My wife and I are building a sort of solar punk diy hydroponic farming growing start up here in our garage in Alaska!
We found a nice design someone had released online under creative commons BY, modified it to fit our needs (though we’re thinking mark2 might need a complete redesign), then have been printing the towers out and growing veggies under grow lights!
We have a long way to go but I’m building the online store presently to sell towers (that should be up and running in a few weeks - I’m kind of exhausted after my day job - and we’re hoping to have enough towers to sell veggies at the farmers market by the summer.
Long term I’ll likely buy some land and build a less ad hoc setup, for now, we are still experimenting. The idea is to slowly build this up as self-reliantly and simply as we can so that anyone can grow their own food and so we can use dirt simple tools to run the business. We plan on doing as much as is practical with open source tooling and Linux. No subscriptions, no spyware (once we get to tower design mark4 or 5 and we have some raspberry pis running the tooling), and we want this to be a model so other people can do the same thing we’re doing!
Basically, as we approach this AI inflection point, I really strongly feel like the best results for the future will be to leverage this technology for good. Also, I think there’s a niche in using tech for extremely practical and non-SaaS purposes. Everyone and their brother wants to create this crazy billion dollar startup idea where everyone pays them a subscription to their AI bot or whatever, we’re just hoping we can make people a little more resilient in our community and maybe feed my neighbors. We think we can leverage these new tools for good.
I’m not a very experienced web dev (my day job is in automation), but I’m learning and actually it looks like I might have some side business where I throw together some small websites for local companies too. The goal is modest, practical, and ideally something that makes my community better.
Come check out my terrible flask website here:
www.pragman.io
In a couple weeks I should have my garage cleaned out and the online store ready, but for now enjoy!
We found a nice design someone had released online under creative commons BY, modified it to fit our needs (though we’re thinking mark2 might need a complete redesign), then have been printing the towers out and growing veggies under grow lights!
We have a long way to go but I’m building the online store presently to sell towers (that should be up and running in a few weeks - I’m kind of exhausted after my day job - and we’re hoping to have enough towers to sell veggies at the farmers market by the summer.
Long term I’ll likely buy some land and build a less ad hoc setup, for now, we are still experimenting. The idea is to slowly build this up as self-reliantly and simply as we can so that anyone can grow their own food and so we can use dirt simple tools to run the business. We plan on doing as much as is practical with open source tooling and Linux. No subscriptions, no spyware (once we get to tower design mark4 or 5 and we have some raspberry pis running the tooling), and we want this to be a model so other people can do the same thing we’re doing!
Basically, as we approach this AI inflection point, I really strongly feel like the best results for the future will be to leverage this technology for good. Also, I think there’s a niche in using tech for extremely practical and non-SaaS purposes. Everyone and their brother wants to create this crazy billion dollar startup idea where everyone pays them a subscription to their AI bot or whatever, we’re just hoping we can make people a little more resilient in our community and maybe feed my neighbors. We think we can leverage these new tools for good.
I’m not a very experienced web dev (my day job is in automation), but I’m learning and actually it looks like I might have some side business where I throw together some small websites for local companies too. The goal is modest, practical, and ideally something that makes my community better.
Come check out my terrible flask website here:
www.pragman.io
In a couple weeks I should have my garage cleaned out and the online store ready, but for now enjoy!