People made fire by hand for many thousands of years. We improved the energy efficiency of the process by letting the legs do the work. Unlike modern lighters, the lighter bike does not use fossil fuels. Lighting a cigarette takes about a minute of brisk pedaling.
No Tech Reader #40
June 1, 2023 by Filed Under: Boats, Digital technology, Environmentalism, Fire, Internet, Nature, No Tech Readers
- Out of the wild. [The New Atlantis] “The ideal of nature as it used to be before human intervention is one that Western urbanites created in the late nineteenth century, chiefly as a foil for their own modernity… This vision still permeates much of environmentalism and stands in the way of responsible action toward nature, particularly in the places where we actually live.”
- Minds on Fire: Cognitive Aspects of Early Firemaking and the Possible Inventors of Firemaking Kits. [Cambridge Archaeological Journal] “We analyse aspects of the two main hunter-gatherer firemaking techniques—the strike-a-light and the manual fire-drill—in terms of causal, social and prospective reasoning.”
- The Kayak’s Cultural Journey. [Craftsmanship Quarterly] “For millennia, Indigenous peoples across the world have built and used skin boats to fish and hunt, for sport and travel, even for warfare. Now non-Indigenous admirers of the craft are making them, too.”
- Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Design Constraints in Computational Culture. [LIMITS 2023] “Permacomputing is a nascent concept and a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in digital technology. At the heart of permacomputing are design principles that embrace limits and constraints as a positive thing, as well as being creative with available computational resources.”
- Building and Monitoring a SolarPowered Web Server. [ETH zürich] “In this thesis we focus on building a solar-powered web server. We present existing websites which are fully or partially solar powered, introduce some background about battery state of charge estimation and how to determine the right solar panel and battery size. Reusing components from older projects, we host a static website on an exemplary setup, which is solely solar powered.
Human Powered Record Player
May 19, 2023 by Filed Under: Human power, Random
Low-tech Magazine’s bike generator powers a record player. No batteries are involved: a buck converter in the control panel keeps the voltage output constant at 12V. Power use is very low and pedaling is easy. Record: Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline.
Build your own bike generator.
We also published a video of our pedal powered video projector.
Human Powered Dot Matrix Printer
April 30, 2023 by Filed Under: Human power, Random
Human-powered dot-matrix printer. Direct power. No batteries are involved. Directly powering a dot-matrix printer is challenging, especially when printing longer documents. The power demand is variable and can increase suddenly for a short time. You must pedal very fast to anticipate these peaks. If you fail, the voltage drops, the communication between the printer and the laptops breaks down, and the machine prints the document all over again. Capacitors could solve this. A laser printer has a very high power use during startup and is incompatible with a bike generator (or a small-scale solar installation).
DIY manual for the bike generator: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2022/03/how-to-build-bike-generator.html.
History of office equipment: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/11/why-the-office-needs-a-typewriter-revolution.html
No Tech Reader #39
April 30, 2023 by Filed Under: Books & Reference, Building materials, Digital technology, Farming, Internet, No Tech Readers
- I’ve rented DVDs from Netflix for half my life – streaming is a poor substitute. [The Guardian]
- The Glorious Return of a Humble Car Feature. “Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touch screens. Buttons are back!” [Slate]
- Agriculture in the Ancient Maya Lowlands (Part 2): Landesque Capital and Long-term Resource Management Strategies. [Journal of Archaeological Research] “We demonstrate long-lasting agricultural investments by Maya people, in social capital including multigenerational land tenure, in cultivated capital including long-lived trees, and in landesque capital including soil amendments and landscape engineering projects, such as terracing and wetland modification.”
- Archaeologists are unlocking the secrets of Maya lime plasters and mortars. [ars technica]
- When innovation goes south: The tech that never quite worked out. [ars technica] “We don’t need new gadgets; we need to use antibiotics more sparingly.”
- “RAIN was planting the seeds”: An Interview with Tom Bender, co-editor of RAIN: Journal of Appropriate Technology. [Open Edition Journals]
Human Powered Electric Guitar
April 19, 2023 by Filed Under: Human power, Instruments, Musical Instruments, Random
Musician Germán Canyelles uses Low-tech Magazine’s bike generator to power his electric guitar. The guitar amplifier and pedals are plugged into an inverter connected to the 12V circuit of the bike generator. No batteries are used. Recorded at Akasha Hub, Barcelona.
