Computer Recycling Complete! (for now...)

Hey all! Hope you're enjoying the break in the weather. Here's what we've been up to this week in the Commons:

Coming up soon:

• Saturday 8/29 @ the Artisan Market - Screenprinting Day! We'll be printing the Montague Commoners logo onto tshirts, tote bags, and any other flat fabric objects people bring in. It's a great opportunity to learn the basics of screenprinting, and anyone who helps out for an hour or more will be able to take home the tshirt of their choice.

Last of the Laptops!

Nate and I stayed a little late at the Market on Saturday to finish the last few laptop keyboards, and we are now 100% done with the computers from the May 30th electronics recycling event. I got the last shipment of circuit boards off to Boardsort, and it brought our electronics fundraising total up to ~$500 for this round of the project. We also learned a LOT along the way, and we're looking forward to being able to put that knowledge to use for the next electronics recycling event. Some plans for next time:

• Better use of space. At the start of this round of recycling, we didn't have our workshop at the Artisan Market yet, so Nate and I brought all the computers back to our house. Our house still hasn't recovered 😂 For the next round, I want to keep everything contained to the Artisan Market workshop, and not let it take over multiple rooms of my house. Now that we've got a better sense of what sort of volume we're likely to be looking at, we can plan ahead and make space for the project ahead of time.
• Better sorting and batching from the start. One of the big challenges of computer recycling is that there are 100+ different categories of parts and materials, and any given computer might have parts falling into 40+ of those categories. Finding the balance between filling the whole workspace with sorting boxes and having to sort every piece a dozen times is tricky. Now that I've been through the process start-to-finish on a wide variety of computers, I've got a better sense of how to break things up.
• More testing and re-use. We saved out some of the newer laptops from this round, and Nate's been playing around with various hardware testing suites and Linux distros. Our goal is to make sure that every part of the laptop is in good condition, and then get it fully set up with open source software that lets people do everything they're used to doing with their computers, but without ads, tracking, and AI bullsh*t. As the corporate tech world collapses into AI psychosis, we want to make it easier for people to escape the corporate tech bubble and get back to the sort of community-driven tech that actually works.
• More community involvement. We had a few families stop in and help take stuff apart, but we want to make it clearer to folks that that's an option. Kids deserve a chance to grab a screwdriver and learn what's inside the devices that they use every day.

WLACAC is holding their next electronics recycling event at the end of September, so if you've got computers or other electronics you've been meaning to recycle, now is a great time to start gathering them up.

Fabric time!

Since the computer recycling has left me with countless scraped knuckles and sliced fingertips over the past few months, I'm taking the gap before the next round to do some nice soft projects 🤣

One of our goals for the holiday shopping season this year is to have a nice range of re-usable wrapping cloths available, and to that end we've been picking up cotton sheets from Goodwill Bins so that we can cut them up and dye them.

There's a Japanese fabric dyeing technique called itajime shibori that I've been practicing on and off for a couple of decades now. It's basically tie-dye on steroids. By following different patterns of careful folds, you can get different patterns of color in the final pattern. It takes about half an hour per piece to do all the folding, but the results can be spectacular.

To prep this queen-size sheet for dyeing, I started by folding it into quarters and cutting along the folds to get 4 pieces of fabric. I don't like working with fabric that's wider than my ironing board is long, but making lots of little pieces limits what you can do with the fabric, so this makes a good compromise.

Next, I iron the fabric into an accordion fold one layer at a time. This is the most time consuming part of the process, but it's a very relaxing, meditative sort of time consuming. The more precise the folds, the better the pattern will come out, so I usually spend a couple of minutes aligning and smoothing each fold before I iron it down.

Once the fabric's ironed into an accordion strip, it's time to pick a final fold pattern. For this one, I picked an equilateral triangle, so I started making 60-degree accordion folds in the strip and repeated that pattern until the strip had been turned into a big triangular prism.

Finally I tied it up with some cotton ribbon from a big spool I bought wholesale a few years ago. This way the ribbon gets dyed too, and we can use it in future projects.

I'll be passing these along to Noah from Windswept Farm at the Market on Saturday so that he can do the actual dyeing. I've dyed a lot of fabric over the years, but it's a fairly messy process and I don't have a good space for it at the moment. Noah does a lot of tie-dyeing, so it's fairly easy for him to throw a few shibori pieces in when he's doing a batch. But he doesn't like doing all the precise folding and ironing for shibori, so it's a good opportunity to partner up.

These are some pieces that Noah dyed for us in the last round. These were my first time trying shibori on knitted cotton jersey, and it was a LOT harder to get the folds right, but they still came out looking pretty cool.

This Week In Nature

We're still a month or so away from acorn season, but I spotted some baby acorns on a Red Oak along Cook St. and managed to grab a picture. We're definitely into "Squirrels eating immature acorns and dropping them on people" season already 😂

You can tell when the acorn harvest is starting for real because you'll find intact acorns that are missing their caps. Right now, we're seeing the early fall, when trees shed acorns with weevils or other developmental problems. That way it can devote more energy to the nuts with the best chance of surviving.

We probably won't be making a big push for the acorn harvest this year, since we still have a lot of acorn flour from last year. But I'll keep checking on the trees I usually harvest from, and I'm happy to walk people through the process if they want to make flour themselves.

Recommendation Corner

I've got a long list of things in my head that I wish I had time to do explainers on, and it's always nice when someone else comes along and does that explainer for me. That's what happened with this video by Literate Machine. For a video that's less than an hour long, he does a pretty good job of summing the history of the news media over the past hundred years or so, and explaining how right-wing think tanks have been able to manipulate so many mainstream news sources off a cliff.

I was suspicious of Ground News when it first launched, because it clearly had an enormous marketing budget, and it was clearly based around algorithmic content generation rather than subject matter expertise. From a casual glance, it could look like a good tool to expose yourself to a wider variety of news. But the closer I looked at it, the clearer it got that it wasn't designed in a way that would actually surface important stories or good journalism. It was just doing the usual TechBro thing of wading into an area they didn't actually understand and assuming they had the answers.

In this video, Eric does a great job of breaking down the problems with Ground News' methodology, and placing them in the context of the larger media ecosphere. It's well worth an hour of your time, and if you like his analysis, you might like some of his other videos as well.

This Week's Nails

You made it to the end of the newsletter, and that means you get to see this week's nails! They are temporarily boring this week, because as I was sitting down to put the polish on this evening, my bluetooth speaker spontaneously caught fire! Luckily we were able to put it out without anything else catching, and everybody's ok. Three cheers for modern fire extinguishers, and I'm glad that it happened while I was nearby and able to react quickly. But I'm definitely not finishing my manicure tonight, so you'll have to come down to the Market on Saturday if you want to see this week's design.

Enjoy the cool weather while it lasts, and if I don't see you around town, I'll see you back here next week.

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