Tech Take-Apart at the Market!

Hello all! Hope your various spring projects are going well. Now is the perfect time to set up some mosquito traps if you haven't yet. They're going to be breeding in earnest in a few weeks, and it's a lot easier to keep numbers low from the start than it is to get the numbers down once they've had a chance to get a foothold. If you need some netting for the top of your bucket, we'll have extra available at the market.

Events on the Horizon:

Friday, May 22nd, 12-1pm - Dance for Democracy at the Weathervane! Bring your signs, visit with your neighbors, and dance the stress right out of your body.
Saturday, May 23rd, 9am-2pm - Montague Artisan Market! Come join in on Montague Commoners projects, and check out all of the other local crafters selling their wares.
Friday, May 29th, 12-1pm - Dance for Democracy at the Weathervane! Bring your signs, visit with your neighbors, and dance the stress right out of your body.
Saturday, May 30th, 9am-2pm - Montague Artisan Market! Come join in on Montague Commoners projects, and check out all of the other local crafters selling their wares.
Saturday, May 30, 2-4pm - Electronics Recycling Drop off at Montague Farmers Market. It's as easy as loading up your car with your old electronics and dropping them off. Recyclable Items: household batteries, light bulbs, printer cartridges, and MOST household/portable electronics. NO large appliances, air conditioners or CRT monitors/TVs. Montague Commoners will be hosting a tech-take-apart table where we harvest magnets from hard drives.
Friday, June 5th, 12-1pm - Dance for Democracy at the Weathervane! Bring your signs, visit with your neighbors, and dance the stress right out of your body.
Saturday, June 6th, 9am-2pm - Montague Artisan Market! Come join in on Montague Commoners projects, and check out all of the other local crafters selling their wares.
Saturday, June 6th, 11am-7pm - The Muskegon Pride Festival! Montague Commoners will be in booth 83, so come say hi!
Thursday, June 11th, 5:30-7pm - Join Chemours Environmental Impact Committee (CEIC) as they present their plans to Chemours (formerly DuPont) and EGLE on on June 11, 5:30 to 7pm at NBC Middle School in Montague.The more community members are there, the harder we can push for a real cleanup.
Friday, June 12th, 12-1pm - Dance for Democracy at the Weathervane! Bring your signs, visit with your neighbors, and dance the stress right out of your body.
Saturday, June 13th, 9am-2pm - Montague Artisan Market! Come join in on Montague Commoners projects, and check out all of the other local crafters selling their wares.

This Week at the Market

Hey, I finally remembered to take pictures of the retail display! 🤣🎉

We've still got some empty shelves we're filling in, but I'm really happy with how it's looking so far. The pegboard and the new lights make the shop much more inviting, and it's been paying off! If we keep selling baskets at this rate, we might actually end the season with some money to put towards new programs for this year! We might also run out of baskets, so if there's one you've had your eye on, you might want to grab it now before a tourist does. I only make a basket or two per week, and that's not likely to change unless someone comes through with a magical amulet that pauses time.

The same picture of the dissassembled laptop from the top image. Also, sorry for the lack of alt text on the gallery images above. I haven't figured out how to add alt text to galleries yet.

My picnic table project this week was taking apart a 1995 Apple laptop that someone donated for recycling. It's been a while since I've done a project like this, and I wanted to test out the toolkit that we got for the upcoming electronics recycling event on May 30th. It was a LOT of fun, and I think it's going to be a popular project at the Market. Taking apart such a complicated piece of equipment is like solving a reverse jigsaw puzzle, with the added treasure hunt of finding a cool spring, or a switch that could be useful for other projects. There was a large copper heatsink underneath the motherboard, and I was able to send it home with Tina and Noah from Windswept Farm so they can turn it into copper jewelry.

By the end of the Market, I had quite a collection of screws, a rare earth magnet, and a variety of sensors, springs, LEDs, and motors. I also had a bucket of plastic parts that are probably going to need to be landfilled (for now), a bucket of misc metal parts that need further sorting, and a box of circuit boards. The plan is to keep taking things apart all through the market season, and then take the parts we don't want to specialized recyclers . If we keep at it, the proceeds from recycling the circuit boards and other high-value scrap might eventually pay for the equipment we need to do local plastics recycling here in town.

The tech take-apart bin will be available at the Market every Saturday from now on. If you've got an old piece of tech you want to get rid of, or you want to grab a screwdriver and help us take stuff apart, drop on by.

Recommendation Corner

Cory Doctorow has a new book coming out! He's the guy who coined the term "ensh*tification", and he's someone who's been on the right side of a lot of tech fights in the 20 years that I've been following his work.

In this book, he outlines the difference between "centaurs," humans are assisted by machines, and "reverse centaurs," humans who are conscripted to assist machines. It's the difference between riding a bicycle and working on an assembly line. He goes into the ways that workers across the economy are being forced to use AI in situations where it doesn't make sense, and explains why the hierarchical leadership structures of modern businesses are so vulnerable to snake oil salesmen.

He's doing pre-orders through a Kickstarter to get around Amazon's near-monopoly on the audiobook market and their refusal to carry DRM-free audiobooks. It's a great opportunity to pick up this book, as well as Ensh*tification, in audiobook and ebook formats that you can listen to on any device and through any player without large corporations being able to take it away on a whim.

This Week's Nails

You made it to the end of the newsletter, and that means you get to see this week's nails! This week I took another crack at magnetic nail polish. Magnetic polishes have magnetized pigments in them, and you can use a magnet to make different patterns in the pigment as the polish dries. Sort of. It's one of those things that looks a lot easier on YouTube than it is in real life, and I haven't had a ton of luck with it in the past. But I have a few magnetic polishes, and every once and a while I pull one off the shelf and give it another try. I was able to get the "tiger's eye" effect I was going for on most of the nails, though I'm still not 100% sold. Next time I might try using one of the hard drive magnets we've been harvesting to see if that gets more dramatic effects.

Thanks for reading! Take advantage of these last few low-mosquito weeks and spend some time outside. If I don't see you at the Market, I'll see you back here next week.

Pre-meme-ium Content

Now that we've got a few people supporting us with premium subscriptions, we wanted to find a way to thank our supporters without putting anything useful behind a paywall. So I've started tacking on a couple of memes to the end of each newsletter! If the paywall feature is working, free subscribers will see one meme below, while paid subscribers will get to see all five. If you're living on less than $35k/year, please do not give us money. Just let us know and we'll hook you up with the memes for free.

A text post that reads "if you want butterflies, you need to live with caterpillars. I'm not being metaphorical. I work in a garden center. Stop buying plants 'to bring in the bees and butterflies' and then immediately poisoning every caterpillar that dares to consume a single leaf. You will not get butterflies if you kill all the things that turn into butterflies! What are you doing?"

A four-panel comic from smbc-comics.com. A man tells his partner "Before we go to bed, you should know I've... sown some wild oats. Invasive oats from Australia. They're crowding out habitats for native mice. Millions of mice, Sally. Crying out in hunger as their babies gnaw upon seeds their teeth cannot crack! Sally responds "I... Well... Have you stopped doing that?" The man replies "Don't try to change me, baby."

A Mastodon post from user @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange. It reads "Imagine being so bad at stuff that using an LLM makes you *better*."

An upside-down car with a garden growing out of it. The car is labeled "Industrial capitalist civilization" and the garden is labeled "Semi-automated agrarian solarpunk anarcho-municipalism".

A picture of Miss Piggy from the muppets with the comment "The whole 'lipstick on a pig' thing makes no sense because the second we gave a pig access to makeup she became god's c*ntiest soldier