Shenzhen and still a a few in Hong Kong.

Carrying poles - some people in HK still have them. I remember
watching the news a few months ago and a water main burst near a big
apartment block and the water trucks came & there were some people
who were out there w/ their carrying poles to take their 2 buckets
home. Good for carrying lots of things, not just water.

Electric trams - still going strong in HK after 100+ years http://www.hktramways.com/ - double-decked!

Hand-carts - very useful for moving big loads of stuff without a
vehicle or a pack animal - seen more in China now rather than here now

Chinese cleaver & whetstone - you don't really need so many
knives for regular kitchen stuff & it can eliminate need for meat
grinder

Mortar & pestle - can help eliminate need for food processor

Thermos - keeps hot water hot!

Tankless water heaters - will make hot water when you need it.
Electric is nice because you never run out of gas in the middle of your
shower. Gas is nice because you can still have a hot shower if the
electricity is gone.

LPG Cylinders - for the hot water heater or the cooker

Gas hot-plate (hobs) - two rings are great! very easy to attach and get going. Some are automatic, others you light w/ a match.

Gas hot plate -- like the Iwatami burners we use in catering that run off of canned butane? I LOVE those.

Of course, they aren't especially sustainable or deep value, as I
see it -- you still need the butane cans. What makes them better than a
regular modern kitchen stove?

Deep value doesn't necessarily mean buying different stuff.
Sometimes it's just a matter of researching brands (aka "being thrifty,
not cheap.")

Most people I know abhor toaster ovens because they "break sll of
the time." We've had our (Krups) toaster oven for seven years now,
seeing steady use for both toasting and oven duty, and it's still going
strong. And because there's only the two of us, that means we don't
have to heat up the big oven for a meal.

Same thing with just about anything else— do your research and your
purchase will last you for years. Sometimes this is surprising— I still
get good use out of my high school solar calculator, which has decided
our 100W equivalent CFL is a perfectly legitimate light source.

And (looks around) I actually am still pretty happy with my six-year-old computer. Don't tell anyone, mmmkay?

Let's see -- my van is 21 years old and I drive fewer than 3K miles
a year. I do have to drive. I'm disabled and I can't even get on buses
here, assuming I could walk to the stop. And how would I get the trash
and recycling out and the groceries and such in? I mentioned a
reclining tricycle to my nephrologist and she said "Absolutely not!"

I only recently moved to reusable grocery bags -- my grocery store
lets you recycle their bags and the WashPost bags and I did that for
decades. I bought two of their bags and had to adapt them some (the
weight would be too low and make me wobble and I'm not a Weeble) and I
always ask the cashiers to balance them weight-wise as much as possible
and some do. The one that refused to not only balance them, but
insisted on putting everything in one bag "because it fit" was
reported. I still put the WashPost bags in the reusable bag and that
reminds me to take it with me that day.

After the stroke/coma, I couldn't use tampons, so I used reusable
pads. I still have them even though I'm in menopause. Maybe I should
repurpose them for rags. (This is also where I buy bras and underpants
and my current ones are now uncomfortably large and I need to get more.)

I have three windup flashlight/radios -- one in the van, one in the
bedroom, one in the office (it's a small condo, I think that's enough).

A lot of the hand/strength powered tools mentioned here are things I
can't use anymore. As Bruce Baugh commented, moving everybody to more
of these tools isn't possible. There will always be people who are not
capable of using them.

If I couldn't use a microwave, I'd be eating a lot of cheese and
bread and fruit. I can't cook anymore. I have about two gallons of
trash every week, and most of that is frozen food packaging (the actual
trays can be recycled). I have compact fluorescents in the bathrooms
that are 21 years old. I do the best I can, but I can't meet an ideal.

Oh, fountain pens. I had one from about freshman year of high school
to senior year of college-- the cap fragmented, and I don't know if
it's the kind of thing that can be replaced-- and a Waterman Phileas
filled with Noodler's, and... okay, I was weak and it was purple,
Noodler's has a purple ink that looks kind of purple and it comes with
a pen. I expect it to show up by Wednesday. If I don't like the pen,
I'll pass it on to someone who does; if I don't like the ink, much the
same.

Speaking of, anyone like Noodler's Nightshade? Too red for me. I wanted *purple*.

This post has reminded me to get a damned helmet. I like biking, and
this is a good town for it... but I have hair. I didn't take the bike
out at all last year because I felt people would hate me more for
riding without a helmet than for driving. Time to see how much I'll
have to spend for a helmet that I'll be willing to wear.*

A related question (I am full of them today): what *is* proper
distance for a bike? I see them all the time, but all I know is that
they're very skinny cars, and it makes me so nervous passing them
because it's rude somehow.

And the Divacup is amazing. Tampons gave me cramps for years, and
not always in logical places. My Divacup has some interesting side
effects, but nothing as bad as pads, and once I figured it out, it was
so much easier.

On the subject of older cars, I have another: old-people cars. You
know the Buick the little old lady bought for her last car and splurged
on because she was finally going to get a car she liked, and never
drove? I have that car. Seriously. Little old lady and everything. If I
get over my bike issues, I'll be driving Milady Buick to the mall once
a month and out of town... whenever necessary. Why do I love this car?
Because it is made for people who a) are not getting a substandard car
for their last one and b) are arthritic or otherwise not fooling around
with discomfort. It is such a good car.

*Please do not lecture me on why I should wear a helmet. I am fairly
certain I will interpret any comment as lecturing. I know I should.
This is why I haven't ridden a bike I love to things I love to do,
because other people will think less of me for not wearing one. I have
issues, yes.

Speaking of the jerkoff flashlight: my Dad has a wrist watch which
automatically rewinds itself with the normal movements it's subjected
to being worn on your wrist. So whenever you move your arm or walk
around, you wind up your watch.

Rikibeth at #87,

No, bigger than that (I think)

Like these:

http://www.tradeeasy.com/photo/seller/6586/lgraphic/windynasty4079.jpg

http://www.tradeeasy.com/photo/seller/4434/lgraphic/twinklestar1040.jpg

The lasting value is:

1) The LPG cannisters can last for up to a month or more at a time
& are re-fillable & recyclable. You put down a deposit for the
cannisters.

2) The LPG cannisters are reasonably portable - one can carry them
on one's back if need be - no need for infrastructure of gas mains.

3)The gas burners are relatively simple to hook up and move around.
If you move house you could carry one in your arms (or on a hand cart).

4) The gas burners are cleaner & easier to deal with than cooking with coal briquettes, charcoal, or wood.

5) The gas burners can last for quite some time - I've seen some that are at least 30 years old.

It's hard to believe that this thread is up to 92 comments and no
one has mentioned Wendell Berry's criteria for adoption of a new tool
or technology:

1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.

2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.

3. It should do work that is clearly anddemonstrably better than the one it replaces.

4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.

5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.

6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.

7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.

8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.

9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

from WHY I AM NOT GOING TO BUY A COMPUTER

Dena @54 - As a recent convert to home butchery, well, it's fun! And incredibly educational. I can't recommend Merle Ellis' Cutting Up in the Kitchen
enough; it's a practical introduction to what's in your meat counter,
though you can get yourself up to whole beasts with a bit of effort.
Getting closer to my meat has led to tremendous improvement in the
quality of what I put into myself - if you're going to go through the
effort, it's worth investing in free-range, local, and organic. Happier
animals seem to taste better, too.

Avram @65 - They are only dry-clean only if you're lazy. Cold water
gentle wash (or hand wash), and lay out to dry. Yes, you'll lose the
pristine "I just bought it today" look, but you'll trade it for "I love
it and use it", which I tend to prefer.

Greg @73 - The device you want doesn't doesn't really exist because
memory grows so much faster than your connection bandwidth. In
practice, you'd have a 16gig device that took eight hours to fill.
[OB-related-but-not-really-Tech: while memory grows by the square of
the process feature size, the off-chip connection can only grow by a
linear factor, because it has to come out the edge, pretty much
guaranteeing you won't be able to fill it as fast as you want].

neotoma@79 - You might want to track down a shoemaker and have them
*make* you shoes. I had this done about 6 months ago, and I think this
is the first pair of shoes I've had that actually fits right. They cost
more, but they can be resoled and otherwise repaired. Although all the
little nails in the sole set off the metal detectors at the airport...

Oh, in the midst of the long comment, I forgot.

I need grocery bags. Not reusable ones, have a couple of those
bought in a fit of bike-optimism before it became apparent that it is
Not Done. I use paper bags for recycling; as far as I can understand
the recycling rules here, items must be sorted into bags and placed in
the bin... where the bags will stay until a paper day. Plastic bags are
for the bathroom trash can, the cat's litter scoops, and a gigantic bag
in the pantry to drive over to the food bank one of these days.

Checkout people keep asking me if I want my milk in a bag. It's a
gallon of milk. It is in a plastic jug with a handle. There is
astonishingly little that can be done to make that more portable.

Stuff I don't have and seem not to need: microwave, cable tv,
camera, iPod, iron -- none of my clothes need ironing -- food
processor.

I don't own anything that needs to be drycleaned.

I have a cell phone, and in 6 months I've used it only once.

I try to remember to bring my cloth bags to the grocery store, but
sometimes I forget. They are wonderful bags, though; huge, strong, much
easier to hold than plastic ones.

I wish I didn't need a car, but I do.

One of the best deep value products you can have is your health and doing everything you can to hold onto it.

The better your health the more you can do yourself without fangled
technology, freeing up resources for those that truly need them. We
have become just a bit too delicate to survive without our toys at
times.

"If you're walking, you'll make the mistake of forgetting your bag
once or twice, tops. And if you're walking and you forget your bag the
second time, odds are good that you'll buy a second bag rather than
endure another walk with plastic ones."

well, my trick is I have a big Ortlieb compression bag with shoulder
straps so it will function like a backpack in which I carry what I need
during the day, generally my computer, power supply, training clothes.
The size of this can be rolled down to a small backpack, when I go to
the store I unroll it to the size of what I need to buy, since it can
hold 50 liters it's seldom I reach that limit.

abi @ 11: That is a story of wonderful improbability.

Bruce Baugh @ 59: "Some of this, to be sure, is spillover
frustration at healthy young (generally male) bloggers who've done
yeoman work analyzing the screwing over that the working and middle
classes have gotten and then turn right around to enthuse about hiking
the price of food and transportation, knowing damn well that nothing
like sufficient aid to the needy will be forthcoming."

It is a real problem, the extent to which confronting the wasteful
nature of our society is seen as an issue of personal morality, rather
than a problem of collective action. To be fair, though, there are
those who are aware of the extent to which being environmentally
conscious has become a luxury item, and are trying to do something
about it. To grab two random examples from my daily blogs, one of Exra Klein's
regular issues is the utterly bass-ackwards government subsidies on
meat and dairy versus fruits and vegetables, which have the perverse
effect of encouraging people to eat less healthily. Amanda Marcotte
takes environmental issues on from the feminist perspective, addressing
the way that coding earth-friendly action as the domain of middle class
women works to trivialize the issue.

At its best, individual action serves as trailblazing, pointing the
direction for society as a whole by saying "See, this works even
without any social support. So let's make it easier for everyone to
do!" At its worst, it prevents collective action from taking place. I
think it's important not to discourage the former while criticizing the
latter.

Various @ many: The discussion about sewing machines, manual and
electric ought to remind us that there's nothing about modern
technology that is inherently more prone to failure than old-timey
stuff. My parent's KitchenAid is almost thirty years old and still
going strong. It is arguably easier to design appliances and equipment to last forever than it was then--materials technology has only improved.

The fundamental thing that has changed isn't the nature of the
product*, it's the design philosophy behind it. Producers have been
shortening and shortening the lifespan of consumer items. It's just
more profitable that way, and consumers have become habituated to
it--why not force everyone to buy new stuff every five years, or every
three? What alternatives do consumers have?

I like the idea of buying one really high-quality item and using it
for the rest of my life. Whenever possible, I do. But it's almost never
possible--I am frustrated, every time I buy new glasses, because the
frames I got last time around aren't made any more. How can I buy items
with deep value if no one makes them? /rant

*Cutting-edge tech aside. Greg's point about Moore's Law is well-taken.

#70 Caroline: From a tidy roommate in the past I learned this trick
to keep plastic bags in check: stretch them out between your hands,
twist them into loose ropes, and tie them into a loose half bow knot.
Takes less than a second. Suddenly they are tiny and weighty, and you
can fit oodles into the single bag that escaped this treatment, to be
retrieved for wastebasket or "shoes in suitcase" duty, or taken to
Longs Drugs to be recycled.

#73 Greg London: I say short lifecycle stuff sucks, you say short
lifecycle stuff sucks. I think you're distracted by the shiny wrt your
Moore's Law argument, though: it's the Broken Window fallacy.
I had a perfectly good 5 Megapixel camera which reliably did what I
wanted. Now I have an even awesomer 7 Megapixel camera with a wide
aperture and unlimited video. In both cases I have a digital camera I
like just fine; in the second case I'm $280 poorer.

As for my suggestions about making ours less of an economy built
around disposable crap by requiring teaching and knowledge about fixing
it, sounds like you're saying that most of our short lifecycle
electronics are based on chips that are all baked together and pretty
much impossible for a human to replace? I'm not sure I buy that most
electronic failure is a result of something going wrong in these chips.
They sound sturdy. Still sounds like a good idea to have the knowledge
to test the power going to them and the stuff going on downstream.

Of course, if you have an idea about how to encourage fixable
electronic bling, I'm keen on getting suggestions. Electronic bling has
some really excellent applications.

Avram #65: "I notice that two of the items in that "Real Deal"
article Chris linked to -- the Pendleton shirt and the Hudson Bay point
blanket -- are dry-clean-only."

This is the most bizarre thing I've ever heard. As pointed out above, both articles listed are 100% pure wool and predate
dry-cleaning. The Hudson Bay blankets, in particular, were designed for
trading to indigenous northern peoples, who were not noted for their
laundering technologies (nor, honestly speaking, their laundering --
it's tough to launder a caribou skin, which is the technology the
blanket was replacing.)

I grew up a few miles south of the Arctic circle in a wood-heated
log cabin. My parents slept under Hudson Bay blankets (they were deemed
too expensive for child use, we got old sleeping bags from Salvation
Army) and my father wore Pendleton shirts exclusively, as nobody else
was selling a 100% wool man's button shirt at the time.

Solidly-woven heavy 100% wool fabrics are easy to launder. Hand
wash, cold water, luke-warm if heavily soiled. Gentle soap. Woolite is
great; Ivory works. Gently press out excess water. Hang on clothline.

But, here's the point. The blankets, in particular, never really
need laundering; they're used in a clean environment with a cotton
sheet between them and oily or soiled human skin. After a long winter,
hang them in the sunshine for a day to air out accumulated smells, and
they're as new. Barring kittens or catastrophes, they don't get soiled.
If you've got special soil issues (sick people, children, pets,
smokers, badly-chimneyed wood stoves) you use a russian-style
blanket-cover that encapsulates the blanket like those things that
protect goose down comforters.

Dry-clean only? Maybe in some yuppie universe, but not in the universe where those products were first marketed.

Which I think is a point to keep in mind about "old tech" in the
context of this discussion. Tech cannot always be readily divorced from
its context. In the modern world where you've got an electric washing
machine with a spin cycle and a center spindle, 100% wool fabrics are not
appropriate tech, especially if you live in an urban apartment with no
outside clothesline. But if you're packing a bedroll every day for a
dogsled trip to the next log cabin along the trapline, 100% wool is way
lighter and more compact than furred hides, will keep you alive better
than killer cotton, and will stay "clean enough" until the next time
(spring?) that you do laundry, which realistically is going to be "by
hand and in a tub" at best no matter what fabric you have.

"Looking at a world where the economy is probably going to be tightening up for a while"

A fairly short while, I think. We're at the cusp of an energy
production shift, and it's going to be huge - the ball is already
rolling. The age of the Douglass-Martin sunscreen is being ushered in
before our eyes. At least three companies I know of are getting the
price of solar down to below that of coal for electricity - one of them
claims (I think correctly) that a Vermont-sized chunk of Arizona would
suffice to power 90% of the US power-grid, including in that
calculation a significant transition to electric cars.

But long or short, I think the right criterion for deep value is not
the stuff we dream of keeping, but the stuff we actually keep. My house
is 125 years old, and with a modicum of care, will last another 125,
easily. I've hung around some of my best friends for over thirty years,
and I don't expect that to end anytime soon. The system of government
I've been fond of all my life has taken some hits recently, but I'm
hopeful it will bounce back.

Perhaps I just find revealed preferences a better guide than stated ones.

xeger @49, Dena @54 -- I agree wholeheartedly about skills. Knowing
how to do something, even if you choose not to do it yourself,
empowers. That goes for all sorts of things, including finances,
household and car repairs -- anything you can think of. It means you
can be a better consumer, will stand a chance of not getting cheated,
will get good value for money.

Not that I am a whiz at everything. My husband installed a nifty
rainwater collection system that theoretically will supply the toilets
with water. Also various computer controls for the window shades. Also
the computer system in the house (I think we're up to 16 computers at
the moment, including our own server). I haven't been able to master
these systems, and this sort of thing worries me. If anything happens
to him, I'm screwed. But the skill sets one acquires are a function of
time, personal inclination and talent, and also sometimes (dis)ability,
as others have mentioned.

xeger, #49: "The magic just happens" is a spectacular form of ignorance.

Yes, and it's one which has been deliberately encouraged in American
culture for well over a generation. It's difficult to find toys that
encourage tinkering and/or experimentation even for young teenagers
now, and most mechanical and electrical items are marketed as black
boxes -- when they break, it's cheaper to get a new one than to spend
the time to fix it (if fixing it is even possible).

But then, tinkering and experimenting encourage logical thinking and
critical skills -- and there is a large and powerful subset of
authority figures who do not want citizens with the ability to
think logically and analyze critically. (Actually, there are several
partially-overlapping subsets, each of them having somewhat different
reasons.) Because people who can reason and analyze also question...
and that's not good for said authorities. They want drones, who will do
as they're told without bothering to wonder why; smart enough to do the
work, but lacking the habits of independent thought.

R. Emrys, #58: I am SO with you about the word processor! I've never
been a fast writer; my typing is much quicker, plus there are the
tremendous advantages of the backspace key for corrections and the
ability to edit without recopying. Losing those things would be, for
me, a severe hardship -- I could get along, but I wouldn't be happy.

Avram, #71: Wool fabric + washing machine agitation = felting. Not
what you want for your blanket! OTOH, you can buy 2 yards of 60"
acrylic fleece material for a lot less than one of those Hudson Bay
blankets, and the resulting throw is completely washable and doesn't
need any edge treatment. If you need a bigger blanket, buy 2 pieces and
sew them together. Our experience has been that they wear pretty well,
too.

SK-reader, #86: How do those tankless water heaters compare in energy usage? To me, it seems as though you'd use more energy with one in a colder climate, as opposed to storing heated water in an insulated tank. But I could easily be wrong.

B. Durbin, #88: We have a toaster oven as opposed to a toaster; it works just as well for toast, and then also
lets us do a lot of things that a toaster won't, such as bagels and
grilled-cheese sandwiches. We heat leftover pizza with it all the time
-- it doesn't take any longer than the microwave, and the crust stays
firm instead of going limp. Try doing that in a toaster!

Diatryma, #90: I hear you about the helmet issue. I grew up riding
without a helmet -- only bike racers wore them in the 60s and 70s --
and dammit, I don't WANT to wear one, even though I understand
intellectually that it's advisable. Yes, I'm still working thru my issues on this too, so you have my sympathies.

Altho' this story might be of general interest to y'all, ('Email archive to immortalise Australian life'), for this particular thread, I would draw attention to the last three pars of this version, in our local paper, the SMH. I'm assuming it's not an April Fools' joke.

Curses, for my fellow Aussies, I forgot to correct the link that was given in the email archive story; it should be: emailaustralia.ninemsn.com.au. The one given goes to a main page where I can't find any link to that project.

Bruce @59:

Coupla things.

First off, if things can be repaired simply, using easily accessible
tools, then they can be repaired by a local craftsman as well as the
owner (like the 2CV designed so that a French village blacksmith can
fix it). Not everyone has the knack, tools, ability and time to repair
things. But there is still a value in something that you can get fixed
locally, rather than having to throw it away or ship it back to the
factory.

Also, we all have our own lines and limits. Deep value is one of a
number of factors that I use to make my choices, along with time,
convenience, money, etc, etc. I don't know where other peoples'
priorities lie, but I assume they're all in different places. The issue
is as much stewardship as conservation: using the resources wisely, not
saving them for saving's sake. For instance, one should drive when it's
appropriate (which for some people = always, for others = never, but
for most people somewhere in between). Reducing my car trips leaves
more petroleum available for my disabled neighbor, and clears the road
for her as well; it should not shame her.

The minute this topic, or this thread becomes a stick to beat other
people rather than an exploration of our own values and discoveries, I
am going to go out and buy the cheapest gimcrack piece of junk
manufactured halfway across the world and stick it directly in
landfill. Still in its indestructible plastic wrapping. Unless it has
lead in it, in which case I will open it up and lick it first.

</rant>

Note that many wind up torches use the winding to recharge internal
batteries (unlike the Bayliss clockwork radio). And rechargable
batteries do still have a finite life, so if you are relying on it for
emergency use, check it every now and again (and if it has failed,
don't put NiCd rechargeables in regular trash for landfill).

#73: You can get generic MP3 players that take SD memory cards. But the
ones I've seen aren't SDHC, so 2Gb is your limit. (You can still swap
cards with different 2Gb collections though.)

One of the problems with a lot of modern portable electrical gear
--- including the stuff I'm addicted to, like an Ogg player[1] --- is
that they use lithium ion batteries. While these are really cool and
have lots of advantages, like running, well, *cool*, and being
reshapable into all sorts of strange shapes to fit into confined
spaces, and recharging really fast without a lot of gas being given off
and having no memory effect and not having a noticeable limit on
recharge count and having a fairly hig power density, they do have a
few notable disadvantages:

- if you recharge them too fast you *do* get gas evolution. A lot
of it. And heat. And then the casing breaks open and you get hot liquid
sodium metal. They call this 'venting with flame' because 'nasty
explosion' sounds really bad.

- oxidation eventually raises their internal resistance to the
point that, while they still have lots of power, they won't give you
any of it in a useful fashion

Put those together, and you get batteries which are shaped for the
specific model of hardware they come with, are coupled to specific
charging circuits, and which wear out every three years unless you can
breathe pure nitrogen. My understanding is that the consortium that
holds the patents won't let you build a device using lithium-ion
batteries if the battery is user-replaceable, because sodium burns are
bad PR.

Of course there are perverse incentives here, because it's in the
interests of the consumer electronics companies that you buy a new
device every few years, or at least that you have to send it back to
*them* so they can charge you almost as much to get a new battery
fitted.

You can't throw it away when you're done, either: the chemicals inside
make a lead-acid battery look environmentally friendly, so in the EU at
least the immortally-titled WEEE Directive applies, so you have to send
them to a special facility for destruction (they're too fiddly to
recycle).

(Of course, last I heard there *were* no such facilities in the entire EU, and none planned to be built for years. Whoops.)

None of this stuff is conducive to deep value. (Personally I do the
closest I can with my media player, which is to run Rockbox on it and
learn how that works. The hardware may still be mostly-closed and
disposable, but at least I know how the software that does the useful
work functions.)

[1] hey, look, Ogg, not MP3! I'm a *rebel*, I am!

On shopping bags and "granny carts":

We do a fair bit of our grocery shopping at Aldi, where they do
indeed charge for bags. The bags are plastic, but they're pretty
durable and generally get used multiple times. At a cost of ten cents
each, they're not expensive, but it makes sense to bring them back
again and again on subsequent grocery runs. Another alternative is to
use the cardboard boxes that Aldi receives and stocks many of its items
in, and which they will gladly give you for free.

Another favorite place to buy groceries is Cleveland's West Side Market. Just about everybody
brings a "granny cart" there, because by the time you've hit two or
three stands, it's easy to rack up 15 - 20 lbs of purchases and still
not be done with your shopping. In fact, this place is what prompted me
to go out and buy my cart.

#100: I think Greg unintentionally defined "obsolete" to mean "not
useful." A device can be nowhere near the state of the art, and still
be useful as long as it still does what the owner needs it to do. I
don't think we get to pin this one on Moore's Law. i.e., if a
necessary, but unserviceable, device breaks after three years, we need
to replace it regardless of whether it is obsolete.

Moore's Law doesn't say that companies have to design products which
the end user can't service for himself. However, it can be a side
effect of end user demands, in much the way Greg said. e.g., they
surface mount chips, or integrate multiple chips into one to save space
and, likely, power. Modern electronic devices often have specialized
parts. Keeping them in stock after the device is no longer being
manufactured is expensive. (This is assuming you can desolder and
resolder surface mounts at home so that you can use it.) Sadly, this is
even true for typically replaceable items like batteries and memory.
Eventually, you hit a point where companies stop making them.

We, as a society, haven't made maintainability a must have feature
in our electronics. I'm sure people still upgrade their desktop
computers, but how many of them do? The trend is moving away from
buying desktops towards laptops. In general, the latter aren't as user
serviceable as the former. (Of course, some desktops aren't user
serviceable any more either.)

Madeline, you wrote:

I'm not sure I buy that most electronic failure is a result of something going wrong in these chips.

What do you think is the cause of most electronic failure? If you
have schematics, and diagnostic tools, chances are you'll find that the
failure is the result of some chip not behaving as it's supposed to.
They make up the bulk of the device, why wouldn't they be the problem
much of the time? The act of using the device subjects semiconductors
to lots of heat. They don't really like heat. Just because you can't
see them wear out doesn't mean they don't.

(This isn't arguing that we shouldn't be able to check things out
for ourselves, BTW. I don't care if there are "user serviceable parts"
or not, I still want to see what's going on.)

I think what Greg is saying is:

If all electronic devices used only socketed 7400 series ICs, servicing
those devices wouldn't be that big a deal. With some documentation, and
a multimeter, the end user could diagnose the problem, isolate the
errant part(s), and replace it (them). Oh, and the device is also laid
out on a PCB where all traces are exposed somewhere on the top level
(or the device can deal with you wiring pins together directly).

However, we, as consumers, want device smaller and less power hungry
than what a pile of discrete chips gives us. Electronics which meets
modern demands then has specialized parts difficult to keep in stock
once the device goes out of manufacture. It connects those parts
together in ways that are difficult to disconnect then reconnect. And,
we're apparently willing to give up on serviceability to get smaller,
less power hungry, and more functional.

Do we have to build devices what aren't end user serviceable? No, of
course not. However, as consumers, we have to see the ability to
service it ourselves as a feature we're willing to pay money for. (The
Linksys WRT54GL is an example of this, albeit in terms of software, not
hardware. There is a reason why open source hardware hasn't had nearly
the level of success as open source software.)

However, we may have to wait for the day when we can all fab our own
chips at home, not to mention deal with surface mount, before we can
even start to consider servicing modern, highly integrated designs.
Either we retreat back to manufacturing techniques the end user can
already deal with, or we push ahead and find ways for the end user to
deal with the techniques the manufacturer is using.

Lizzy L @ 96... none of my clothes need ironing

Are you implying that there are clothes that do need ironing?

Lee @ 104: "We heat leftover pizza with it all the time -- it
doesn't take any longer than the microwave, and the crust stays firm
instead of going limp. Try doing that in a toaster!"

Ah, I see you have indepedently re-created Heresiarch's Highly
Excellent Pizza Rejuvenation Method. It is one of those rare instances
when leftovers are sometimes even better than the fresh stuff.

abi @ 107: "The minute this topic, or this thread becomes a stick
to beat other people rather than an exploration of our own values and
discoveries, I am going to go out and buy the cheapest gimcrack piece
of junk manufactured halfway across the world and stick it directly in
landfill. Still in its indestructible plastic wrapping. Unless it has
lead in it, in which case I will open it up and lick it first."

Hee! And seconded.

Emily H. @ 83: typing from here in the Triangle, I completely get
you. I had a choice between here and Boston for grad school; I chose to
come here because of the program, the research, and the advisors, but
some days I wish I'd chosen Boston because of the lifestyle. I have to
get in my car to do anything. (I grew up here. Instead of making me used to it, it's just made me more fed up.)

I had one friend, well-intentioned, comment that maybe real
commitment to environmentalism meant taking the bus even if it was
inconvenient. I appreciate the thought, but I'm inclined to think that
the better thing to do is to work to make public transportation an
actually viable option. (Also, "inconvenient" here means something
quite different than it does in a city with a functioning transit
program. Here, it means "get to work late if at all, stand on the side
of a busy highway with no bench or shelter because bus stops are signs
stuck in the ground, and walk half a mile in the dark along a curvy,
hilly road with no sidewalk or shoulder to reach the stop." The walking
in the dark is also a problem because no one else walks anywhere, which
leaves me vulnerable to assault when I'm a lone female on an empty,
dark road. Yes, as you say, I've been told You Can Do It If You Just
Try Harder. Argh.)

Regarding mp3 players...I have a Treo 700p. Takes 4Gb SD cards full
of music and I have two programs installed that will play any format
I've ever come across. It also doubles as a phone and personal
organizer so I don't have to buy/carry around several different
gadgets. Solar chargers aren't in my price range yet, but they're
getting there.

My grandmother had a treadle machine. It was given to her nurse when
she passed away and while I would have liked it, I think she probably
made better use of it. I've got my mother's sewing machine, that's
currently being serviced because I want to start sewing again. It's
electric and older than me, but could probably be operated manually in
a pinch.

I bought a granny cart when I moved to this apartment. Mostly I use
it to move stuff from my apartment to the garage and vice versa, but I
have in a pinch walked to the supermarket with it. It's not an ideal
walk - there's a rather steep hill in the way - and I usually do the
grocery shopping on my way home from work or I'd do it more often.

I've attended a number of book and library conferences, and have an
amazing number of bags I got as giveaways which I use for grocery
shopping. Sometimes I'll forget to bring them back down to the car, but
I'm getting better at that.

I had a bicycle when I first moved here, but it's very hilly (and
I'm not in great shape) and my route to work is along a street with
heavy traffic that I don't feel comfortable biking. I should walk more
often but that's a time thing rather than a lack of desire. I'm
terrible about getting out of the house in the morning.

Anyone who talks to me for a while knows that a great many barriers
between what I want to do and what I do are in my head. I think that
user-serviceable appliances are wonderful, but it takes a certain
amount of daring to open up the first one. When my printer stopped
pulling pages in, it took me a while to stop being angry, look up what
the problem might be, and then spend an afternoon taking it apart, over
and over and over. It took some Krazy Glue, some rubber cement, and a
hairpin, and I have one screw I forgot to put back, but it works now.

The only way I could do it was by saying, "I bought a printer six years
ago. I have not gotten a hundred dollars out of the printer. The
printer has turned into a doorstop. There is nothing I can do that can
make it less useful. Let's see if I can turn a doorstop into a printer."

Apparently, the first phase is that you leave your reusable bag
at home. The second phase is that you leave it in your car. The third
phase is when the bag finally makes it into the store.

My string bags make it into the car about two times out of three,
with the ratio going up as I get used to having them. (The hurdle there
was deciding that no, I didn't really need to net the damn things
myself and could just buy a couple.) But once they're in the car, they get used even if someone has to go back out for them.

They don’t zig-zag, they don’t embroider, but they are immortal, and they break the dependence on the power grid.

It seems to me that there's no reason a treadle-powered machine
couldn't zig-zag; the switch on many older electric machines (my
mother's, for instance) is purely mechanical. Plus, I'll bet you could
retrofit a normally electric machine to treadle power, in that there's
that wheel on the side that you can hand-crank for extra precision.

The mooncup and its ilk

There's someone out there making reusable natural-sponge tampons.
They're not immortal, but they last for 20 or 30 uses, so I'm told,
which is vastly better than the one-use cotton tampon.

I also prefer watches with dials.

My current watch has a face that was designed in approximately 1911,
and I didn't wear a watch for years because I couldn't find one with
the face I liked. And it's all mechanical, albeit self-winding; if the Change hits, I'll at least know what time it is...

My serger, which I rarely use and which really ought to be a candidate for disposal

If you're really looking to get rid of it and it still functions,
I'll happily pay for shipping. At the moment I have three sewing
machines in my house and none of them work; the theoretically most
easily fixable is only missing a presser foot, but it's a very old
machine and the feet aren't made anymore. And I've got all this fabric
sitting around wanting to be my summer wardrobe. The one skirt I did by
hand for winter was more than enough.

Going meta for a moment, I'd say that -skills- are very much one
of the deep value items. I'm always surprised to find people don't all
have some rough idea of how to weave, or make paper (or ink), or
sew[0], or butcher, (more recent) how electricity works, even in
general terms, or all sorts of remarkably basic ideas that underly
modern technology.

That's one of the things about hanging out with SCAdians--if The End
Of Civilization happens in a reasonably survivable way (e.g. not by
nuclear exchange), we're gonna be useful to have around. I can take a
sheep and end up with clothes; they might not be great at first, but
they'll be warm. And I have friends with similar skills down to "I can
take iron ore and end up with a knife". Handy.

Looking at a world where the economy is probably going to be
tightening up for a while, I find myself drawn to things with deep
value, things a little less dependent on the state of our technology
and shipping infrastructure1 to build and repair.

Won't that make the economic crisis that much worse? It's all well
and fine to say "Well, I won't buy a new car every time I run out of
gas" but what of the unfortunates languishing on the assembly lines?

Abi @ 107: Absolutely. Thirded.

It seems to me that a lot of this stuff is sold in some quarters as
a quasi-religion: Consume less and smell more! Sackcloth and ashes are
good for the skin! Your car kills kittens!

On the other hand, keeping your kit working for longer than it
should can be fine fun and a route into finding out how it all works.
My own excuse is growing up on a farm with parents/grandparents for
whom 'make do and mend' and 'dig for victory' were still maxims to live
by.

(Which doesn't quite explain how I got into the toxic and ephemeral
computing industry, but there you go. Or maybe it does. Anyway.)

Heresiarch @ 99: I think what has happened is that the tech used for
designing objects has got a lot better. There was the old Colin Chapman
line 'If it doesn't break it wasn't light enough, if it breaks it was
too light'. Which is fine for Lotus drivers but NBG for the rest of us.

If some careful simulation and/or finite element analysis can make a
VW Golf lighter and stiffer, then it'll use less fuel and less steel.
At the expense of any road accident worth the name wrecking the car,
but rather that than it all going a bit pea-in-a-bucket for the poor
passengers. Old Land-Rovers are tough, but you wouldn't want to shunt
one properly.

I can't help thinking 'Foundation and Empire' here.

I switched to the reusable grocery bags a few months ago. I love
them, but forget to bring them about half the time. I have taken to
just buying more of the reusables when I forget my own and then giving
them away to friends.

I really like my Divacup but can only use it around the home. I just
can't get the knack of emptying and replacing in a public restroom. I
got mine from lunapads,
but use their reusable pads (and panties! With protection all built
in!) much more often. Incredibly comfortable. They have a nice little
program where you can also send menstrual products to girls in Africa
so they don't miss school.

Carrie S.: I believe these are the sponges you were referring to. Lunapads used to sell them through their site but don't any longer. Not sure why.

Any suggestions on beginner fountain pens?

#101 ::: Daniel Boone [on wool blankets/dry cleaning]

Beautifully put. I have a similar ongoing battle with people who
claim silk must be dry-cleaned. Tell that to several thousand years of
Mandarins. The solution, as you've mentioned, is to put an easily
washed baffle (often cotton) between the oil-or-grime producing
skin/environment and the wool or silk.

This is one of the points of underwear. My grandmother's generation
wore cotton underwear, and slips, and would hang clothes to "air" after
a day's wearing. Heavily-constructed items like wool suits would
receive a gentle but thorough brushing. Laundry was tedious enough,
even with a good well close to hand. Dry cleaning not an option.

The other factor is that we've conditioned ourselves not to have
smelly bodies, and go to great lengths not to "cause offense". The U.S.
has plenty of water (not to mention deodorants and questionable
antiperspirants). Or at least we think we do. This is a major component
of culture shock with travel to third-world countries.

#117 ::: Carrie S.

It seems to me that there's no reason a treadle-powered machine
couldn't zig-zag; the switch on many older electric machines (my
mother's, for instance) is purely mechanical. Plus, I'll bet you could
retrofit a normally electric machine to treadle power, in that there's
that wheel on the side that you can hand-crank for extra precision.

Unfortunately not. There has to be a groove beside the hand wheel
(which usually has a rounded edge) for the belt to nestle in, and the
machine head has to be cast with channels for the belt. Adding an
exposed belt with enough tension to cup around the exterior of the hand
wheel would be dangerous, even if you religiously wore a cap or hair
net.

Re: natural sponge tampons

You can also cut cheap manufactured sponges into chunky cylinders that
work quite well. I soaked mine in vinegar between times and never had
problems in a couple decades' worth of use. They lasted considerably
longer than the sea sponges, and no one saw the garish colors they came
in.

Unfortunately not. There has to be a groove beside the hand
wheel (which usually has a rounded edge) for the belt to nestle in, and
the machine head has to be cast with channels for the belt. Adding an
exposed belt with enough tension to cup around the exterior of the hand
wheel would be dangerous, even if you religiously wore a cap or hair
net.

I was thinking along the lines of replacing that wheel entirely with
one that had spokes (for a more chain-like belt) or the appropriate
groove. It'd be a pain, but once done it might work.

A related question (I am full of them today): what *is* proper
distance for a bike? I see them all the time, but all I know is that
they're very skinny cars, and it makes me so nervous passing them
because it's rude somehow.

Proper passing distance is "do not squash the biker" or 3 feet. Some
localities have a law for the 3 feet. I find it very unnerving when
it's safe for a driver to pass me and they don't. If it's not safe to
pass me, and I think that cars ought to, I'll pull over. I've got a
right to use the road, not a right to *block* the road.

Proper biking distance is "one that means *you* do not collapse in a
heap at the end of the day". For some people, this is 1 mile. For
randonneurs, it tends to be in the 200-400km range, but most
randonneurs will cheerfully tell you they're crazy (and if you let
them, will then tell you *all* about the last bike part they broke,
their favorite toys, their favorite food, and the best way to make your
bike do silly distances). I am pretty ordinary, with my daily bike
trips being 2 miles or less. Running a loop route usually means I go
6-8 miles.

Yes, as you say, I've been told You Can Do It If You Just Try Harder.

No. You can do it if you are in an appropriate enviroment, know what
tools are needed, and have good support. I *can* get around by bike in
Central PA... and I'm not willing to indulge in the level of try harder
required to be without a car there. No sidewalks, which means if a hill
is too steep for me to manage I can't bail and walk safely. Often,
major bridges are motor vehicle only. Limited route selection. Very few
roads have a shoulder. Lanes are narrow. And the road layout is
challenging - very fun for low traffic and unholy hell given the normal
traffic levels. Bike shops mostly think that bikes are for racing, not
for getting groceries.

Instead, I live in Madison where things are far more manageable.
There are sidewalks, and the roads are mostly wide enough that a car
can pass me safely even if there's not a bike lane. I can *walk* to a
bike shop if I have a problem I don't know how to fix or if I need a
doohickey Right Now. And there will be a bike shop within walking
distance of any place I go normally.

I tend to class the Just Try Harder group as misogynistic clowns and
ignore them (and IME, if you present as female, there *will* be much
rougher treatment than if you present as male). Their contact with
reality tends to be tenuous. If you must deal with one, I find a strong
dose of reality tends to make them be quiet.

Emily @ 125: Yikes. No wonder US bikers think us Euros have it easy.

Here (the UK) drivers are supposed to give a cyclist as much room as a small car.

Personally, I tend to ride about a third of the way out into the
carriageway. Then the driver has to make a positive decision to avoid
me when overtaking. If you ride tucked into the side of the road, yon
car-driver won't get over and you'll feel a wing-mirror brushing your
elbow.

Long hair, riding w/o a helmet and throwing in the odd wobble will also make the average car-pilot carefully avoid you.

I'm aware that such (Highway Code mandated) behaviour will get me killed in short order in the US.

I'm so glad it's getting warm enough that I can ride my bike again
(as soon as I have the back wheel looked at); I lost a good two months
of biking weather last fall to an unfortunate encounter with a woman
who either didn't see me, thought I had a Stop sign too, or assumed I
had to yield to her because I was on a bike. I sprained my back, which
pretty much put an end to biking for four months or so, and then it was
winter--and having given myself bronchitis biking when it was too cold
once, I'm not anxious to repeat the experience.

Pittsburgh is not a very bike-friendly city*, what with the hills
and the narrow windy streets and the bad weather in winter; I can get
to work and back because it's one of the few long stretches of
relatively flat in the city, but I don't blame anyone who doesn't want
to try it, even if they're reasonably able-bodied.

I've got a right to use the road, not a right to *block* the road.

One of the few times I've been yelled at was when a driver refused
to pass me despite my doing everything possible to safely allow him to;
the guy behind him, who had perforce been traveling at bike pace,
called me something that our respective vectors thankfully rendered
incomprehensible.

* This problem is not made better by the many bikers who seem to
assume they are fast-moving pedestrians: going up on the sidewalk when
it's convenient (or riding on the sidewalk most of the time), ignoring
traffic lights, failing to signal turns, etc etc. If they don't want to
wear helmets, that is not my problem; their skulls, their skills, their
issue. But it'd be nice if they didn't make it so that drivers assume a
person on a bike is a dangerous loose cannon.

#120--Most of the large pen manufacturers have lines that they
usually refer to as student or school pens. Pelikan has the Pelikano
and Future, Lamy the Safari, Waterman the Reflex and Phileas, Caran
d'Ache the Primo, Parker the Vector, Frontier, and 45, Cross the ATX
and Century. There are others as well--Rotring's great strength and
fame is pens for drafting work, but they make good writing pens as
well, and if you're willing to go from the under-$30 range to the
under-$60 range there's an even wider number of good basic pens.

I haven't tried all of these, but I have tried several of them, and
they seem to be good, functional pens that don't leak* easily. It's
possible to use many of them with cartridges, or with the appropriate
(for that model) refilling mechanisms (I happen to be allergic to the
bladder type--we just can't seem to get along--but the piston styles
seem to be pretty good). it's also possible to refill the (supposedly)
disposable cartridges, but you need something like an eyedropper or a
syringe to so it, and I'd advise working over the sink.

My favorite place to shop is Montgomery Pens, the online arm of the Montgomery Stationery Store of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Other good places are Colorado Pen Direct, Fountain Pen Hospital, Pendemonium, and Swisher Pens.

Student pens tend to be fairly durable, since their expected
environments include places like book bags and backpacks. They just
aren't made with the exotic materials and fanciful details you see in
the high-end models. My own philosphy is that company that can't make a
good basic pen probably can't make a good one, period.

*Cheap Shaeffer cartridge pens, I'm looking at you. If these people can do it, what's stopping you?

OK, Colorado Pen Direct. Sorry about that.

Rather than fountain pens, I ended up using drafting pens, until I stopped being able to write for more than a minute-or-so.

neotoma @79: Try finding resole-able shoes. They aren't common at all anymore, especially for women.

Yes and no-- if small local shoe-repair shops can be found, they can
attempt to resole anything you bring them, although they may not always
be successful and the new sole may have a very different texture than
the old one... my one attempt in that direction was disappointing (they
replaced a worn-out rubberized moccasin-style sole with a slippery
rigid leather one), but I mention it anyway out of
support-small-local-businesses principle.

IME true resoleability is mostly brand-dependent, wrt whether the
shoe manufacturer has made some of their own original parts available.
I've had excellent results from mailing various Clarks and Rockports to
this place, both my husband's and my own; the one exception has been a pair of cork-based Clark's sandals.

For the truly intrepid, there's the possibility of learning to make
one's own shoes. There are various books and websites on the subject;
many of the latter are SCA-based, but I mostly figure that shoes is
shoes. An astonishing array of leather scraps can be found on eBay,
such as the square yard or so of waterproof Timberland which (to my
shame) has been languishing in my closet for the past few years since I
bought it. At the least, however, such references also contain info
which could be adapted for DIY shoe repair ("Barge Cement" at your
local hardware store seems to be the glue of choice).

Diatryma @90: Oh, fountain pens. I had one from about freshman
year of high school to senior year of college-- the cap fragmented, and
I don't know if it's the kind of thing that can be replaced

Contact the manufacturer and ask if you can buy a new one from them;
even if it's not a model in current production, they may still have
spare parts in stock. If you're not sure what the model is, you may
have to mail the pen to them for identification, but the worst that can
happen is that you'll have spent the postage. (Or, I suppose, your
mathom drawer will have divested an unused/unusable pen.)

Speaking of, anyone like Noodler's Nightshade? Too red for me. I wanted *purple*.

Haven't tried it, but based on the samples here, it doesn't look particularly purple to me either-- which is the new "purple" you've just ordered?

Private Reserve's "Tanzanite" is rather nice, imho-- it's been a
while since I've refilled a fresh pen with it, but iitc it's slightly
redder than the sample shown here. This multibrand chart may also be of interest.

I’m still using the same fountain pen I bought in 1992. The guy
sitting next to me isn’t even using the same ballpoint he had in
January.

Me too, exactly -- a next-to-the-top-of-the-line Pelikan bought at
Pearl Paint in New York in 1992, when the brand still offered good
lifetime value at fair prices. Now they're out and out luxury products.
I hate disposables. To get me to switch, you'd have to pry my beloved
Pelikan from my cold, dead hand.

Also dislike disposable computers, which is what these necessary evils all are these days. My handheld Psion Series 5
and I have been inseparable for more than 10 years. (The screen cable
-- hard to fix -- went bad on the first one after three years, and I
bought a replacement Psion on eBay. Since then I've opened and closed
it very gently, and no problem.)

I take it everywhere, it has a cramped but real and very usable
keyboard, it's instant-on because all the software is in ROM,
rechargeable AA batteries last far longer than any laptop. Has a full
MS Office-compatible software suite, but I no longer have a Windows 98
machine to sync to for the conversion. These days I just use it to
capture keystrokes when I don't want to lug a laptop around. Upload as
text files via a card reader to my Mac. Simply one of the most elegant
computers ever made.

Caroline, #114: I had one friend, well-intentioned, comment that
maybe real commitment to environmentalism meant taking the bus even if
it was inconvenient.

First off, as you point out, "inconvenient" is one thing, while "dangerous" is quite another.

Secondly, my response to that comment would have been that a real commitment to environmentalism involves working to make greener behavior easy enough that it doesn't have
to be inconvenient, because as long as it's inconvenient the only
people who will do it are the ones you don't need to convince... and
how many letters have you* written to the City Council about the need for viable bus service in the last year?

* That is, the person who made the original statement.

Carrie, #117: If the Change hits, knowing what time it is will become a lot less important. ;-)

James, #118: What we're probably looking at here, in the long run,
might be called the Anti-Industrial Revolution. Whether that's the most
accurate description or not, it's fairly clear that there is
going to be some significant economic disruption, no matter whether
it's the result of people moving back toward longer-usage items or of
people simply no longer being able to afford the throwaway consumerist
culture and not buying things at all. Eventually things will shake out
-- but the shape of the culture we end up with will probably be as
different from what we're used to today as the shape of Western
European culture in 1850 differed from that of 1750.

I haven't finished reading, but to drop in a thought before it gets any further from the source...

#30, C Wingate -

I'm currently saving to pay for a timing belt replacement on my
current Toyota (a 1996 model). I've participated in the changing of the
timing chain on a 76 Toyota, and done a lot of wrenching myself on that
same car. Heck, I replaced the rear brakes on the current car the last
time it needed doing. But an engine task that starts with removing the
passenger side wheel and proceeds to removing an engine mount, with
potentially catastrophic consequences if you get it wrong?* I'm paying
someone.

We did buy a 1976 Celica, the car both drove while we were dating in
the 90s** to rebuild. If we can make it reliable enough, there's a good
chance it will become my daily driver.

*My memory says that getting a timing chain right is easier than
getting the belt right sounds. I could be misremembering, though.

**He had a 75 Celica when I met him, and I ended up buying a 76 in
exactly the same color. It was disgustingly cute, though it was a
practical choice as much as anything.

General announcement: I am not planning to get rid of my serger
anytime soon. Thanks to everyone who's emailed to ask for it, but
"candidate for disposal" does not imply "this week" or even "this
month" or any other very-near-future timeframe.

Even after yesterday's discussion here I managed to forget to take
my recyclable bag to the grocery store to shop. I feel like such an
idiot about this.

Regarding bicycling -

I'm currently a bit frustrated by it because I live five miles from
my work. Only five miles! In metro Atlanta! I could bicycle. But the
first half-mile is a winding road full of blind curves, with no
shoulder much of the time, much less a sidewalk, and I'm just plain too
chicken to ride in the road.

This isn't helped by the fact that there is a large segment of
pro-bicycle bloggers who seem to think that this is a good argument to
convince people to bicycle in the roadways*:

Bicycles are vehicular traffic and have a right to be on the
roadway. In point of fact, they should be on the roadway, not on the
sidwalks. Sidewalks are for pedestrians. (I buy that.)

Auto drivers don't know how to drive safely around bicyclists in most of the U.S. (I agree.)

Therefore, more bicyclists should ride on the roadway to educate drivers on how to not kill bicyclists.

I just can't see how that doesn't amount to a segment of bicyclists martyring themselves for the cause. So I drive.

*"This" is my made up summary of the arguments as I see them, not a direct quote of anyone, heaven forbid.

John Chu@111: We, as a society, haven't made maintainability a must have feature in our electronics.

I'm not sure that's a decision we could have made. The way I
understood it was that Moore's Law itself pretty much requires planned
obsolescence to operate - if a fair number of us don't replace all our
shiny at regular intervals there just won't be the money to keep the
whole thing moving forward.

Susan #135: Even after yesterday's discussion here I managed to
forget to take my recyclable bag to the grocery store to shop. I feel
like such an idiot about this.

You and me both.

Jen B 120: best method I've found for emptying/replacing the Diva in
a public restroom: dampen a paper towel before entering the stall and
bring it in with you.

Of course, if you're in one of those restrooms with only hot air
dryers, best method is to hope you haven't reached capacity yet. Even
on my heaviest days I can go 8 hours before having to worry about
overflow, but I'm aware that there are people for whom this won't work.

Jen B. at 120: Many of my friends swear by the Waterman Phileas as a
good starter fountain pen. Do you like heavy pens, or light ones? If
heavy, I would recommend a Sheaffer Prelude or Javelin; for lighter
ones... hmmm. I migh suggest a vintage Esterbrook. They're light,
durable, and have interchangeable nibs.

Abi: I've still got the second Pelikan M200 that I bought in 1993,
but the oldest pen in my collection is close to sixty years old. It's
had its sac replaced once, and its nib customized for me, but other
than that, it's the same pen it was when Virginia Siegler bought it
(that's the name engraved on it). I suspect my niece will inherit it,
and it will still be in working order.

This is something that we've been discussing at my house recently.
We moved from Portland, where public transit is easy, grocery stores
were within walking distance, and it was possible to eat a diet that
was fresh and (fairly) local. Now we live in Central Illinois, where
public transit is non-existant, the nearest grocery store is 10 miles
away, and if we want fresh local food, we best start a garden
(broccoli, tomato and pepper seeds already started, actually). In
addition, we're starting a family, and getting to hear "You'll be
amazed how much stuff you'll need for a baby!" Well, we NEED a car
seat, some way to carry the baby, clothes and diapers. Everything else
just makes life easier (and more expensive and more crowded). We're
currently in the middle of clearing out my dad's house, as mentioned
previously, so I'm not really interested in bringing more stuff into
the house. Moreover, I'm tired of feeling pressured to buy more
disposable stuff all the time.

I quit my previous job in retail because I was tired of selling people
useless gadgets. You know the sort of thing that makes people go "Ooh,
that's handy!" and then never take it out of the drawer once they get
it home? I wanted to be doing something that was actually worthwhile,
or better yet, actually creating something that people could use. So
I'm trying to learn to sew, I'm starting my first ever vegetable
garden, and I'm debating whether I'm willing to invest the time
necessary to have chickens. I don't know that I want to move off the
grid entirely, but I would like to stop being driven to consume endless
quantities of lackluster goods.

Oh, and tankless water heaters won't work if you have a lot of natural
gas in your well water. I pushed for one, but apparently, being able to
light your tap water on fire makes it incompatible with the high
pressure heating? Who knew?

While I am 100% on board with the idea of buying durable goods that
are actually, you know, *durable,* as someone professionally involved
in the renewable energy sector, I would argue for the fact that
electricity use in and of itself is not unsustainable. If an electrical
appliance can be designed to be as durable as a manually operated
version of the same thing without an undue load associated with it, I'm
generally onboard. At the same time, though, when a design tweak can
offer better results than the application of electricity- passive
solar, skylighting, etc- then obviously I'd take that tack first.

Graydon: I might be among the first approximation, but I'm strange.
I have seed corn, animals (horses, dogs and chickens), some access to
acreage; know where there's permanent water and a place to hie me to
until things settle down.

I have firearms, so meat is findable while food grows.

And I have a whole lot of those skills someone upthread (ethan?) was
amazed everyone doesn't. My thought when watching "Castaway" was, "he
didn't read the right books as a kid."

If we move back to SLO, no problem. We have farmer friends (and old
farmers too, Webb is in his early seventies; he knows how to make do
without the most modern of trappings.

Since I don't think the machine culture will just end, but break
down in bits and pieces, I figure those of us who have skills/knowledge
can trade them in for food.

I can tinker, do some smithing, reap corn, preserve foods, refine
salt, cure meats, tan hides, work wood, maintain weapons, sharpen
tools, plan sanitation, milk cows, grow crops, build walls, and I don't
know what all else.

So, barring a Lucifer's Hammer sort of end to civilization, I think
I'll come through it all right. Add the skills my extended
family/friends have, and it might even be a reasonably comfortable one.

Now I have to catch up with all the posts I know have been made
since I wrote this last night (our net was down, so I have been unable
to post it).

Slowly making my way through the comments...

#91, Daniel Klein -

Oh, I had an old model "selfwinding" watch that I loved until it
died. It was a Timex, so it wasn't repairable. I'm terrible about
getting a battery replaced when it goes dead in a watch - I much prefer
something that is self-sustaining or at least stemwound. I am
definitely tempted by the new quartz watches that apparently charge a
capacitor based on your movement, but the manufacturers seem to be
aware that this is possibly the last watch you'll buy, and price them
accordingly. I haven't convinced myself that I need a watch badly
enough for the initial outlay of a long-term investment.

A related pet-peeve is the apparent fascination with
battery-operated clocks that have (battery-driven) pendulums. I went
into a clock/watch shop (one of those annoying ones at the mall) and
while I waited for the battery in my watch to be changed, I noticed
that all of the pendulum clocks on the wall were silent. As I paid my
bill, I asked, "Why don't the clocks tick?"

The look I got suggested I'd asked why they didn't sing and dance. "Tick?"

"Yes, tick. Why don't the clocks tick?"

"They're quartz," came the answer, as if I were a bit slow.

I was so flabbergasted all I could say was, "Oh, okay."

#116, Diatryma -

"I bought a printer six years ago. I have not gotten a hundred
dollars out of the printer. The printer has turned into a doorstop.
There is nothing I can do that can make it less useful. Let's see if I
can turn a doorstop into a printer."

Brilliant. And a train of thought I should try more often myself.

#122, Carol Kimball -

I don't quite understand what you're saying about the belts in
regard to converting an electric machine to treadle. I wouldn't bother
with the conversion with many of the new machines, and the older ones
that are worth converting often are belt-driven, with an external motor
and exposed belt. I'd expect converting them would be a matter of
setting it into a treadle table and finding the right belt. Am I not
thinking of it correctly?

You're definitely right about belts being a hazard to hair, though
it was my fingers that were most in danger around the belt-driven
industrial sewing machines* I used. If you cupped your hand too far
around the wheel, it was possible to get between the belt and the
wheel. I managed to only give myself a good scare a few times before I
learned how to do it right, but it's a risk.

*Speaking only of durability, these are the best candidates for
conversion, though I don't know how hard they are to drive - a treadle
might not be enough power to make one run even through light material.

Paul Lalonde @ 94: We've been considering getting a real shoemaker
for a while. Do you have any advice about how to find/identify a good
one?

Lee @ 104: My parents are late adopters; I typed papers on a
typewriter for most of my childhood, and finally an electric typewriter
for the latter half of high school. I have not a shred of nostalgia for
either of these devices.

Another good source of deep value items is Amish furniture stores.
We discovered these when we went bed shopping last year. Our new
four-poster is made of solid oak, and we know the name of the guy who
built it. If our hypothetical grandkids snap one of the posts in 40
years, someone will come to our house and fix it for free. The only way
we'll ever need to replace it (for certain definitions of need) is if
we actually save up the money for the canopy bed from the same store
with secret compartments in the footboard. Apparently the Amish are
very fond of secret compartments; who knew? Not that I blame them. If I
can't have a bookcase that swings out to reveal a hidden layer, secret
compartments in the bed are the next best thing.

#124 ::: Carrie S.

I was thinking along the lines of replacing that wheel entirely
with one that had spokes (for a more chain-like belt) or the
appropriate groove. It'd be a pain, but once done it might work.

If you're getting into machining, it'd be better to use a rat-tail
file and make a groove for the belt on the left side (inside) of the
hand wheel, and open up the head casing where the belt needs to pass.
That runs the belt in the channel that was meant for it, directly
around the flywheel for the treadle.

Far less tricky work, and most of the path of the belt is out of
harm's way. Even with the 7-8" of "standard" exposed belt at the front
right of the machine, any bit of thread, fabric, hair (!) that wafts
over that way will get grabbed by the belt.

Adrian Smith@137:The way I understood it was that Moore's Law itself pretty much requires planned obsolescence to operate

Moore's Law says that transistor density doubles approximately every
two years, period. (It's really Moore's Rule of Thumb.) It says nothing
about how we should use those extra transistors per unit area. It
doesn't even say that we should make use of those extra transistors per
unit area.

Planned obsolescence is one way of getting people to replace what
they already have. Coming up with something irresistably shiny is
another way. Those are hardly the only two ways.

There's nothing about Moore's Law that prevents companies from
making user serviceable products. e.g., give a useful user serviceable
product, a company might make money selling upgrades.

However, if we, as a society, choose tightly integrated, sealed up
packages over bulkier, more user accessible packages, then the products
that sell will be ones that are harder to service.

Incidentally, the project for African schoolgirls that Jen. B refers to in #120 is http://www.goods4girls.org/

They offer a variety of links to make-it-yourself reusable menstrual pad instructions (under "Patterns").

Rikibeth: It is more a problem of, um, re-insertion. There just
isn’t enough room in the stalls where I work to be doing anything other
than sitting or standing. And once you’ve dropped one in the toilet
once or twice… I suppose the only answer is, “practice”.

Velma: I always use Pilot pens, so I suppose I would write with
something light. I think what has kept me from fountain pens up until
now has been the great variety: weight, materials, nibs, etc. I’ve just
never known where to start. Of course, there is also the fear that I
will break nibs left and right.

All the talk about the trend towards products which customers cannot fix themselves has put The Magnetic Fields’ Epitaph For My Heart in my head.

#145 ::: R. M. Koske

I don't quite understand what you're saying about the belts in
regard to converting an electric machine to treadle. I wouldn't bother
with the conversion with many of the new machines, and the older ones
that are worth converting often are belt-driven, with an external motor
and exposed belt. I'd expect converting them would be a matter of
setting it into a treadle table and finding the right belt.

I messed around trying to do a conversion for some time before
finding the proper head, hence all the minutiae. The problem is that
when a head is cast to accommodate an electrical motor (we're in the
home versions here), things don't line up properly to run a belt down
to the flywheel.

The old Singers I have that were made for either treadle or
electricity are model 411G. The 401 (+) gear-drive series was an
attempt to make an industrial machine that would appeal to the home
market, and almost every home ec teacher in the country bought one. I
can set the timing in about twenty minutes as perfectly as when it came
from the factory.

An industrial is far more finely machined, has a more powerful motor
set apart from the sewing business for greater torque, and is noisy and
(to a dainty 50's housewife) ugly.

The 401s were almost as finely machined, but limited to the size of
motor that could be put into the right side of the conventionally
home-pretty case.

One of the advantages of using the treadle is that I no longer have
thunder thighs. Though only about 110#, I can generate plenty of power
with my quads, so I'd guess an industrial conversion would be fine.

Both my machines were electric set in a convertible head. The first
arrived without those guts, so I immediately ordered and installed a
wiring harness to get the light working again. In a power outage of
several hours, I propped a mirror up and worked by ample reflected
light.

On fountain pens: I have a Waterman Phileas and the first time I
used it... oh, yeah, not buying anything else. My handwriting has
adapted to fountain pens; I am even less legible in ballpoint, and I
once described a particularly bothersome professor as 'worse than
pencil'.

Your handwriting may change as you get better at it; there are little
weirdnesses to fountain pens. My mother can't write with one at all.



The Noodler's Violet Vote ink, formerly Iraqi Indigo, is an appropriate
shade of purple, not as dark as I'd like (I'm waiting for the color
that came out of purple Pilot Varsity disposables), and the pen feels
flimsly after my darling Phileas, but it's good to have options. It's
not perfect, but it's better than I was prepared for.

RM Koske, stupid brain tricks make me happy. Like I said, most of
the problems I have with lifestyle changes are in my own brain. And I
did manage to turn a doorstop into a printer! It works so well now, and
every time I use it, I am happy because I fixed it. Yay go me!

I do have a thing with kitchen gadgets. Not a very big thing, but a
thing. I bought a microplane zester to make Teresa's limeade (zester
worked, alcohol didn't) and a food chopper to make heroin truffles (I
am not hand-grinding an entire package of Oreos, no I am not). What
I've learned from that is not to buy the cheapest appliance available.
The five-dollar difference between the cheapest hand mixer and the
second-cheapest is wide enough to burn out a motor on truffle filling.

I second the suggestion of fleecie blankets. My bed has flannel
sheets, a cheap comforter, an afghan, and three layers of fleecies. Two
and a half yards covers a double bed adequately.

Diatryma @152:

What I've learned from that is not to buy the cheapest appliance
available. The five-dollar difference between the cheapest hand mixer
and the second-cheapest is wide enough to burn out a motor on truffle
filling.

My mother, in her aspect as a car mechanic, taught me to always buy the best tool that you can afford.

I haven't always followed her advice, and I haven't always regretted not following it, but I've never regretted following it, if you see what I mean.

#151 - Carol Kimball -

Ah, yes, I understand now. Thank you.

*goes to look up Singer 401+. Drools a bit.* Wow, those are really
affordable on ebay! Wouldn't I love something like that! My current
machine is one I picked up from the dumpster at my apartment complex.
It has all-metal parts inside and oiling points that look a great deal
like the industrial machines did. It's a brand that didn't survive
("Good Housekeeper") but it looks to be incredibly durable and I'll be
using it for a long time, I hope.

Your talk of setting the timing yourself makes me wonder about the
cost of a sewing machine repair class. (Speaking of skills with deep
value.)

#154 ::: R. M. Koske

*goes to look up Singer 401+. Drools a bit.* Wow, those are really affordable on ebay!

Over the years, I've owned maybe six or seven* of the 401 series and
checked over a dozen or so, and never found one that didn't justify
paying $200-250, and I see the current crop is substantially less than
that. None of these appear to be convertible to treadle, no surprise -
what to look for is the bobbin winder on top of the machine, and a
rectangular hole (or maybe just knock out) at the base of the motor
compartment.

* I currently own one 401A electric and two 411G treadles. The prices on ebay make me want to buy ALL OF THEM (calms down a little)
for the next crop of begging students/interns/clients. Okay, I can send
them there. The heirs of those Home Ec teachers of yesteryear don't
know what they've got.

Your talk of setting the timing yourself makes me wonder about
the cost of a sewing machine repair class. (Speaking of skills with
deep value.)

In a heartbeat! The old Singers have built-in guides that make
setting the hook quick and easy. I took classes for timing both sewing
machines and sergers a decade or so ago and have never regretted it,
though I'll pay someone to do the serger. Other sewing machines are a
little more fiddly to set, but still, no big deal.

I'm just plain too chicken to ride in the road.

Sensible given what you describe. If the roads are laid out so that
it's safe to walk and you've demonstrated to yourself by *doing* it...
then you can probably ride a bike on them. With practice. I use
pedestrians as a rough guideline: if a road isn't safe for pedestrians,
it's not safe on a bike either.

I say probably because a clever department of transportation can
manage to munge things up so that a sidewalk isn't bad, but the roads
are downright terrifying still. Large chunks of Los Angeles are like
that. I was quite happy to walk everywhere there, but I don't think
there's enough money in the world to get me to ride a bike on a typical
LA street. (and I'm scared witless of riding on a sidewalk... I wasn't
allowed to do it as a child, and LA sidewalks can be extra specially
exciting even as a pedestrian)

There are League of American Bicyclist classes in riding bikes on
the road. I was taught by my parents, and the material they taught
matches the PA Bike Driver's Manual (which didn't exist when they
started teaching me, but is related to the LAB course material). This
means I'm not very motivated to check out the classes, as PA law
matches CA and WI law (for once)... but I know people who have taken
them, and they seem to find them helpful. There's a substantial
practical component of riding your bike on the road, and that seems to
be what makes the classes work. The supervised practice can't hurt, and
it might cut down on what road conditions you find terrifying.

And yes, I find the activist types annoying too. IME people who do
not ride their bikes have sound reasons for their choice. Maybe they're
more disabled than I am. Maybe they weren't taught. Maybe they have
kids and don't want to turn their kids' lives upside down. Some of
those reasons are fixable, others aren't. But if I'm not willing to
help with the fixable ones and be kind about the permanent ones, I'm a
pretty poor excuse for a human being.

Treadle-convertible Singer

It would need to have a groove machined in the hand wheel. You'd do
this by taking the top section off, before disconnecting and pulling
the motor.

Note the transverse fin across the top of the machine. This is to
create turbulence, so that when you're stitching at great speed,
nothing catches fire.

Oops, it's straight stitch only. Still a better deal for a treadle
conversion than trying to refurbish one of the "granny style" spindly
black ones of days of yore.

All the parts for this one are still available, and not expensive.

No, I have no connection with the seller.

Carol Kimball @ 155... The old Singers have built-in guides

"And over here, on the right, is Mark Singer, start of Beastmaster..."

#156, Emily -

Truthfully, it probably is perfectly possible to ride on the road that
frightens me. I see cyclists doing it all the time. But they're sport
cyclists, not commuters, so they do it early on Sunday morning most of
the time, in a pack. Occasionally there'll be someone alone on a
weekday afternoon. Even so, I wouldn't walk that street.

I'll have to see if there are any LAB classes in my area. A class
might help, because if I went the other way (the long way around,
really), I could be on the frightening road for the last, straight
stretch instead. The difficulty with that route is that it is a much,
much larger and more heavily trafficked road that I'd be turning on to.
That does scare me, but not as much, and a class might be enough to
make a difference there.

The activists...I'm probably exaggerating the situation. My most
recent spotting of the problem was on a Treehugger.com comment thread
where someone pointed out that

(Sharing bike lanes with traffic depends on...)1. The ability of the bike rider to understand how to ride in traffic, and that means to not be afraid of these metal monsters.

2. The understanding by the drivers of these cars that bikes belong on the road too.

The problem is that 2 can only happen when there are enough 1s, but most 1s want to wait until there are enough 2s. Catch-22.

My fear and guilt makes that read as an accusation that it probably isn't.

Things I love, which persist in usefulness.

Cast iron (hard to kill, easy to clean; purported to add iron to the diet).

Manual utenstils (mortar and pestle, madeline, pasta machine, planes, chisels).

Old machinery (the south bend lathe, drill press, etc. In a pinch we
could convert them to lots of batteries fed from the solar panels).
It's fixable. With the lathes, we can make every other tool we need.
The shaper makes it easier (because that will make gears a lot more
easily than hand filing them from turned wheels)

Heck, with some work, we could use the horses to drive things. Not the best, but a generator isn't that hard to build.

re helmets: I grew up without them. I can't really concieve of not
wearing them now. I feel naked without one (be it horse, bike, or
motorcycle; though those have always been a helmet item). Sort of like
seat belt. I am not comfortable in a car without one.

Then again, I've probably spent more time in a helmet than most people.

re pizza (having worked in a pizzeria). Reheat them with a hot oven.
(450-475). Arrange for some airspace below the crust (crumpling tinfoil
will do it), this keeps the crust from getting soggy. That's also a
good trick for baking them at home (though somethig like my baking
stone will also work). Places like Domino's have a woven screen they
use; even in the industrial ovens (small airspace, high head) they use.

re watches: I dislike things around my wrist (this may be a result
of my having small wrists, tight enough to stay on = binding). So I use
a pocket watch, except that my windup ones are all in need of new
mainsprings (and the one I like best needs to have a competent
watchsmith to repair the catch; the previous owner had the habit of
pressing it shut). The electric one I bought when I shipped to Iraq
works fine, but I forget to go and replace the battery.

So right now it's sitting on my dresser, useless.

Carrie s. I recall taking a class on the history of England. We got
to changes in spinning, and I took a drop spindle and some wool with
me. I think I'd spun about ten feet before the instructor noticed and
then made me do a demo.

John Hawkes-Reed: I recall, when I was riding everywhere, the number
of drivers who enjoyed being rude to cyclists (the honking, the
swerving, the yelling out the window). Then the people who don't look
when the open doors, or make turns without noticing, etc.

That I did this all without a helmet is why I ended up with a couple
of concussions (the kid who shot out of the alley at 25 miles an
hour... I am so glad I looked to my right, because I was started
hauling as much ass as I could crank. Had I been a trifle slower it
wouldn't have been my rear wheel he hit, it would have been my leg).

Then there was the time the guy just swung into the parking lot in
front of me. Couldn't turn tight enough; wasn't able to lay it down
before I hit the door. Trashed my front wheel, and left rubber marks on
the rear window.

Then again, bicycles (here in Calif.) can second class pedestrians;
they are allowed to use the sidewalks, so long as they yeild to foot
traffic and dismount at intersections.

This was done so that children didn't have to ride in lanes.

Regarding bicycling -

I normally cycle if: it's under 5-6 miles and I'm not
carrying/expecting to carry anything very heavy (I carry 10 kg in my
backpack on a too-regular basis) or too large.

We still have a car; it doesn't get used very often (less than once
a week on average) but it's the convenience when it is needed, whether
to get two people, two cats and assorted luggage from London to
Manchester via the workplace, or to take a neighbour to Accident &
Emergency.

As a cyclist, I consider it important to be aware (including being
aware that bus and lorry drivers can't see you while you're alongside
them) and to obey the Highway Code (UK) - for example stopping at
traffic lights, including pedestrian lights. I just wish powered
vehicle drivers would be aware of that their airstream can make
cyclists wobble, cyclists want to go around, not through, that
pothole/large puddle ahead, and (for drivers of long vehicles in
particular), cyclists are not stationary, so cutting back in when the
back of your vehicle passes where the cyclist was when you started overtaking is a bad idea...

The canvas bags we've been using for shopping are still fine after
about five years, and we very rarely forget them. We're finally running
out of plastic supermarket bags to use as trash bags in the kitchen bin.

Emily: The San Fernando Valley (which is in Los Angeles, for those
as don't know) is where I learned to use a bike for primary transport.

I think, actually, it made me a better driver. Looking out for
traffic patterns (lest I be smeared by a truck) made me aggressively
defensive.

I have what I will dub the "battleship" theory of mechanical
appliances and devices. This theory holds that all such tools pass
through a stage where they are built like a tank. For woodworking
tools, this is epitomized by the Stanley 9 1/2 block plane
(they don't make this particular model anymore, but the current model
12-920 is close). For sewing machines, it's the Singer 401.

I think there's some misunderstanding about Moore's Law. Moore's Law
doesn't force any electronics company to do anything at all. Moore's
Law is like a natural law, like.. the law of gravity. And there are
plenty of ways to move around with gravity as a constraining factor.
But if you happen to be a rocket ship that's about 2000 feet above a
launch pad, you pretty much have to accelerate your ass off until you
hit orbital velocity, or you're dead meat.

What Moore's Law ends up doing is this: Any chip I build today will
have maybe four times the features as a chip I built maybe two years
ago, and today's chip with more features will cost less than the chip
from a couple years ago. That's because I can fit that many more
transistors in a fixed space, and can do it for less money.

The other thing is that the chip I build today will have a fabrication NRE that's way
more expensive than it was a couple years ago. This means I have to
design a chip to be much more generic, much more able to be used in
different systems. More flexible. And more generic at the same time.

Now, combine that with the most fickle human beings on the planet:
i.e. customers, and what you'll find is customers have this really,
seriously, annoying habit of choosing more features for less money when
comparing that against less features for more money, or even compared
to same features for less money.

We've lost big chunks of revenue because a competitor had a chip
that reduced the board to two layers. Our chip took four layers. The
savings per unit was a couple of dollars. The OEM decided to go with
the competitor. You can't stand still in this business.

If anyone is interested in game theory concepts, this is an "arms race" scenario.

Now, if Moore's Law ever hits its limit, some very interesting
things will happen. The biggest thing will be that those rocket ships
will hit a ceiling and have to park in orbit.

This same outcome has been produced by other means. When CD Burners
hit 52x, speeds, there really wasn't any more improvements you could do
to the design, as far as features go. Spin a Disc any faster, and it is
likely to go all 'splodey inside your drive. The only way to
distinguish yourself from the competitor was to have the same features
as everyone else, but at a lower price. When that happened, we got out
of the business of selling CD Burner chips.

Thing is, have you ever open a CD Burner drive? Not a lot of user servicable parts in there.

Which brings us to the third law of nature that affects electronics
economics: component failures. Think vacuum tube TV's. Not a lot of
"gates" on those designs. We had one when I was a kid. Thing had a
whole bunch of individual tubes. Each one had a mean time between
failure. Add those together, and you tube TV could easily crap out
quite soon after you bought it. A whole new TV was a lot of money. So,
it was cheaper to replace the tube that didn't work.

Nowadays, you've got most of all your logic on a single chip. Rather
than having high voltage circuits operating in a vacuum contained in a
rather fragile physical medium (glass), you've got relatively more
sturdy components made out of various metals and plastics. solid state
electronics is inherently more sturdy than vacuum state electronics.
Your transistor based television didn't have sockets for the
transistors because the mean time between failure for transistors was a
hella lot better than for tubes, which means your transistor TV is
likely to last a lot longer than your Vacuum TV before it fails. Which
means putting everything in sockets just adds more to the cost of the
TV without any benefit to most customers.

Nowadays, the overall mean time between failures for most
electronics is approximately equal to the mean time before obsolences
and voluntary user upgrade. At which point, if you make it easier to
repair by adding things that will raise the cost of the device, it is
wasting most consumer's money. And the time between upgrades is
partially an outcome of that harsh mistress called Moore's Law.

I bought one of the first 5MP digital cameras when digital cameras
were really catching on and 2MP was standard. I still have it. It still
works. But the wife hates it because it's the size of a box of frozen
peas, and has an LCD that's like only an inch diagonal. When it dies,
or when a thin, 5MP, digital camera is available with a 4 inch screen,
for cheap money, I'll be upgrading.

assuming they don't have 5MP cameras integrated into cell phones by
then. Everything is getting integrated into your cell phone, if
anyone's noticed. The cost of cell phone hardware can be subsidized by
a two-year contract of monthly fees, which means cell phone economics
are controlled by Moore's Law on steroids.

Computers are generally converting over to either fully integrated
laptops and/or component systems connected by USB and/or ethernet. No
one crack's open their PC case anymore. That last bit of "repair"
capability has been replaced with plug 'n play interoperability. If a
box dies, replace the box and just plug it into where the old one way.
USB will find it. and you're up and runnign again.

But when you combine the economic laws of Moore's Law, fickle
customers who will always choose more features for less money, and mean
time between failure versus mean time before upgrade, you get the
current state of consumer electronics that you see now.

Is it "good"? Is it "deep value"? I dunno. But I've been working in
consumer electronics, specifically in asic design, for the last decade
or so. And it's just the way the current market operates.

Can it be changed? I don't know that either. I've been a big fan of
Open Source for a few years now. I'm currently helping a group come up
with an Open Source license that would actually provide hardware design
with some Copyleft protection. (GNU-GPL, due to some quirks, provides
no copyleft protection to hardware.) And as big of a fan as I am of
open source and hardware design, I can't figure out a way to get out of
the gravity well that is moore's law. The big hit right now is that the
fabrication NRE for a chip can cost you a million dollars. Not
something some hackers and a few PC's can pull together. FPGA's will
allow some folks to play, but they will always be outpriced by someone
who can afford to pony up the money to convert it into an ASIC.

ah well.

Re digital cameras --

I think that digital cameras, especially dslrs, are run a lot harder
than the snapshot cameras that they replaced due to the whole 'each
click is free' thing.

I'd be stunned if your entry level slr from 20 years ago would have
it's shutter die. It just didn't happen, even though the shutters were
only good for ~ 10k clicks.

I know someone who's worn out a Nikon D70. Killed the shutter from
over use. I've run my Original Digital Rebel to about 40k images, and
it's rated at 50k. That would be something like $15k worth of film, and
would just never happen.

And now, If I need to replace the body, I have three choices:
replacement in kind, original dollar value, or what I really want. Used
300Ds are ~$225, a new/refurb 30d is about $650 (same price as I paid,
but one level up and 2 generations newer), or the 40d is more like
$1200 (what I want).

It's somewhat freeing to know that even through this was originally expensive, its replacement cost is not that bad.

As for durability, the camera that the dslr replaced, a digital
elph, also $600 new, is now my preschoolers camera. It just went
through the washing machine in his pocket, and after drying, it still
works.

Greg's summary is right on the dot. Kudos for putting it so clearly.

C@164: I have what I will dub the "battleship" theory of mechanical appliances and devices.

I have a vague (and totally would not bet so much as a dime that I'm
remembering any of this correctly) memory of reading about some general
during WW2 who was in charge of procurring a new artillery design. He
had some companies build prototypes, and then he had each prototype
thrown off a cliff. The one that fired the best after the cliff-drop
was the design he approved and ordered manufactured in quantity.

Now that is what I call deep value.

;)

Greg @168: That reminds me of a friend of mine who used to work in
the hard-drive industry, telling about a set of special
extra-shock-resistant drives they made for some particular application
that was willing to pay quite a lot for custom drives.

As he told the story, after the fellow running the tests on the
prototype finished with the basic "not a brick" tests, he hooked up
some long cables to it, set it on the edge of the lab bench, started up
a read/write test, and swatted it off onto the floor.

It may have missed a beat or two, but it corrected for that and kept going.

Matt @ 142: "electricity use in and of itself is not unsustainable".

Absolutely: muscle power's still energy which as to come from
somewhere, and in terms of minimising our use of resources I'd have
thought that generate electricity -> transmit electricity -> use
electricity was a more efficient cycle than grow food -> harvest and
transport -> cook -> eat & convert to muscle power.

Providing, of course, that the generate electricity bit doesn't
involve growing trees, compressing them for a few million years, and
burning the resulting goo.

Distraxi at 170 wrote: [I]n terms of minimising our use of
resources I'd have thought that generate electricity -> transmit
electricity -> use electricity was a more efficient cycle than grow
food -> harvest and transport -> cook -> eat & convert to
muscle power.

It is more efficient if you a) have an application that absolutely
needs electricity to work (eg. computers), b) can only get your power
from something that won't cook your food or heat your house on its own
(eg. hydro), and c) don't have to transmit it over long distances. The
loss to the grid is something fierce.

The ground rule is not to change the form of any energy (chemical,
kinetic, electrical, heat) unless you absolutely have to, because
you'll always lose some down the thermodynamic cracks.

The second cycle you quote can be multipurpose too - growing food
helps condition your land for more food, and preserves a friendly local
ecosystem, while cooking also helps keep you warm. It's also far less
vulnerable to problems outside your control than the electricity one is.

My Deep Value status:

Bicycling: Back when I lived in Cambridge (MA) and before that, I
was an avid cyclist. When I moved down to NYC, I found the roads simply
too threatening, and gave up on trying to bike them. Now that I've
moved down to Charlottesville, I got a new bike, but discovered a
couple or three problems:

(1) After 10 years in NYC, half of them sunk in depression, my leg
strength is shot. That's gonna take a while to recover, especially as
I'm 10 years older!

(2) There are quite a lot of bike-friendly roads around, but they don't include the roads I actually live
near! (Despite being a non-driver, I seem to have a karmic attraction
to big, dangerous, highways.) This leaves me in the peculiar position
of having to take my bike on the bus to get someplace where I can ride
it....

(3) This place is a heckuvalot hillier than Cambridge ever was, and more spread out too.

On the other hand, there are some advantages:

(1) I actually can take my bike on the bus -- they all have racks on the front. There's a lot of public support for biking too.

(2) The weather is much more clement than either Cambridge or NYC.
In retrospect, I could have gotten a fair bit of riding in during the
winter, but I was still adjusting to everything.

(3) My new bike is much more flexible, and lighter, than the
Frankenstein Special (built from parts, thank you Broadway Bikes) I was
riding up in Cambridge.

Other stuff:

I'm still using the canvas bags I accumulated back in Cambridge;
they stuff nicely into my backpack, and one has handles long enough to
sling it over my shoulder. I also get some plastic grocery bags, but
those are good for litter-box maintenance.

I'm using a bunch of old cast-off computers, PCs ranging from 400 to
1200 MHz, running Linux and BSD. (The 400s are almost useless these
days, but I am using one for a BSD firewall). I've been maxing out the
memory on the faster machines, and generally upgrading peripherals and
components. (Already my systems are doing a lot better than they were a
year ago.) At this point I won't bother salvaging boxes under a
gigahertz or so (except to strip them.

My digital camera (An Olympus FE-170) takes AA batteries. It drains
them pretty quickly (2 at a time), but I got rechargeables first thing,
and keep a spare set handy. I also have a flashlight that charges with
a squeeze "trigger", but for some reason K-mart stopped stocking them
since I bought mine.

Most of my furniture is gifts or salvage, some of it quite old. My
bookshelves are steel-frame, I bought those back when a rabbit was
vandalizing all my stuff, and undermined my prior set to the point of
collapse. My book collection adds up as the most massive of all my
possessions, and a goodly amount of it comes from used-book stores or
sales. (The local library is doing their booksales this month, the SF
part starts next week. I need another bookshelf.... ;-) )

R. Emrys @ 146 - I found my shoemaker by asking at upmarket shoe
stores. The recommendations all agreed, so I went to visit Gaudio who
turned out to be an elderly Italian man who has been operating in the
same location for over 40 years. Nowadays he does more repair than
fabrication, but he loves the new work when he can get it. His
collection of lasts is astounding.

Yes, I've made my share of medieval leather shoes. Modern shoes
don't look too much more difficult, but there are more fit and finish
issues to deal with if you want to wear the shoes to anything nearing
formal.

Sam@171: The loss to the grid is something fierce

I'm a digital guy, and I only took one power distribution course in
college, most of which I can't remember other than vague-ities like
"current, bad. voltage, pretty." But according to wikipedia, the loss
on the grid for the US for 1995 was only about 7 percent.

The grid has a bunch of problems, mainly relating to the fact that
anyone with a pessimistic streak, or with some experience in fail-safe
design, would look at the grid and whimper uncontrollably.

But as far as efficiency goes, I think it's relatively decent.

Lee @ 104

You asked about energy usage of tankless water heaters.

From what I've read:

"For homes that use 41 gallons or less of hot water daily, demand water
heaters can be 24%–34% more energy efficient than conventional storage
tank water heaters. They can be 8%–14% more energy efficient for homes
that use a lot of hot water—around 86 gallons per day. You can achieve
even greater energy savings of 27%–50% if you install a demand water
heater at each hot water outlet."

Via: http://www.eere.energy.gov/consumer/your_home/water_heating/index.cfm/mytopic=12820

I think they're popular here in Hong Kong because of the energy
savings and because most flats are very small and there's no room for a
"conventional" water tank hot water heater.

The electric ones are nice, because you don't have to worry about
ventilation issues. The problem is that you have to have robust wiring
in your house. So the gas ones (that run off of the big LPG cylinders)
are better for places that have weaker or intermittent electricity or
no electricity at all.

The retail prices for one of the big companies in HK is between
US$150 (for a single point, small heater) to ~ US$ 650 for a large
multi-point heater.

In our flat we have one water heater for each bathroom (2) and one
for the kitchen. That way if someone wants to take a shower while
another person is washing dishes, it's not a problem.

abi @ 107

Not only did that sentiment make me huzzah in agreement, I also laugh really hard every time I get to the last sentence. :)

I've been unemployed since mid-Decmeber, when my non-profit job was
no longer able to fund my position. It was a bit of an extra sadness
when on Christmas Day one of my tires decided to die. I'd known I
needed new tires, but had been waiting till financial stability to get
new ones. Now I had no choice, but I am trying to avoid digging myself
into debt while looking for a job. So I've been going carless since
then.

As I am yet another Madisonian (rather a lot of us on this thread,
aren't there) this has been both easy and difficult. I have asthma and
a hard time dealing with cold and won't bike if there is ice, so it
meant a lot a lot of long, slow trudges to the store or the bus stop
(often in snow). It was especially inconvenient that the buses only run
till around midnight (and sooner on weekends) and most of my friends
live across town from me.

Yet I realize that not having a car has really saved me money these
past few months. No money going into the gas tank and fewer impulse
buys. I need to plan what I am going to buy, when I am going to buy it,
and how I am going to get it home. This has helped me to get by in my
unemployment insurance.

It has also prompted me to start considering going carless once I
have a job again. I'd love to get by on foot, bike, and public transit.
Maybe make occasional use of Community Car.
But so much of that depends on where I find work and what I do. It
might be that a car remains essential. Madison has some areas that are
very bike and ped friendly and others that are sprawling and impossible
without a car.

(Of course the housing costs in the bike/ped friendly areas are
shockingly high and the areas of town with my affordable rents are the
ones that require a car. Six of one, half dozen of the other, I guess.)

R. Emrys @ 146 There are also some folk on Etsy.com how custom make
shoes. I can't vouch for their work personally, since it is out of my
price range, but it all looks pretty good.

I don't know if this qualifies as "deep" value, but I just received
an 8 gig USB 2.0 drive dongle that I bought for $35. you can get one here.

I finally replaced the stereo in my car (last one was stolen a
couple years ago, had a big gaping hole there for a long time). It is a
nice unit that plays MP3 CD's, has a USB port connector, an aux input
connector, and bluetooth for my cell phone. It was a clearance item
that I got for $40. The wire harness was $7 from walmart. The mounting
bracket I had to get from the toyota dealer cost $50 (fricken dealer
anyway).

So, I got the USB drive today, and I'm dragging and dropping all my music so I can play it in my car, and damn but 8 gig is a lot of space.

What do you think is the cause of most electronic failure?

Due to EU and Calif regulations, lead in solder is being phased out.
Lead-free solders are far less reliable than 63-37 solders, and at a
first approximation, electronic reliability went backwards at least 2
decades (which means that it will take at least 2 more decades for
electronics to get to the reliability of those made in the early to mid
90s). As for fountain pens, I got a Namiki with a retractable tip for
writing Japanese (ok, so I fell for the advertising blurb at Levengers)
about 15 years ago and I'm still using it. It gets a lot of looks from
strangers, because it sits in my shirt pocket (gah! nerd alert!) and
people continually hold it wrong to play with it. I've noticed that a
lot of people try to hold a pen with attached pocket clip downwards
(opposite the gap between thumb and index finger), which for this pen
puts the writing nib upside down.

Cameras: I have different expectations of them. I know people who
wore out the shutters in Nikon FE2s (mostly because they didn't know
that the titanium shutters don't do well with motor drives.

I wore out the shutter on my entry level SLR (N2000). The shutter,
per se, didn't fail, but the stop on which it rested between uses
degraded and started to cause sticking. I'd put, oh, I don't know,
15,000 frames through it.

But I'm not the typical user. The shutter on the D2/3 cameras (and I
believe that's for the 200/300 as well) is the same as in F5/6, which
is, so far as one can tell, the best Nikon shutter since the F3 (for
which the record is, IIRC, something in in the insane 100s of
thousands, before it needed to be worked on).

My D2H has, though I am not more than approximate, I'll dig out the
actual numbers if anyone cares), about 100,000 frames in the past 2 1/2
years.

R.M. Koske, #160: Back in the late 60s and early 70s (for me, age
11-16), I rode all over my neighborhood -- including several busy main
arteries -- in the street. All the older kids did; it was sort of a
rite of passage to move from riding on the sidewalk to riding in the
street. And I didn't particularly worry about the cars, because I'd
seen how drivers responded to other bikes; there was a general
expectation that yes, there were going to be kids on bikes in the street, and you just dealt with it.

Where I live now, it's a very different story. Houston is overall a
fairly bike-friendly city, but there are a lot of streets that aren't
wide enough for a bike to share safely with traffic (the prevalence of
huge SUVs and monster pickups has a lot to do with this), and the
sidewalks (where there are sidewalks at all) tend to be... poorly
maintained, which makes them a challenge to ride. Even where the city
has added bike lanes to the streets, there often isn't room for a bike
if there's heavy traffic in both directions (see again, ultra-wide
vehicles) -- and frankly, I don't trust the drivers to give a shit.
This is doubtless unfair to a lot of them, but it doesn't take many bad
apples to spoil the whole barrel.

So yes, it's the catch-22 that you describe; however, I also feel
that there's been a general cultural shift in the attitudes of drivers
about bikes since I was a young teen. There was a high-profile case a
few years back where a popular "drive time" comedy team was making
JOKES about running down bike riders, and then some cretin actually did
hit a biker on purpose and said that the DJs had been his inspiration.
Of course there was a very large settlement, but IMO that doesn't make
up for the level of injuries suffered by the biker, and the DJs lost
their jobs at that station but probably just went to another city.
Let's face it, in an altercation between a car and a bike, the bike is
going to lose... badly. That's not a matter of opinion, and it's
definitely a factor to take into account.

Re shopping carts on wheels, I've just started using one that folds
up into a small "bag" when not in use, excellent for taking to work to
use for your shopping on the way home.

Emily, #125, in Virginia, you do have the right to block the
road. Bikes have the same right to use the road that a car does, and if
a car can't pass safely, they're supposed to stay behind the bike. Of
course, the instant a biker crosses on a red because nobody's coming,
I'm going to feel more comfortable passing in a tight area.

fidelio, #128, I have the Pelikano Junior,
but I have an older one. Mine has the yellow barrel (with the port) but
a purple cap and the part right above the nib is purple. It has a flat
side on the cap and around the port so it won't roll down your desk. I
have really lousy handwriting, so I only use it for really important
cards.

Madison Guy, #132, I have a Kensington trackball
with ten programmable buttons that isn't made anymore and it's
particularly valuable to me because my hands shake (it can take a
minute to manage to double-click on a link with a mouse). I bought a
backup from eBay so when this one dies, I'll have one for a while. I'm
wondering if I should buy another backup.

Diatryma, #152, I have a down duvet and duvet cover on my bed
because they're very light and I have gout. I made a plastic pipe thing
to hold them up when even that's too much.

Sam Kelly @ 171:

"It is more efficient if you a) have an application that absolutely needs electricity to work".

If you absolutely need electricity, what's it more efficient than?

"b) can only get your power from something that won't cook your food or heat your house on its own"

Sorry, I fail to follow the logic here

"c) don't have to transmit it over long distances"

What Greg London said. Grid transmission is pretty efficient - thats
why they use stupendous voltages. Transporting food in trucks, on the
other hand, is not. Particularly when as in the real world it goes from
farm to storage to processor to warehouse to supermarket to your home.

"The ground rule is not to change the form of any energy "

Which is precisely my point - there's more mode changes in the food
chain than the electrical one, and while I'm not a biochemist I'd
hazard a guess that some of them are pretty inefficient.

"growing food helps condition your land for more food, and preserves a friendly local ecosystem"

Dubiously true for the high-intensity farming practiced in most of the developed world.

"while cooking also helps keep you warm"

And doing so is an additional energy wastage. Most cooking processes
have lousy efficiency and heat you whether you need it or not. The
waste heat from your stove is using exactly the same amount of energy
as if you turned the stove off and turned your electric heater on.
Probably more because your heater's not wasting half of it up a
rangehood.

"It's also far less vulnerable to problems outside your control than the electricity one is"

Now that one I'll buy.

distraxi,

Probably more because your heater's not wasting half of it up a rangehood.

well, without a good rangehood, a hoodrange can't range good.

(sorry! it could not be resisted.)

miriam beetle,

How much good could a rangehood range if a rangehood could range good?

Re: bicycles:

I didn't want to post this on the First of April, to make sure it
retains at least a shred of credibility in the eyes of the poor USians
reading here:

Münster, "Bicycle Capital of the World", has about 270.000 inhabitants and about half a million bicycles.

Every street wide enough for a line down the middle also has at least one bicycle lane on the side.

Every traffic light at a street with bicycle lanes has separate bike traffic lights, often with separate green times.

There often are special bike lanes for turning left, where cars stop somewhat behind the bikes, so that the drivers have the bikes well in sight when the light turns green.

There are several hundred kilometers of bike lanes in the city, and
a total of eleven streets where cars are tolerated, but bikes have the
right of way -- kind of like pedestrian streets for bikes.

There are two big bicycle parking garages, one in the middle of the city (for shoppers, mostly), the other at the railroad station.
Commuters arrive by train, check out their bikes to ride to work, and
return in the afternoon to check in their bikes and take the train home.

Within the city, 35% to 40% of all trips are by bike.

In my eyes, there's a lot to be said for old cities with narrow,
crooked streets that never were adapted to the kind of traffic you get
in a modern US city.

Make that "how much hood could"

Bah, who needs to proofread properly anyway? Mutters off back into lurkspace....

Distraxi at 184:

Re getting your power from something that won't cook/heat on its own
- sorry, I skipped a few steps. My background for this is much more in
microgeneration, so I was implicitly thinking about different ways of
generating your own electricity. You want hot food and a warm house,
it's smart to burn something in a good stove rather than burn something
to generate electricity and then spend that on heating elements.

Good point about the high-intensity farming. I suppose I was trying to compare best practices there, rather than current ones.

Greg at 174: Looks like my informant was wrong. I don't know where
Wikipedia are getting their figures or how they calculate them, since
the link for the UK figures is suffering from VBScript rot, but this official National Grid plan
claims that the total losses are consistently between 2 and 3%. Note
that those are projected figures, but naturally they'll be projected
from the real ones.

So I'm delighted to be able to retract that claim!

Sam Kelly @189, et al.: I'm curious -- are there any figures for the
equivalent to "line loss" of natural gas pipelines? I can't find the
right bit of jargon to include in my Google search.

I'd always thought that using gas for cooking rather than
electricity made sense, exactly because the energy only changes form
once, right under your pan, but if the inefficiencies in transport or
in combustion are large enough, they might outweigh the benefits in
terms of energy-efficiency. (Cooking over gas is still nicer and more
controllable than cooking over an electric burner, IMHO.)

#170 electricity vs food

http://www.ebikes.ca/sustainability/Ebike_Energy.pdf (PDF) is a paper comparing the energy cost of electric and human powered bicycles.

Food production typically uses a lot of fossil fuels (in fertiliser,
in farm machinery, in transport). If you eat a typical diet and live
somewhere with significant renewable electricity (e.g. hydroelectric),
the electric bike can be "better"/more sustainable. This ignores the
fact that you are generally healthier with exercise, and if you use an
electric bike to go to the gym to burn off just as much food as cycling
would have, you would be better off just cycling.

(On the other hand, if you already have more exercise than you can
cope with, an electric bike might be better even if its recharged from
fossil fuel power stations while you only eat locally grown organic
food.)

The hand-cranked torch sounds a nice idea; on the other hand, the
hand-cranked torch I've actually used was really not much good for what
we were trying to do, namely finding small telescope parts dropped in
mud on a dark night.

It doesn't shine uniformly for very long, and the fading light is
very distracting; you can't hold it usably still while cranking, and
the wobbly light is unusably distracting.

Kevin Riggle at 190: [A]re there any figures for the equivalent to "line loss" of natural gas pipelines?

I've found a case study of Russian pipelines that quotes 0.6% as the "maximum allowable loss as

established by the Russian government (Federal Tariff Service, 2005)"
and then goes on to cite the "IEA average leakage figure" of 3.2%.

US figures are scarce, but this EPA estimate of methane emissions from the US natural gas industry shows that most studies assume leakage rates of 1-3%.

I suspect it varies a lot, because the loss is a function of actual
mechanical failure, and of different kinds of technology, rather than
electrical heating and yer basic entropy.

(For reference, I found those using google: "natural gas pipeline" "leakage rate".)

And let's not forget the crochet hook. I don't go anywhere without a
crochet hook, which means that I can whip up all sorts of necessities
and luxuries at a moment's notice, out of anything remotely threadlike.

#189, Sam Kelly -

It's a minor quibble, but "you want a warm house" isn't true all the
time, and some places it is not-true most of the time. I'm in Atlanta,
and I'm already struggling to keep the house cool without resorting to
air conditioning.

I have a top-floor apartment with all the windows on one side, so
there's no possibility of a crossbreeze. It is very easy for my
apartment to be warmer than the outside temp. In the winter that's
nice, but it isn't winter here very long. Last week it was warm enough
outside to make it uncomfortably hot in my apartment.

Methods of cooking that generate the least waste heat are of great interest to me.

R.M. Koske:
A Catch-22 doesn't imply blame on any of the parties involved (in my
world at least): the whole point is that all involved are acting
rationally given the current state of the system.

In this particular case, it might be perfectly rational for cyclists
to avoid the roads, since they fear being run over by drivers whilst in
the meantime drivers don't think about cyclists because they never see
them on the roads!

About mooncups... As a former user of the diaphragm for birth
control, I thought this was an excellent alternative to tampons. I
tried a US product "Instead" for one cycle, and had some "diffuculty"
in the removal - it looked rather like a murder scene in the bathroom,
and was a lot more difficult to use than a custom-fitted birth control
appliance. Other than that, it was very nice. These products are not
widely promoted in the US, and I am not even sure the local stores
carry such things anymore.

R.M. Koske #136: I understand your plight. Consider that of the
transit-dependent (i.e., poor) Atlantan who lives just outside the
range of bus service (MARTA or CCT or GCT or C-TRAN). I've known people
who've had to walk two miles to the nearest bus stop, with no sidewalk.
When I lived in Gwinnett Cou nty, I had a half-mile walk to the nearest
bus stop in DeKalb County.

I have a really old Singer (made of cast iron, with a crank
on one side), and while it would be nice to be able to serge, I'm
pretty happy with it (plus in the extremely unlikely event of my being
attacked while sewing, I could probably use it as a weapon). My concern
is needle replacement. Anyone know if interchangeability is an issue
with old/new sewing-machine needles?

Sarah: if you can get me your machine's model information, or a
picture of the machine if there isn't any, I can ask my Singer Guy.
He's quite amazing.

Wendy @ 197 -- Instead cups are a whole different animal from
Mooncups or Divacups. I've heard many people report that Instead cups
didn't work for them when a Mooncup-type cup did.

While the Divacup, Keeper, and Mooncup aren't promoted much in the
U.S., they can often be found at health-food stores (like Whole Foods
or Earth Fare) -- that's where I got mine.

Just to note, they can be had even in the U.S.!

EClaire @ #141: congrats on the gardening! Here
is the online text of a gardening-in-the-schools guide a friend and I
wrote for the Square Foot Gardening Foundation a long while back; might
include some info of use. Gardening also virtually guarantees that your
offspring will (a) know where food comes from and (b) not regard fresh
vegetables as the enemy.

Belated comment on treadle-powered sewing machines: I bet they cut
down on the incidence of DVTs (deep vein thromboses, or blood clots) in
the legs of those who use them.

In our definitions of Deep Value, we've included skills and things which can be repaired. So I've got a question -

Anyone know about repairing staplers? I've got a nice, heavy stapler
on my desk. Not especially old, but not a cheap plastic number, either.
It is showing it's age by not bending the prongs of the staples
reliably. One side gets mashed wrong and doesn't go through the pages
in at least one use out of three.

I can't fathom why it is doing that in the first place - it ought to
be simple leverage, how can it go wrong? - so I can't figure out if it
is fixable or how to start.

Greg London @ 165: "Can it be changed? I don't know that either.
I've been a big fan of Open Source for a few years now. I'm currently
helping a group come up with an Open Source license that would actually
provide hardware design with some Copyleft protection. (GNU-GPL, due to
some quirks, provides no copyleft protection to hardware.) And as big
of a fan as I am of open source and hardware design, I can't figure out
a way to get out of the gravity well that is moore's law. The big hit
right now is that the fabrication NRE for a chip can cost you a million
dollars. Not something some hackers and a few PC's can pull together.
FPGA's will allow some folks to play, but they will always be outpriced
by someone who can afford to pony up the money to convert it into an
ASIC."

FPGA's
sound fascinating, especially the ones that are basically an entire
computer on a single chip. I can imagine a point in the near future
where FPGA's are good enough, small enough, that they can be used for
almost any non-miniturized application: cars, TVs, household
appliances, etc. If a generic, Good Enough FPGA became standard in such
applications it would massively increase user- (or friendly local
technician-) servicability--just pop out the fried one, and pop in a
freshly-programmed generic. If the initial design costs to fabricate
custom chips are so high, and rising, this might become economically
feasible rather quickly. Then, if there was wide industry adoption of
FPGA's, that would drive the price per chip down. Does that sound at
all reasonable to someone who actually knows anything about the subject?

Ugh, Fragano, yes. The transit in Atlanta is possibly the best in the state, but that isn't saying much.

I once waited an hour and a half to catch a bus that runs every
forty-five minutes, and I used to pass on taking the bus to do errands
when I lived in the areas Marta serves because I just didn't have time
to make an hour-each-way trip. And that's speaking of Marta
specifically. Non-marta transit isn't as good, and as you say, living
outside the transit areas it is even harder.

Sidewalks are fast becoming a pet peeve of mine. They're apparently
only for the wealthy, who don't use them (or only use them to walk
their dogs). Buford Highway has a high immigrant/poor population and no
sidewalks. There are stretches of a mile between traffic lights (and
therefore, between safe street-crossings). People just cross when and
where they can, and I personally saw at least one pedestrian fatality
being loaded into the ambulance in the time I lived there. I don't
doubt there are far more there than there should be.

On the other hand, the really wealthy sections of Buckhead, where
the houses are stunning, have sidewalks. The only people I ever see on
them are (judging by appearances) household workers, waiting to catch
the bus. They are building new condos in a poor section of town I used
to pass through regularly, and the first thing they did, before the
started tearing down houses, was install sidewalks. Grrr.

One small thing that gives me a little hope is the situation in
Smyrna. They're adding wide bike/pedestrian sidewalks in a lot of the
area around Atlanta road, and near the Smyrna municipal complex I do
see a lot of local people (mostly middle and upper-middle class, but
not all) walking and biking apparently to the restaurants and
buisinesses in that area. There's also a lot of mixed-use construction
(businesses with condos above) going up. Mostly pricy stuff right now,
but eventually those buildings will age and hopefully become more
affordable.

I should have said for the non-Atlantans - Buford Highway is a
seven-lane road. It is not something I'd care to cross without a light.
But if you are on the wrong side of the road and need to catch the bus
going the other way, you cross without a light or walk a mile out of
your way. Most folks cross without a light.

Wendy @ 197:

The reusable cups are entirely different from the disposable
"Instead." The instead has that awful wide floppy bowl, which tends to
loose it's shape as your remove it, causing the bloodbath you mentioned.

The reusable cups are firmer. They will fold for insertion/removal,
but the bowl of the cup stays down in relation to the edge. Much, much
tidier. Plus, capacity is enough that I've found I can leave the cup
for up to 12 hours, allowing me to empty at home, where the sink is by
the toilet.

As far as shape goes, the Diva has a U shaped bowl, while the
Keeper, Keeper brand Moon Cup, and UK Mooncup have a more V shaped
bowl. I find the latter to be far more comfortable.

(There is a UK company that has been making the "Mooncup" for years.
Now the company that makes the Keeper makes a "Moon Cup" from silicone,
in the same style as the latex keeper.)

Best comparison I've seen of the different cups here:

http://afriska-engl.de.tl/Different-brands-and-sizes.htm

I've tried a Keeper, but it began to itch after a few years use
(developed a mild latex allergy?), so I got a Diva, which I returned
because I found the shape uncomfortable, and I've settled on a UK
Mooncup.

Oh all right, I can't resist posting my whine about local transit
after all.... Buses? Prescott AZ ain't got no stinking buses! (Or clean
ones either.) Our "Tri-City Area" has finally started *discussing*
plans for a transit system, but I won't be counting on any swift,
efficient results.

It's also hilly where I live, and I never learned to ride a bike
(poor vision and crummy balance, as a kid), so I'm just lucky they have
now built a shopping complex with a grocery store, bank, and mailing
center within walking distance -- about half a mile. My husband takes
me and my mother shopping once a week, but I rarely see the older, more
touristy section of our downtown. (Touristy, but there *are* a few neat
shops and restaurants there.) And at times I feel nostalgiac about the
good old days in both Berkeley and Emeryville, when I was in easy
walking distance from a movie theater.

Are the current rising gas prices likely to turn more attention
toward public transit or to cripple it? Depends on where you live, I
guess.

(end of whine)

Musing on the idea of sustainability and gasoline use from driving, I came up with a rather evil plan.

Standardize all automobile gas tanks to the same size. Say, ten gallons (the size of the tank on my Echo.)

As it is, right now, if a vehicle is less efficient, car makers put
in a larger gas tank. You pay more for gas, but otherwise, you suffer
no inconvenience.

But, if every car has the same size gas tank, from the most
efficient subcompact to the most gas-guzzling SUV, the SUV drivers
would have to stop and fill gas far more often.

This would provide, I suspect, a much stronger incentive to buy a more efficient car.

Plus, it would address the problem that financial incentives for
fuel efficiency are less pressing for the more wealthy, which means
that auto makers have less pressure to make higher end cars efficient.
If you can afford the luxury car, you can afford the gas. So there is
little incentive to develop improvements that will be brought in with
the high end cars, as improvements often are. The improvement of having
to be less frequently inconvenienced by filling the tank is something
people might pay for.

FPGAs are very nifty, but I don't think there are very many problems to which they're the right answer.

They gain their flexibility by using something like twenty times as
many transistors as a custom solution which can simply lay down wires
does, so they're unavoidably expensive: fifty dollars for a chip that
does what a custom chip you could get ten million of from TSMC for five
million dollars would do.

You've still got all the soldering problems that are unavoidable
from putting eight hundred connectors on the bottom of something the
size of a quarter - it's a black art to get the chip onto a board
without destroying chip and board alike, a blacker art still to remove
it - so you'll be in big trouble replacing the FPGA in your
sewing-machine whose FPGA broke with the one from your TV whose screen
broke.

(Though there is a little hope. I have been to malls in Thailand
filled with little booths containing quite elaborate surface-mount
rework kit, where you can bring in your broken mobile phone and have it
repaired. It's a couple of thousands of dollars of equipment and quite
a lot of training, and I think probably a bad sign for Thailand that
they don't have higher-margin work for electronics assemblers - I
assume that the people in the booths worked on electronics assembly
lines and then left to work more for themselves)

You can't stick everything on the FPGA - you still often need
external memory, you still usually need external analogue devices to
for-example turn the digital signals from your MP3 decoder into
something that can drive headphones.

FPGAs have cropped up in some kinds of consumer goods - the earlier
LCD TVs used them, because it meant that they could use any kind of LCD
panel available on the surplus market and program the video controller
to drive it. They're ubiquitous in prototypes, they're ubiquitous in
Weird Custom Military Things of which only a thousand will ever be made.

But that fifty-dollar versus fifty-cent thing means they're almost by definition used in niche applications.

@136:R. M. Koske - I hear you. I live in Atlanta, too. I'd love to
bike to work, but my route takes me down a very narrow, very busy two
lane road without sidewalks where people drive 50mph, and onto a
limited access road that says "No bikes." I also live in the MARTAless
'burbs.

Oh, and I forgot to mention (@anyone in general)--linux is also very
forgiving of old hardware, if you use the right distribution.

Marilee: In Calif. bicycles (which are in lanes) are vehicles, just
as cars are. Then again, as a pedestrian I have an absolute right of
way (even when I am not legally allowed to be in the street).

But, on a bicycle, I am really vulnerable if the drivers of
automobiles don't want to yield to me the right of way to which I am
entitled. Worse, I am not seen by them (in the main) as equal, or even
notable; except as a nuisance.

I've been hit by two cars, and cut off so badly I've hit two cars.
I've been pushed off the road (occaisionally to places where I was
toppled) more than that.

That was in a five year period.

In the 21 years I've been driving, I've been in zero automobile accidents.

re gardening: I have grapes in half barrels. In those same pots I
also have rue (to keep the damned cat from digging) some poppies (I'm a
sucker for pretty flowers), onions (attracts bees), dill, carrots (also
attracts bees), shallots and garlic.

I let the vetch grow, because it's a legume.

This year, I'm going to have to thin "The Cutting Grape" (they all
have names) because it's got not less than 40, large, bunches of
florets.

Jen B at #120

Pelikan makes some very good entry-level pens. Most of them are
piston-fills, so they hold a lot of ink. And all of the M-series pens
have interchangeable nibs. The M200 is the most reasonably priced of
the M-series pens, I believe. If you have big hands or like heavy pens,
it probably won't be suitable for you. Personally, I love the M200.
It's the perfect size for me, and is light enough that it doesn't cause
fatigue or pain. The M400 is the same size, but has a gold nib, and
possibly better plastics. Generally, for the M-series pens, the higher
the number, the bigger/heavier/more expensive the pen. The largest is
the M1000.

Oscar Braun pens usually has a nice selection and really excellent
prices. Pam also does special orders. http://onebeagle.net/oscarbraun/

If you want to get more advice about fountain pens, you could also
check out The Fountain Pen Network. They're always happy to find more
people to lure over to the dark side. http://www.fountainpennetwork.com

If anyone wants to try the Instead thingy, please contact me (email
my livejournal name (visible in the link) at juno.com) and I will ship
the ones I have and didn't use off to you.

Jen B. at 150,

I would suggest a Parker Vector - the nib is steel, and very hard to
bend. You'll give you the springyness of a fountain pen, but won't have
to worry about the nib. They're inexpensive, and make a nice, light
starter fountain pen.

I finally bought one to replace the one from my childhood I lost.

I'm very leery of Linux for two reasons.

1. My husband is an IT professional who prefers Windows. He hates
Linux, so my in-house tech support would evaporate if I switched.

2. My experiences with Linux have been pretty poor. I spent a long
time once (forty five minutes?) trying to get an existing Linux setup
to tell me what kind of Linux it was so I could see if a program I
wanted to install would be compatible. I never succeeded. I had to get
my husband to tell me (he'd built the box, so he knew.) Even armed with
this information, I couldn't figure out what programs would be
compatible because I had something like Red Hat 3*, but all the
information I had gave compatibility answers in terms of "Fedora Core."
I can tell that it is related, but I couldn't make the conversion to
figure out if it was actually compatible.

I got hubby on the job, and he determined that it was compatible
once we updated some files...which then persistently refused to update
properly. He spent an hour telling it to update, waiting for it to do
so, and then being told the update failed, without getting a helpful
reason why. He gave up in disgust.

My impression of the Linux-education sites is that there are two
types - the ones that want to teach you how to install and use a
particular flavor, at which point they tell you that it is "just like
Windows" and effectively teach you how to use Windows, or the type that
thing that you're extremely familiar with *nix in general and only need
to know the differences.

I like the idea of future-proofing my hardware by my choice of OS,
but Linux is in a box in my mind labeled "hard." My impression is you
learn it by apprenticeship, not by independant study. Can anyone
recommend a site to begin learning about it? Is it actually helpful to
pretend it is Windows for a while? Or should I put this off until I
know a guru?

*I made these "version names" up. I don't recall what I had.

RMK, your stapler problem might be a simple misalignment.

You have a plunger which should press evenly across the top of each
staple, shearing it off the strip, and forcing it donw through the
paper against the anvil which bends the ends over.

The feed-spring should be pushing the strip of staples against a
nice flat surface. But that's often the sides of the carrier assembly
bent over to close the end.

If the bends don't quite match, you have feeding problems.

The detailed construction varies quite a bit, but this sort of misalignment can cause the fault yoiu describe.

Thinking something else with deep value: Cloth diapers. When the kid outgrows them, they are wonderful rags, quilting, etc.

Terry @217 -- re cloth diapers. I used them for my two children. I'd
agree that overall they're less wasteful, and probably less
energy-intensive in their production. I did wash them with much hotter
water than the rest of the laundry, but I'm very proud of how little
garbage we produced. We never filled our bin, while our neighbors' were
overflowing.

On the versatility of toaster ovens (re #88, #104):

The frozen-food-in-a-paper-dish that says "Conventional Oven
Directions" / "Microwave Oven Directions" / "Do not use a toaster
oven"? Don't believe it.

Put it inside a baking pan that fits in your toaster oven and is
taller than the frozen dish; place another (shallow) pan on top as a
lid. Ideally both pans should be dark rather than shiny, to absorb the
radiant heat from the oven efficiently. This way, you make a metal box
which acts more like a regular oven with respect to the food inside.

We use this technique all the time and the worst trouble we've had
is things coming out a bit undercooked, which can be adjusted for.
Doing this also saves the preheating time and energy of a full-sized
oven.

linux is also very forgiving of old hardware, if you use the right distribution.

I generally agree, but if you want to run X, watch movies, and
browse with multiple tabs, you still need certain resources and
hardware capabilities. Of course, with Linux, you can (and I do) get by
with a lot less, than with Micro$oft bloatware!

R.M. Koske #205: Buford Highway contains stretches that are just
plain insanely planned -- high density, no sidewalks, inadequate
transit -- though both MARTA and GCT now provide some service at least.
Jimmy Carter Boulevard is even worse. I get the feeling that nothing is
going to be done since the population in both areas is largely Hispanic
and has therefore been defined by the powers that be as 'alien'. I have
a feeling that somewhere down the road, no pun intended, someone is in
for a big surprise.

In Buckhead, on the other hand, they do want to make it easy for the
servants to get from the bus to the houses that they clean. And they do
want to make it easy to walk from the condo to the supermarket (which
is what the new urbanism seems to be about).

There are a lot of condos springing up in the area where I work,
which is one of the poorer sections of town -- or used to be (the
public housing has now been totally emptied and fenced off, and there's
a lot less derelict private housing left east of Joseph Lowery now than
there was nine years ago). Of course, the current economic crunch has
slowed gentrification down. But we do have sidewalks, and I'm
increasing likely to have to dodge idiots driving Jags, Bentleys and
Rollers.

R. M. Koske @#215:

I've generally been frustrated (and sometimes infuriated) by Red Hat's products, and by their successor Fedora as well.

The Debian-based distributions are generally much better, and the
Ubuntu varieties are currently the best by far. (Knoppix is pretty good
too.) Ubuntu now has a "try me" Live-CD mode, and Knoppix is primarily
a Live-CD distribution.

Also, the distributions have gotten much better over the past few
years, so these days you rarely need to go "under the hood", much less
reboot the system.

And the "dmesg" output (repeats what zipped by at system startup)
starts right off with both the linux and distribution names and version
numbers.

About biking and disabilities - not everyone can ride a bike.
However, you don't have to be in tip-top shape to ride, either. I have
a bursitic hip, wonky lower back, bad knees, and I ride my bike to work
in summer dressed like a girl - skirt, flats, little purse, the whole
deal.



It took a few different bikes and a lot of bad attitude from bike shop
workers (No, I will not use clipless pedals. Yes, I want a
step-through. I understand that the other frame would be faster, but it
would cripple me.) But standing up for myself and getting over being
embarrassed (it's not uncommon for me to get off the bike and walk up
hills) made it possible for me to be a regular biker, which has saved
me a ton of money and given me the exercise I need to maintain the
abilities I do have.

R. M. Koske @ 215: Well, it's usually easier to learn by
apprenticeship than by self study, regardless of the topic, but giving
up local technical support is a big inconvenience.

Have you played with the vmware images at all? They let you run
linux in a virtual box inside your normal environment. That can be a
good way to learn, and you can reverse the roles later if you decide
you like Linux but don't want to give up your old system entirely.
There are some instructions here and more images here,
which are also not german by default. Of course, running two operating
systems at once does use more memory and storage, so it will be slower.
Running linux inside windows is free with the vmware player, but doing
the reverse costs money.

As to whether Linux is "hard", it's definitely been improving for
people with a GUI (Windows) instead a Unix background, and recent
vintages are completely usable without resort to the command line. Some
things are different, of course, just like with switching to MacOS, and
that can take some getting used to.

There is an argument that people who love words should prefer the
command line interface because it is so much more expressive. The
visual metaphors used in graphical user interfaces are great for some
things, but mostly they're about limiting what you can tell the
computer to do. That makes them easy to learn, but it's also like
filing out forms instead just saying what want to do.

Sarah @ 199 ...

I have a really old Singer (made of cast iron, with a crank on one
side), and while it would be nice to be able to serge, I'm pretty happy
with it (plus in the extremely unlikely event of my being attacked
while sewing, I could probably use it as a weapon). My concern is
needle replacement. Anyone know if interchangeability is an issue with
old/new sewing-machine needles?

I've had no major issues[0] using modern sewing machine (flat on one
side) needles with any of my singers -- the industrial singers take
needles that have a round shank, though, so that can be an issue.

This page
shows a number of handcrank machines -- I have a 27K Sphinx that's very
similar to the second one pictured... the serial number[1] dates it to
~1905.

[0] I have had to futz a bit with how deeply the needle is set, as
far as the length to be sure it picks up the bobbin thread correctly,
but only by tiny futzes.

[1] If you're curious, Singer finally posted their list of serial numbers to years/locations made.
They also have (only for the single-letter-prefix group, as far as I
can tell), a serial number-to-model set of PDFs for some of the serial
numbers.

I've never had a car! So I don't know what I am missing. I've been using the same bike that I bought in 1991.

Carolyn:)

heresiarch@204: FPGA's sound fascinating

The problem with FPGA's is they will always, by design, be more
expensive and fewer usable gates than an ASIC. The ability to reprogram
an FPGA adds a phenomenal amount of overhead, which leaves only
a fraction of the total chip to be used for the logic that the user
actually wants to implement. We recently purchased an FPGA to implement
a single core on one of our ASICs. The core was rather large and
required high frequencies, and the FPGA ended up costing $1,500. For
one FPGA. Our ASIC, when finally implemented, included this core and
probably two dozen other cores. Our chip, in quantity, sold for $15.
Two orders of magnatude difference in price. maybe one order of
magnatude difference in functionality.

If one were to continue the "gravity" analogy, with ASIC's being the
rockets capable of lifting heavy satelites to geosynchronous orbits,
then FPGA's are more like amateur rocket enthusiasts who can throw a
digital camera just above the atmosphere. Whatever an FPGA can do, an
ASIC can do better and cheaper, because of all that reprogrammability
overhead. And the only way to improve FPGAs is to improve ASICs, which
means ASICs will always be above an FPGA.

If there is going to be a shift anytime soon, it will probably be in
the realm of generic embedded processors getting fast enough and cheap
enough that you could buy a generic embedded processor chip with some
programable IO pins and some internal logic, and then implement all
your specific functionality in software.

This is how your remote controls pretty much all work now. Some
generic embedded processor that is just smart enough and just fast
enough to toggle your infrared LED to change channels or control the
volume. The problem then is getting generic hardware to do the
application specific stuff. Digital camera needs an image sensor. Not
going to find that on a generic processor chip. MP3 players are
probably at the point where you could implement one with a generic
processor chip.

The requirement for this is that whatever application you have in
mind, there needs to be a generic embedded processor that's fast enough
to do it. I think more and more applications are falling into this
category.

If you need to toggle a couple bits in a semi-smart fashion, you can
buy a little PIC. They're available in as small a package as 8 pins and
can cost less than a buck.

ANother alternative is Asic On Demand. This has been the holy grail
of professors getting research grants to look into what it would take
to make some sort of generic "box" that you could download a design
into, and the box would fabricate the asic one semiconductor layer at a
time. (ignoring the hazardous chemicals you'd be messing with for the
moment.) I've seen blurbs about these things for as long as I can
remember. So far, they're all turned out to be pipedreams. Building an
ASIC is hard. There are timing issues and placement issues and
RF issues and crosstalk issues and power issues that are complicated
enough that people can specilize their entire career into dealing with
one of these specific issues. The software tools that they use cost
millions of dollars, and for all that money, are extremely dumb. If you
can build a 3-d printer that can build an asic, you need something that
can lay down a beam of material that's only nanometers wide. ASIC
fabrication plants can churn out thousands of chips every day. A
fabricator would have to be able to maintain this level of
manufacturing, otherwise, ASIC's still win the gravity well race.

as a counter example, we've had automobiles for about a century.
They're complicated machines. They require a lot of design work.
Manufacturing is a massive undertaking. And yet most people don't
entertain the idea of poeple being able to have a "car manufacturing
plant in a box" thingy. The only way people can even entertain such an
idea is if you get into a Star Trek world and make it something like a
transporter, replicator, holodeck combination of handwavium.

I'm not sure why people are so much more predisposed to entertaining
the idea of asics that build other asics, or an asic-on-demand box. I
can only assume its because the sheer complexity of ASIC design and
fabrication is so concealed from the average user that folks can
imagine it being far, far easier than it really is.

#209, Ursula L -

I love it.

#216, Dave Bell -

Wow, thanks! My first look at the thing suggests that if that is the
problem, it is unfixable - the ends of the carriage assembly are bent
and then the whole thing was chromed*. I don't think I'll be able to
bend them any more. I don't think I see a misalignment, but I'll look
again when I have more time.

*Or made shiny, anyway.

#221, Fragano - Yes, exactly. To pretty much all of it.

#222, David Harmon -

That's very helpful, thanks. I've got a memory stick with a Live-CD
version of something-or-other. Ubuntu, if I had to guess. Maybe I'll
try that.

I don't really feel like I'm trying to go under the hood so much -
all I wanted to do was to be able to install programs and that was
where I got thwarted. I haven't given up. (dmesg at the command line, I
assume?)

#224 - Ralph Giles -

Vmware images? No. As I mentioned somewhere above, I've got a memory
stick that I can put into the computer and boot to Linux, but that and
the pre-existing box are all I've got.

Is running it inside Windows inherently better or worse than doing
the Live-CD thing? I think I'd just as soon dual-boot (that's the right
term, yes?) because I keep a ridiculous number of tabs open in Firefox.
That's both likely to impair the performance of the computer when it is
under a heavy computing load and to make a crash more costly than I
like.

The interface thing is interesting. I use a non-GUI interface for a
program at work, but I haven't ever used a command line for anything
else. Using the command line at work puts me in a weird mental place
with regard to my opinion of the supposed expressiveness of the command
line. I've learned a lot of the shortcuts in our program and use them
instead of working my way through menus (which is what most of my
co-workers do.) I'd much rather type

"avdm" than "F3, F3, 27 (enter) 11 (enter)", so I think I see the
distinction between "filling out forms" and just saying what you want.
Even so, I'm not sure that I can see myself choosing a command line
when there's a GUI available. Maybe partially because the actions I can
imagine myself doing most often would require me to know filenames and
type them in accurately. That's unlikely.

#204: Tom@210 and Greg@227 are on the mark about FPGAs. I think your scenario is only plausible if

1. we've run out of process improvements, but haven't replaced CMOS with some other technology. (i.e., Moore's Law breaks down)

2. we value reconfiguration, field upgrade, and repair over
continued miniaturization and integration. (i.e., exactly the opposite
of how consumers behave now)

FPGAs are like the POD (the printing technology, not the so-called
business model) of electronics. For some niche applications, they're
the perfect thing to use. So far, they don't lend themselves to high
volume general application. They have to get much cheaper, and the NRE
costs of a new ASIC have to get yet higher. I think it's plausible if
densities have gotten so high, that we don't have anything better to do
than to use extra transistors to allow for reconfiguration. Right now,
a decrease in feature size often means we fit more dies on a wafer. The
chip, ideally, becomes cheaper to produce. (So, your scenario has to be
one where making chips smaller does not make the chip noticeably
cheaper.)

The other thing that occurred to me that you're suggesting, in a nutshell:

Lots of interchangeable elements which you can reprogram and reconnect on demand to suit any application.

You've just described the technology in any SF story about The
Singularity. (Hey, maybe The Singularity happens when high volume FPGAs
are practical...)

GUIs are not inherently equivalent.

Linux, any unix, makes a whole bunch of different fundamental
assumptions than Windows does, and just because the GUIs can be similar
doesn't mean it actually works like Windows.

People get into serious trouble equating the GUIs, because what they
think what they are doing means and what it actually means tend to
differ.

Installing programs in any modern linux is a question of getting
them from a package repository; there is very likely a GUI app, but
without some idea which distribution you're using, guessing which GUI
app isn't going to be very effective.

Terry, way back up in 143 --

I can do a lot of stuff like that, too; have used 19th century farm
tools and tech for real, have lots of general woodworking skills, etc.

I don't think it actually matters, as a survival strategy; general
loss of the machine culture leaves effectively everybody dead, because
most regions with dense populations are two orders of magnitude over
their non-machine carrying capacity.

For coping with a stutter, yes; have water on hand, have water
filters, have kerosene lanterns, food, shovels, and so on. But a real
collapse? To a first approximation, there won't be anything like enough
food, and there aren't any social systems for selecting who goes off
and politely and quietly starves to death. There are also vicious nasty
questions of timing about things like putting in crops and getting in
fuel.

While I think being part of the machine culture is an excellent
thing, as well as a present necessity, I think not being part of the consumer
culture as a matter of default expectation is a very good thing, but
that's in many ways because the consumer culture is trying its dead
level best to make you really really insecure.

Being able to do real stuff, and making to a greater extent own
personal choices about wants and desires, I think that's an excellent
good thing as a way to stay out of the consumer culture; as a way to
replace the machine culture? I don't think it's in the running.

My favorite bit of underused old tech is a clothes line. A bit of
coated wire hanging between the garage and the house, and I can use
solar energy without a collector. It doesn't work in all weather, but
the benefit of the midcontinent's changing weather is that I usually
have one day a week warm and dry enough.

We got a couple of the crank-powered LED flashlights from LL Bean and they work great. They have two settings using one or three LEDs and have even light that lasts a fair while.

It turns out that my first lasting fountain pen was a Parker Vector.
I dropped it a lot, taped the cap back together a couple times and the
barrel once, and the nib was bent to be... idiosyncratic, let us say,
but boy did that pen do its job. I dropped it in the woods once, nearly
cried, and then my lab teacher chanced upon it a couple days later.
Loved that pen and felt guilty for switching to the more-right-feeling
Waterman.

There's been so much said about bicycle power here that I now find myself thinking of Edward G.Robinson in Soylent Green.

Graydon: Well, I happen to live close enough to wilderness that I
have, tolerable, expectations of being able to hie me to the hills
(with some extra people) and enough gear to get by for 1-3 years.

Pack animals are wonderful things, and we can be in the hills, absent riding them, in about four hours.

If we're ponying, it's an hour.

Tom Womack, #192. The wind-up flashlight I have has three
LEDs (and you can cycle through 1, 3, and off) and winding 30 seconds
gives you 15 minutes of light. Mine also has a radio. I think we may be
speaking of different types of wind-up flashlights.

Terry, #212, I haven't ridden a bike as an adult, so I don't
know about that, but my van has been hit three times -- twice by people
not paying attention who don't brake soon enough, and once by a woman
who was sure I was going to turn into the shopping center she
wanted to come out of, and I had planned to pass by the entrance. All
three times there wasn't any damage to the van. I haven't run into
anybody.

R.M. Koske, #228, I was going to suggest what Dave said about
the stapler, but there can also be something stuck in the stapler that
is bending the staple wrong. Is this a new batch of staples, by any
chance? Not all staples fit in all staplers, even when they say they do.

R. M. Koske @ 229: It's not better or worse, just different.
Running them in parallel lets you switch more quickly, without closing
your 11 browser tabs. It lets you cut and paste between the two, which
can be handy. That sort of thing. But dual booting (or separate
hardware) works too.

Re the command line, I guess I do keep more of the directory
structure in my head on machines where I use the terminal. One has to
understand the filing system, as it were. But auto-completion (try
hitting tab after the first few letters) means not having to
always type things correctly, or even having more than a vague idea
what they are, and it's not like you can't search for things.

But, I don't use a terminal-window for web browsing. There are definitely places where point-and-click is better.

There is a deeper sense in which the unix tradition is more amenable
to the current topic. Traditionally, configuration is stored in text
files, which can be directly edited by humans. The scriptability of
things is more obvious and accessible. The system contains its own
documentation, so it's easy to learn and explore, rather than being
dependent on experts whether you want to be or not. When combined with
complete source code like the Linux distributions provide, you really
have something that can be maintained by anyone with the proper skill,
and that makes acquiring that skill possible within itself.

Tom Womack @ 210: "But that fifty-dollar versus fifty-cent thing means they're almost by definition used in niche applications."

How big of a time gap does that money gap translate into? Like, how
many years back do you have to go before an ASIC chip with the same
capabilities as your modern $50 FPGA also cost fifty dollars? Are we
talking a year, or a decade?

Greg London @ 227: "If there is going to be a shift
anytime soon, it will probably be in the realm of generic embedded
processors getting fast enough and cheap enough that you could buy a
generic embedded processor chip with some programable IO pins and some
internal logic, and then implement all your specific functionality in
software."

Ah, that's much more like what I had in mind. I can imagine a
generic interface being built to connect and parallel process however
many of Cheap Enough Processor you need for application X, along with
connecting it to whatever specialized chips you need (camera sensor,
etc.)

How do processors compare with ASICs financially?

"If you can build a 3-d printer that can build an asic, you need
something that can lay down a beam of material that's only nanometers
wide. ASIC fabrication plants can churn out thousands of chips every
day. A fabricator would have to be able to maintain this level of
manufacturing, otherwise, ASIC's still win the gravity well race."

Yeah, as neat and exciting as the recent progress of fabrication
technology is, using it to make chips in your basement seems to involve
ridiculously high amounts of hand-wavium. It'll happen if/when nanotech
happens, I think.

#237 different types of wind-up torch: yes, ones with rechargeable
batteries will die as the batteries eventually die and fail to hold a
charge (and cheap ones won't let you easily change the batteries),
cheap ones without batteries and with a relatively small capacitor will
slowly fade immediately you stop winding them (or shaking them), ones
with clockwork-like mainsprings or with high quality supercapacitors
and current regulation circuits will give an even light for some time
after winding with indefinite shelf life, but will cost more to start
with.

Crossing LED technology with bicycles, modern dynamo[1] lights are a huge
improvement on old ones, and anyone with a utility city bike should
seriously consider a hub dynamo. Modern dynamo lights generally (at
least as an option) have standlight functionality that means they don't
just go out as soon as you stop moving.

[1] a word here meaning "permanent magnet alternator without field
coils", not "direct current generator" (though of course the LEDs need
DC, unlike the old bulbs, the rectifying is done outside).

#231, Graydon -

So that's a definite argument in favor of playing with a pre-set
version of Linux* to get accustomed to the GUI quirks. I sort of feel
I'm better prepared for those than I used to be - instead of being just
a Windows person, I now use OSX on the Mac regularly too, so I have a
vague idea of the kinds of differences you mean.

Installing programs in any modern linux is a question of getting
them from a package repository; there is very likely a GUI app, but
without some idea which distribution you're using...

I followed that part of your statement. But "...guessing which GUI
app isn't going to be very effective," doesn't make any sense in
context for me. I didn't think you needed to know which GUI app you had
to install a program. That was part of my frustration when I fought
with it. I could get the GUI to tell me what it was, but not the
distro. Or you just pointing out something that I pretty much
understand, assuming I might not understand it? I do appreciate that.

#238, Ralph Giles -

I'm not as worried about remembering the filing system as I am
simply remembering what I named the darn things. But I imagine there'd
be a great deal of incentive in a command-line system to use consistent
and logical file/folder names. And you can make it cough up a list,
though if you have to do that often, the command line loses some of its
elegance.

I think I might have observed my husband using the "tab to complete
the line" trick, but I'd completely forgotten it existed. That helps a
lot.

I definitely like the "configuration stored in text files" bit, but
I must say that "the system contains its own documentation, so it is
easy to learn and explore" seems a bit off to me. I'm not disputing you
- I believe you. With the right knowledge going in, I bet it is
amazing. But my experience makes it hard to believe. I'm guessing you
mean that the documentation is inline with the code, and all I have to
do is open it with a text editor to read it? Interesting. No one told
me that before, and it is very very deep value. Logical (once
explained.) Possibly easy. (Once explained.) But the explanation is
mandatory, or it isn't either one.

I'm gonna drop it now - I don't wanna make this any more "Teach me
Linux!" than it already has been. Plus I'm still a bit resentful of the
number of times I've been told it is easy (no offense to anyone who's
said it here) and found it impenetrable. The new info you guys have
given me may very well help with that, but I'm afraid that if I don't
go play with it a bit first, my resentment will sour the conversation.

I'm deeply grateful for the help and info, and I will definitely play with Linux some more. Thanks to everyone.

*I don't think I've managed to type "Linux"[1] yet without first typing "Linus" and correcting.

[1] Okay, I succeeded that time. But I had to go really slow to do it.

heresiarch@239: How do processors compare with ASICs financially?

processors are ASICs. The issue becomes more of a matter of
whether or not the application can be handled by a processor or whether
you need special hardware logic to deal with it. And that is more a
matter of whether your application hits some sort of orbital limit that
makes Moore's Law no longer apply for some reason.

TV remote controls are handled by extremely cheap embedded
processors. Even the smart, universal, programmable ones. The job is
just so simple that you don't need special hardware to keep up.

Other limits would be like the CD Burner issue. Except CD burners
were always made out of dedicated hardware because no processor could
keep up.

But your TIVO box is a Linux machine, mostly with generic hardware
and specific software written to do it's job. So the bandwidth and
processing power to do that job is low enough that a general processor
and software can keep up.

But that doesn't help much for your portable MP3 player, since you
won't want a linux box strapped to your hip. Same goes for a digital
camera.

portable electronics have features that include "small" and "long
battery life" that often makes them more suited for ASICs. you put in
just the hardware you need, and you can design it so that you can shut
down pieces that you don't need.

#232, affreca - I've never used an outdoor clothesline, but I want
one. Whether they're allowed will definitely be something I'll be
considering when/if we buy a house. Right now I'm using an indoor
drying rack with pretty good success.

R.M. Koske @# 228,229

(dmesg at the command line, I assume?)

Yeah. I find a few major cases where having a command line is critically important:

1) Finding programs you surely have on the system, but rarely use,
or haven't had occasion to use before. Commands like "apropos",
"which", and so on, let you "poke around" to find things, without
having to dig through umpteen windows and cascaded menus. The "See
Also" section of manpages is helpful as well. Command line is also good
for quick information, like "how much disk do I have free?" (df), and
"What just filled up my home partition?" (du | sort -n | tail)

2) Impromptu logic and stream processing. For example, suppose I've
got a huge pile of downloaded files, which I can see by the filenames
fall into natural groups, but the downloader dumped them into a flat
directory, and maybe the names aren't quite regular....

Feeding the output of "ls" to tools such as "grep", "tr", and so on,
lets me rapidly select subsets of the files, fix the case of filenames,
sort them into directories, and so forth. (Nowadays, the BSD-style
filters "cut", "paste", and "colrm" simplify much of what I would once
have done with the intimidating "sed".)

Using "for" and "while" loops lets me chain together a bunch of
tools and run them over a group of files, maybe with some &&
chaining to back off when something fails.

For example: "par2" verifies checksums on downloaded files, and uses
.par2 and .PAR2 checksum files to correct damage. In less than a
minute, I can write, test, and run a "for" loop to run through a bunch
of .par2 files, verifying each set of files. If and only if "par2"
succeeds, delete the (now-redundant) checksum files, and go on to
"unrar" to unpack the archive. If and only if "unrar" succeeds, delete
that archive, and so on. Then while that's running, I can go make a
sandwich, and come back to verified and unpacked files.

Just try doing that with a GUI, any GUI!

OK, I wrote that last comment before I saw #241. I'll release the hijacked thread now. ;-)

R.M Koske in 241 --

The different distros have different package managers, so, for
instance, a Debian derived distro (such as Ubuntu or Kubuntu) will use
the Debian package management system, which is called "apt", and one or
another apt GUI front ends, such as "synaptic". A Redhat/Fedora distro
will have a different package management system -- in the current
Fedora case, yum, and I have no idea what the GUI is called because I
never use it.

So you do need to know the name of the package manager to know the
name of the command to set it off; synaptic won't work on a Fedora
system (in the simple case, anyway) and yum won't work on a Debian or
Debian-derived system.

The actual package source can probably be compiled on both without issues, but you almost certainly don't want to do that.

Two essential, essential things about Unixes and names -- "strong
minds, weak typing", and puns. So there are rarely vowels if there
don't have to be vowels, and you get things like yacc ("yet another
compiler compiler", really a parser generator) having a GNU
version/clone/functional equivalent called "bison", because a bison is
kinda like a yak...

Graydon: I thought the plural of 'Unix' was 'Unices'. And of course
you know that the name 'Unix' is itself a pun, right? There was an
older operating system called Multix of which Unix was supposedly a
(wait for it) castrated version.

#239:I can imagine a generic interface being built to connect
and parallel process however many of Cheap Enough Processor you need
for application X

As a side note, one of the discussions during ISCA 2006 walked
through the important, difficult problems in computer architecture. One
of them is that we don't have an easy, general, paradigm for writing
efficient parallel programs. (This is not the same as saying we don't
have paradigms for writing parallel programs. We do. We're just not
happy with them, in general.)

So, yes, there is the hardware problem of having lots of cheap
powerful computational units in the first place. However, there is also
the software problem of figuring out how to get all of those units to
cooperate with each other usefully. We do well with embarrassingly
parallelizable problems. (e.g, go off to do X, then come back to me
with your answer.) We do less well if the various computational units
actually need to talk to each other in the course of doing their task.

#247: I've always used "unixes." Wikipedia also lists "unices" and
"unixen." However, I have a natural aversion to treating English words
as if they were Latin. (Don't get me started on "virus," which,
according to my Latin dictionary, means "bog", and is defective, having
no natural plural forms anyway.) I haven't decided how I feel about
treating English words as Anglo-Saxon.

The Economist ran a story recently describing portable light,
i.e. a fabric which combines solar cells and LED's. The fabric is sewn
into a bag form, which one carries around all day, and in the evening
you have light -- 10 hrs of light for 3 hrs of sunshine, according to
the article. Pretty nifty idea, at least on the surface (and I claim NO
expertise). But one thing that amazed me is the cost -- about $50 for
one of these bags, less than the yearly cost for batteries, candles,
etc. in developing countries. That price seems insanely low somehow --
I wonder why the manufacturing costs are so low?

heresiarch at 239: [Basement chip fab will] happen if/when nanotech happens, I think.

Nanotech is fast becoming a meaningless word - the field of "stuff
controlled on the molecular level" is still at the stage where there
are a lot of incredibly varied possibilities, and some of them even
work. We've got MIT-style cogwheels (cogwheels, I ask you... they're
practically steampunk), really cool zeolites, functionalisable
sputtered sulphur-on-gold fields, and utterly smooth and regular
Langmuir-Blodgett films.

Going by the strictest definition, recent chip designs are about as
nanotechnological as it gets. The thingy itself is large enough to see
& hold, but the working parts inside it are very much on the
molecular scale. (For a quick reference, 1 nanometre == 10 ångströms ==
about 10 atoms.)

Being able to deposit single atoms exactly where we want them in a
reliably repeatable manner would be really nice, but we can't yet.
It'll be a few years before it gets to the point of industrial use, and
given the prerequisites (hard and Extremely Cold vacuum, mostly) we
might never see a desktop version.

R. M. Koske at 241: some Unixen, not all, do make it easy. I started
running Kubuntu recently, and their start-menu equivalent has a
prominent Add/Remove Programs option - that automatically runs a GUI
package manager which gives you a menu of things it knows about and can
retrieve from the internet. It doesn't know about all of them, but it
makes most things easy.

R.M. Koske @241: but I must say that "the system contains its own
documentation, so it is easy to learn and explore" seems a bit off to
me. I'm not disputing you - I believe you. With the right knowledge
going in, I bet it is amazing. But my experience makes it hard to
believe. I'm guessing you mean that the documentation is inline with
the code, and all I have to do is open it with a text editor to read it?

Not quite.[1] At least with command-line tools, all the widely-used
ones install what are called man pages (short for manual pages), which
can be accessed by typing "man command-name" at the prompt, eg.
"man df", which give you a lot of information about how to use the
programs. ("Program" and "command" are more-or-less synonymous.) All
the major GUI desktop environments (Gnome, KDE) provide their own help
systems, much like Windows does, but I personally find I rarely have to
consult it. You're right, though, that the existence of man pages is
not intuitively obvious -- it's one of the two or three pieces of
knowledge that are essential to bootstrapping a working knowledge of
the command line. I bet Linux distributions could do a better job
disseminating that information.

Graydon @246 in re: R.M. Koske: So you do need to know the name
of the package manager to know the name of the command to set it off;
synaptic won't work on a Fedora system (in the simple case, anyway) and
yum won't work on a Debian or Debian-derived system.

Err, in these halcyon days of Linux usability, if you're running
from the GUI, you don't even have to know what the package manager is
called. (You don't even have to know what a "package manager", or a
"package", is.) In Ubuntu, you should be able to find it in two minutes
of playing around with a fresh install -- it's literally two clicks
away, under Applications->Add/Remove... (The problem with asking us
old-time Linux grognards for help is that we'll tell you how *we* do
whatever you're asking, which may no longer be the easiest or most
logical way to do it. :-)

In this, as in a number of things, I personally find that, much like
with Mac OS X, once you've learned the simple visual language of
Ubuntu's GUI, it's substantially easier to use, more intuitive, and
more consistent than the Windows GUI. (I punted Fedora Core in favor of
Ubuntu a year ago and haven't looked back. Think of Fedora as "Linux
Corporate Edition" and Ubuntu as... not "Linux Home Edition", more
"Linux Not-Corporate Edition", and not any less powerful either.)
Getting used to Linux still takes some work, but it takes a lot less
than it used to, and if you're a tinkerer or an explorer it may even be
*fun* work. I heartily encourage you to play around with a Ubuntu
LiveCD and see if you like it. And if not, that's fine -- if Windows
works for you, it works. :-)

[1] Documentation for programmers *is* usually inlined with the code, but that's waaaay beyond the scope of this post.

John 248: Please consider the source on this. I'm the guy who BOTH
refers to a single Kleenex™ tissue as "a Kleenek" AND calls more than
one of the things "Kleenices."

I wasn't being remotely serious, in other words.

But being a bit more serious, I do think that '-ices' has become a
standard English plural for words ending in '-ex'. Please note that I
said A standard, not THE standard. I'm still being silly when I say, as
I did yesterday, "Most dominatrices seem to be called 'Mistress'
whatever."

As for the Anglo-Saxon...well, we do have plurals with '-en' in
standard English: 'oxen', 'children'. And we already have some words
that are distinguished only in the plural: one dwarf, two dwarves if
you're talking about another species, or dwarfs if you're talking about
humans afflicted with genetic dwarfism. So I don't object to calling
more than one box "boxen" when they're computers, and "boxes" when
they're the boxes the boxen came in!

That said, 'unixen' does seem kinda stoopid.

Ooop, Sam, no offense meant.

#245, David Harmon -

No worries (at least from me) - I think answering questions already
asked allows for nicely-tied ends on a conversation, even if it is cut
short.

And wow, that is definitely elegant use of the command line. Intimidating, but nice.

#246 - Graydon -

I believe the Gnome is one of the redhat/fedora GUIs. That was what was on the system I fought with.

And I'm sorry. I follow what you're saying, but I'm not sure how it
relates to #241. Or maybe I only think I follow what you're saying.

One thing I'm not clear on - is the package manager system like the
GUI - a separate choice made by the OS installer, and you have
different ones that work with different distros, or is it more like
"Macs use stuffed files and Windows use zipped files" (in other words,
an OS choice that is "hardwired")?

And I'm terrible at cutting off a conversation, apparently, because
I also want to know - why wouldn't I want to compile a Fedora source on
a Debian system if it will work without issues?

#251 - Kevin Riggle - Ah. Okay. That's extremely useful. (I think
I'll be scraping this thread into a text file for future reference!)

This is the sort of thing that I find so weird about my previous
attempts to learn Linux from online sources, alone. I've never heard of
this. Maybe I tuned out on the more techy pages too easily, but...
*shrugs*

Debbie (249): That is immensely cool. I wonder if the fabric would
be any good for clothes. Quilts? Rag dolls? The crafter in me is
twitching.

#237, Marilee -

The staper is new-to-me (and better than my previous one) and has
done this as long as I've had it, so I don't know if brand matters here
or not. The stapler is a Swingline and the staples Bostitch, so there's
a good possibility it's a problem. It might be worth buying my own box
of staples to see if it makes a difference.

And for a little new non-Linux content:

Here's a trivial thing (staying with office-supplies theme) that I think may potentially have deep value. Dahle pencil sharpeners.

In a "fall of civilization" scenario, of course, we'd sharpen our
pencils with knives and call ourselves lucky to have pencils and
knives. But most of the time that's unsatisfactory and impractical.

I don't like using an electric device if I'm capable of doing the
same job with minimal effort non-electrically, so I don't want an
electric pencil sharpener.

I've never found the little single-blade sharpeners to be very
useful. They're portable and non-electric, but they dull (and I'm not
capable of sharpening one, even if I thought it was worth the trouble)
and even when they're sharp, they don't seem to work well if the lead
is off-center in the pencil.

What I want is a hand-crank rotary sharpener that isn't
wall-mounted. (I'm an apartment dweller.) My grandmother had a
wall-mount sharpener mounted on a chunk of 2x4, but it wasn't stable
enough and it was unwieldy. Random googling in frustration turned up
Dahle.

Their sharpeners include a clamp to hold the pencil so that you
don't have to mount the sharpener on anything. You can adjust the
sharpness of the point. Mine came with an item number on the blade
mechanism and the Dahle site says they sell replacement parts, though
prices aren't listed.

I've only had it a couple of years, so I can't speak of durability, but I'm very pleased.

R.M. Koske @203: My guess is that it's a matter of the staple not
having pressure applied evenly so that both sides meet the paper at
once. Either the pusher-plate isn't square to the receiver plate (I'm
making these terms up; I hope you can figure out what I mean) or to the
staple itself; or the receiver plate is uneven; or there's drag on one
side of the channel the stapler goes down.

Try tightening up or oiling everything you can as a first step. Does
the stapler produce neatly-folded staples when there's no paper? Also,
try watching the staple (if you can) while producing just enough
pressure on the handle to break it off its companions. That might give
you some clues.

Re: the Unix discussion:

I am a 25 year old engineering Ph.D student, which means two things:
1) I have reason and inclination to learn, understand and appreciate
*nixes, and 2) I grew up using Windows and am therefore not fluent in
*nix, learning only what I need to do the parts of my work that
absolutely must be done there.

No, I couldn't bootstrap knowledge of the OS. I did have to learn it
through apprenticeship. It is hard to find things you don't know you
have -- David Harmon @ 244, I know about "apropos" but you still have
to pick the right search terms, and those aren't necessarily intuitive.
I find that GUIs make exploration and discovery considerably easier.

Also, man, while useful for some things, is just confounding for
others. I had to buy a book and lean heavily on the internet, coworkers
and supervisors.

*nix has always struck me as being designed by and for engineers,
which means it has very different design priorities than something like
Mac OS X. Linux and Unix expect users to be willing to bend to the
system and its quirks, rather than being designed to bend to the user's
quirks. This is not necessarily bad, just different.

It is extremely powerful for certain things, as David Harmon noted.
Certain things are just a million times more efficient with a command
line. I can do things with a short shell script that are a pain in the
butt to do using Mac OS X's Automator, or indeed impossible (Automator
doesn't have if-then), and an even more major pain in the butt to do
manually. It depends entirely on how much you need to do those things
whether this is a useful feature for you.

(Since I switched to Mac, I now have both worlds, and I think it's great.)

Now if I can just find out why the backspace key on this machine is
mapped to ` and how to change it back, I'll be a truly happy camper.
(Am using the work Linux box today, not the Mac.) It's been a thorn in
my side for the duration of typing this comment. Have learned that I am
a fast but inaccurate typist.

#253: None taken, Xopher! 'Unixen' is a hacker's shibboleth, derived
from Vax->Vaxen (and 'boxen' is an example of the same formation) -
yet another example of the same tendency to extrapolate linguistic
rules beyond all boundaries of sanity, common sense, and everyday
usability.

I quite agree that it sounds silly, but then I think all attempts to pluralize 'Unix' sound silly.

Caroline: try "stty erase [hit the backspace key]". Failing that,
"stty erase ^h" (spell out the ^h by actually using the carat, not
hitting control-h) might work.

Mary Aileen @255 -- I think it sounds neat, too, on all sorts of levels. Quilts? Good for reading in bed (under the covers)!

I was reading this article in the context of an ESL class with a
group of power plant engineers. They brought up the question of the
(seemingly) low manufacturing costs, and also noted that the fabric was
made into bags and not, say, jackets. I suspect that you probably
*could* make garments out of the material, but that would greatly
increase the costs of mass production.

More info here:

http://www.portablelight.org/

It sounds like they're certainly trying hard to go for deep value.

R. M. Koske @256 -- pencil sharpeners. I hatehatehate those tiny
single-blade sharpeners, and we didn't want an electric one either.
Couldn't find a rotary one here in Germany*, so we brought back two
when we were in the States a couple of years ago. (Weird vacation
souvenirs, but -- well, that sort of thing is par for our course.) One
is wall-mounted, the other has a suction cup for the table top. That
doesn't work particularly well; a clamp would be better.

*at least when I went to school, every classroom in the US had a
pencil sharpener mounted next to the door. Here, each kid has his/her
own little sharpener that he/she manages to lose at least once during
each school year.

Caroline --

I have CAPS LOCK mapped to escape. This often causes interesting
side effects when other people try to use my computer. (Most of the
habitual unix users now know what my default text editor is, and what
it would be if I had CAPS LOCK mapped to control, instead.)

I think the best way to think about unixes in general is that they are the product of two processes.

One is frustrated geniuses, unable to solve a problem of concern to
them, produce a solution and have it reach a stage where it is of
general utility. (This starts with the C programming language, and TeX
is one of the purer examples, but an enormous amount of this goes on.)

Two is different frustrated people, often of similar mental
capacity, trying to make the product of the frustrated genius in item
one usable in the general case, as distinct from applicable to the
general case.

These are both iterative processes, and they chain.

So it's more that the quirks are tolerated until they become either
sacred tradition or someone gets mad and comes up with a better
mousetrap which incidentally better reflects their quirks.

R. M. Koske --

There are four layers.

One layer is the flavour of unix -- Solaris, OpenBSD, NetBSD, the Mac BSD, Linux, etc.

Next layer is the distribution; this is the specific collection of
programs that have been tested to work together. This is the level at
which the package repositories -- the collection of individual programs
-- exist. The programs that manage the repositories are different, and
are different choices by different distributions.

(Many people will call this the operating system; I think it's more
like the species epithet, we know what the genus is (and thus the type
of OS) already.)

Next layer is X11, which is the common window manager system used on
(most but not all; Apple has a different one, frex) Unixes. The open
X11 project forked some years back so there are now two different code
trees implementing the behavior of the X11 standard.

Next layer is the window manager/desktop, which is where Gnome, KDE,
AfterStep, Blackbox, XFCE, et multi cetera come into things.

Since I'm old and somewhat command line focused, I think of things
not in terms of 'oh, well, there's an Add/Remove programs in the right
click', but in terms of "what is the wretched thing called so that I
may invoke it directly?"

And that's where it matters what distro you're using, because the
package management programs will be different, so if you just want to
invoke the wretched thing, you need to know.

Generally distros tell you what they are when they boot, and
otherwise there's a file in /etc with the version in it. (eg,
/etc/fedora-release)

R. M. Koske @#254: One thing I'm not clear on - is the package
manager system like the GUI - a separate choice made by the OS
installer, and you have different ones that work with different
distros, or is it more like "Macs use stuffed files and Windows use
zipped files" (in other words, an OS choice that is "hardwired")?

Well, since you're still asking questions.... It's somewhere in
between those. There are two basic sorts of packages: compiled
binaries, and

source code, each with their own issues:

The binaries have compiled-in assumptions about what's already on
the computer, where files are meant to go, and other subtle issues
about the system they're meant for. So if you try to install one on the
wrong system, its chance of actually working is poor, and there's some
chance of disaster (breaking the system). For a while, this was a major
problem, that made precompiling UNIX programs pretty much impractical.
Thankfully, over the past few years, the major "families" (Debian, Red
Hat, Mandrake, etc) have gotten their standards pretty well sorted out
-- and more to the point, they now provide central repositories of
compiled programs, that usually "plug in and work" for systems of their
type. These go along with matching package-management systems that know
where to find the right repositories and how to install the programs
correctly -- for their host system, specifically.

why wouldn't I want to compile a Fedora source on a Debian system if it will work without issues?

Mostly because that's likely to involve "going under the hood" and dealing with operating system esoterica. I have dealt with such issues, and I find them frustrating enough that even as an experienced Linux user (and erstwhile programmer), I will avoid them if at all possible.

The source code packages are theoretically adaptable to any
system... but there's a fair gap between theory and practice, because
many of the differences among systems are things that do in fact affect
compilation, even when you (or I) wouldn't think they ought to. There
are worse problems when it comes to taking your newly compiled program
and installing its various pieces into the proper parts of your system.
So in practice, you still need (a different part of) the package
management system that knows where things are supposed to go. For the
very simplest programs, you may be able to just compile to a single
binary and drop it into one of the .../bin directories, but these days
a lot of programs include libraries, configuration files, datasets, and
other chunks, all of which they need to be able to find after
installation.

The upshot is, that "work without issues" part depends on just how
well the program's author(s) did in terms of making their program
portable. If they messed up anywhere, you get to deal with some really
hairy details about how both the program, and your system, work behind
the scenes. A lot of the "simplicity" up front depends on shoving those
details behind a simpler interface, but that only works if you stay in front of that interface.

Kevin @ 251: Actually, one of the things about Linux that drives me
mad is that the man pages are very poor. Often they're missing, even
for important programs and drivers, or named according to some odd
scheme that makes them difficult to find. Contrast that with any of the
*BSD family of open source systems (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, et al.)
where everything from command line programs to configuration files to
system calls to device drivers really does have its own man page.

This is part of the difference in philosophy between Linux and the
BSD operating systems - Linux is a operating system kernel, and so
Linux distributions may end up packaged with very different sets of
programs and organized very differently. The BSD systems are complete
operating systems, so if you install FreeBSD (for example) you are
guaranteed that a large number of base commands and functionality, and
their associated documentation, will always be there and always in the
same place.

Oh, and Xopher, "Unices" is an equally canonical silly plural for
"Unix". In fact, the mid-80s DEC Posix-compatibility suite for VMS was
called "Eunice".

My father recently had my great-great-grandfather's clock fixed
(built in Sweden in 1872). It's still on the wall and needs winding
once a week.

I think some people in this thread may be interested in the Maker
Bill of Rights http://www.flickr.com/photos/pmtorrone/306528267/

I'm still envious of my coworker who got an old belt-drive
Bridgeport milling machine for the cost of hauling it out of a basement.

I'm really mad at my employer for closing down the only mass-transit
accessible buildings in the company. I now have a 42 mile commute each
way until I can manage to sell my house. On the other hand I got rid of
the 22mpg minivan in favor of a 42mpg diesel Beetle. The TDI diesel
should be good for 250,000 miles and can run on biodiesel (way better
energy balance than ethanol).

re post #166: I saw an engineering review in the 90's that stated
that most consumer point and shoots sold and even most low level SLR's
were used for less than 12 rolls of film, 360 shots.

re post #168: I've got an Old Town Tripper canoe. One of the old ads
involved the canoe being thrown off the tall factory roof and then
paddled away. My canoe is still in good condition after 32 years of
hard use. Another testimonial was from one falling off a float plane,
falling 1500 feet and still being usable when they hiked back and found
it

#258, Caroline - Thanks for the confirmation that I wasn't
necessarily just failing to try hard enough. I won't rule it out, but
it feels better to know that someone else found it a non-trivial
undertaking.

#262 - Debbie -

We had those wall-mount sharpeners in school when I was a kid, too.
Lots of people claimed to hate them with all the passion a person under
twenty can muster, but I tended to like them. There were bad apples,
but most of them were excellent.

And I'm not sure I was clear about the sharpener and the clamp. The
clamp holds the pencil into the sharpener. Since you don't need to hold
the pencil in place, you have a hand free and can hold the whole
sharpener in one hand while operating the crank with the other. It
doesn't need to be fastened down at all.

#263, Graydon - Okay, that makes sense. Thanks.

#264 - David Harmon -

Hey! I followed the paragraph that begins "The binaries..." under my
own steam! Not by assembling definitions and unpacking it carefully,
but by knowing most of the concepts at the beginning. That's a good
feeling, and makes me feel better about my chances of eventually
learning this.

As for the why not compile Fedora source on a Debian system, yes, that is perfectly clear. Thank you.

Hamadryad @ 213: I actually love the vintage Sheaffer Balances more,
but I have several Pelikan M200s (including the Telekom
magenta-and-grey marbled ones, which are rare), and a 215 -- which is
lovely if you want something the 200 size, but prefer a heavier pen.

(A useful guide for Pelikan sizes is on Richard Binder's site:
www.richardspens.com. I mention Richard a lot when I talk about
fountain pens, not just because he's one of the best at modifying and
repairing pens, but because he has the same sort of cheerful,
passionate enthusiasm for things that many of the people who comment
here do.)

Linux being one of those subjects that tends to expand to fill all
online discussion space, kudos to the commentariat here for not doing
so.

(signed, guy who currently runs OSX, XP, and Ubuntu on his home desktop...)

My engineering building has wall-mounted pencil sharpeners. I've
never seen one used-- they are a bit noisy for mid-lecture sharpening.

This just in: My wife and I went to Target in Norman, Oklahoma last
week. Be bought twenty-three items. We had forgotten our sturdy
reusable bags.

We got home with 9 plastic bags--fewer than 3 items per bag.

We will not forget the bags again.

I was recently very pleased to discover one of the desk mount,
multiple-pencil-size sharpeners at my local thrift shop. Noisy as all
get out, sure... but now I'm back to using sharp pencils, instead of
trying to remember the last place I saw my pencil-case sharpener, or
tracking down 0.5mm leads...

Clifton @ 265: No kidding. It doesn't help that most Linux
distributions get a good chunk of their utilities from the GNU project
(hence GNU/Linux) which is allergic to man pages.

Contrariwise the new shiny stuff is all for the GUI desktop, which
isn't supposed to need much of a manual. And, "Developers hate writing
documentation." I wish I understood why open source doesn't attract
more technical writers.

Caroline @ 258: I agree *nix systems are designed for
engineers, but I don't agree that MacOS X doesn't expect users to bend
to it. We're a long way from any software that doesn't. It's just
designed to easier for more people to (learn to) use, and concentrates
on enabling certain forms of creative expression instead. Which, as you
said, is fine.

Jen Roth: While we're not turning this into a 'teach me
linux' thread, can you offer any advice about getting the delete key on
MacOS X to work simultaneously in native terminal applications and with
remote applications on a Linux machine? (Some of them do work without
'delete sends backspace' but e.g. nano does not.)

Reusable bags - I didn't remember them routinely until I mentally
tied carrying them into picking up the grocery list. Now I pick up the
list and I pick up the bags. I don't know why it suddenly worked.
Possibly it worked as soon as I really committed to it. (Not suggesting
that is the problem for others, just thinking out loud.)

For list-less trips I have a bit more trouble remembering, but I've
got at least one bag stashed in the car most of the time. I have
trouble resisting the temptation to acquire more bags.

#267 - Adam Ek

Ooh, I'm so jealous of the clock. Clocks and watches are one of
those things that you have to go up an order of magnitude at least in
price to get real quality, and it is hard (mentally) for me to do that.

I did have a keywound clock for a short time - it was one of two my
father brought back from Korea in the mid-70s. My granny gave me hers
when she moved into assisted living. It ran a few months for me and
quit. It had run every day from the day in the seventies when she got
it until a month or two before when it got put away for me. The
clock-repair guy said those clocks were "a 15-day mechanism with a
30-day spring" and when they died, they were unrepairable*. I think
resting breaks things before their time.

*I could have bought a new mechanism and had it put into the case,
but at the time I didn't think the case had enough sentimental value to
bother. I'm not sure now that was the right choice.

Ralph@274: "Developers hate writing documentation." I wish I understood why open source doesn't attract more technical writers.

(sigh)

I am currently on a two-week hiatus from my current asic project.
I've been reassigned to go back over my documentation for our previous
project, and make it readable.

You work on something, design it from the ground up, deal with every
little nook and cranny that you created, spend months, maybe a year
sweating over it, and the most natural answer to questions about how it
works seems to be "Isn't it obvious?"

I know. I know. Back to documentation...

I wish I understood why open source doesn't attract more technical writers.

Because in order to document a program, you first have to figure it out... without documentation.

RM Koske #256 -- You have (ahem) a point about little single-bladed pencil sharpeners, but still, the Alvin Brass Bullet is a very satisfying-to-hold hunk o' metal, the sort of thing that feels like it'd survive a global apocalypse.

Ok, I'll bite. What documentation do technical writers usually use to figure out a program?