What's "Prawntech3D, PTEC3D, RCX, RCX-AU, RCX-EV, and all?

Yes this page is pretty plain. But I just want to convey the ideas here not distract too much.

What's The Background?

As I said, I'd travelled from Vienna to Bahrain Island to Bombay (now Mumbai, I know. But back then. . .) to Fremantle in Western Australia before my 10th birthday. By my 15th, I was headed solo to PNG to do a few gap years, and then back via a year in Brisbane to be back home by my 22nd. And I had my eyes open all that time.

(Hang in there - all of that is - sort of - necessary because at each step I started to form my opinions, opinions that have led directly to this web page and the acronym soup up above.)

I saw a beautiful city - Vienna - in the mid/late 1950s. I remember much of that time up until age five when we moved to Bahrain island, then saw the still-beautiful Bombay, and we landed in Fremantle in the mid-1960s. Places still hadn't developed the culture of waste yet. Oh there were some dirty rubbishy spots, but not the systematic and systemic generation and accumulation of waste that we see now.

I also saw what good agriculture could achieve because my father agriculture-engineered a dairy farm on Bahrain that later moved to Kuwait and is still in operation to this day. But he started off with a handful of buildings, a tiny irrigation system, and a market garden to provide food and income while the dairy was establishing.

And I saw the steady growth of household waste, insidious and unstoppable, from us living on that dairy (and other farms in Australia) and wasting very little, to living in a small town where it suddenly became necessary to drive a small drum of rubbish to the local tip site once a month, and now I see weekly bin collections in every town, piles of landfill towering over cities, and the growing incidence of waste getting into everything.

That, and the growing trend to burning fossil fuels, has led to the situation we're in now. Disaster isn't too far off in the future, and really, every year could be the one in which the climate system tips over one more ratchet point and wipes out us and all life on Earth and I wish I was exaggerating about that but I'm not, we really are on that kind of a knife edge and I believe we do not want to fall over the other side of that.

And I realised I had some tools at my disposal to make a difference. I have pretty good writing skills and can express ideas, I have experience in a few fields that relate to food, health, agriculture, technology, and maker skills. Also an unstoppable need to write about it all. 8-) So here's what resulted:

The Blogs

I started 'blogging' before the Internet, when BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) were the geeky norm. I wrote articles and kept them on my own BBS where people could log in and download them or read them in place, and they weren't what you'd call a blog these days, just folders full of files. I lost all of that when a highly expensive hard disk drive died. And then the Internet came along and I shifted to a system that was similar but allowed me to keep it all on my PC but make it available online - and then that HDD also died. I'm a slow learner.

But the suddenly there were 'blog' sites online and I posted there. I'd saved a few of my old files and put them online too, and since then one of the blogs has been going for almost as long as BlogSpot has been going, and a few others are only a year or two younger.

I started one as my general commentary blog (TEdALOG Lite II) and it is still running to this day, along with TEdADYNE Systems and TEdAMENU Tuckertime and the Zen Cookbook Blog. More recently I've added the PTEC3D Blog, Grumpy Old Guy, OHaiCorona, and a few more. What started out as brainfarts of a young-middle-age guy have become slightly more researched and thought-out articles, all with the aim of changing the world. Just a little bit, here and there, one article at a time - but I'd like to see it happen before that knife-edge thing starts happening...

But I do other things too. I always have a few food items growing wherever I live, that's just been a fact of life for me since Bahrain. And I know plenty of people have gardening blogs and are actually way better at gardening blogging than I am - but I've also made plenty of things for my gardening, tools that help, small additions that improve fertility, etc. And I can blog about those and share them.

R&D

I learned 3D printing as a way to make solutions. And while 3D printing blogs and Youtube channels are becoming dime a dozen, my ideas can be built/made by almost anyone, and so I can blog about those and develop more of them.

There's a small gardening experiment going on in our tiny front yard, attracting and feeding worms so that they in turn feed our vegies. The design, simple as it is, is online for people to use and riff off to come up with similar solutions for themselves and grow vegetables without using fertilisers and using their own kitchen scraps.

In my end of the hobby room, I'm working on systems to manage small garden watering better, using just the right amount of water. I also have a small plastic recycling corner where I can turn household plastic waste into things that re-purpose that plastic and keep it out of landfill.

I've re-purposed small household devices - but then I can't use them for their original purposes any more afterwards so I've had to source them wherever I can and make the modifications etc. I'm designing some machines from scratch using "cheaply" available technology. I say "cheaply" because to some, this is pocket money, to a pensioner, it's a three month process of scraping pennies.

Upshot

So yes - this takes time and money. All of it is expensive in terms of my time and limited pension. One website alone costs me more than three hundred good old Aussie dollars a year to run, and there are two of them, with four or five being a more useful number. Ideally I'd also be able to publicise those sites so that they reach a larger readership.

That would be $3,500 approximately, and that's a cost a working person would balk at, let alone me where that would be about an sixth to an eighth of my pension. On top of that, those "cheap" bits and pieces. That's impossible for me to achieve on my own.

So, WHY?

Why am I doing this when it's obviously hurting my lifestyle?

If you really had to ask that I'm surprised. After all, you're here and reading this so you must understand how serious the situation is. The world's in dire shape. Peace is tenuous, capitalism is killing millions of people annually, the climate is killing millions more, and the toll on all the other creatures, bacteria, and plants is so high it's somewhere between unimaginable and terrifying.

We have the technology - clean enough, cleaner than the current technology - and the money (as unnecessary as money should be when it's a matter of planetary survival) to solve these problems, but no-one is willing to give up any of their lifestyle to make a start.

Everyone's sitting around going "No - you go first!"  So screw people like that, I HAVE gone first.

So the things I'm most looking for are collaborators that know about maintaining web sites and hosted servers, about writing, and about SEO. Who are interested in developing small scale machines and creating how-to articles; Managing contacts and social media and creating a web forum; Finding and managing sponsors and funds for this NFP open source project; Who'll bring general discussions and idea generation; And would make direct donations of anything that might be useful.