anyday-happyday:

anyday-happyday:

socalledunitedstates:

How to make everything yourself - online low-tech resources

Energy Bulletin pointed us to the website of Practical Action (previously known as the Schumacher Centre for Technology & Development), an online resource devoted to low-technology solutions for developing countries. The site hosts many manuals that can also be of interest for low-tech DIYers in the developed world. They cover energy, agriculture, food processing, construction and manufacturing, just to name some important categories.

We would like to add to this the impressive online library put together by software engineer Alex Weir. The 900 documents listed here (13 gigabytes in total) are not as well organised and presented as those of Practical Action, but there is a wealth of information that is not found anywhere else. The library is also hosted here (without search engine).

Other interesting online resources that offer manuals and instructions are Appropedia and Howtopedia. These are all wiki’s, so you can cooperate. The Centre for Alternative technologies has many interesting manuals, too, but the majority of those are not for free.

Read more…

Just a heads up: the fastonline mirror of the 2006 cd3wd directory is still up, but the download in full link at cd3wd is no longer working. According to wikipedia, the project stopped after Alex Weir passed away and the website taken down.

Here is an archive.org page that has the 2012 dvd version, the last version updated before Alex Weir’s death in 2014.

< Text link for people just browsing through notes https://archive.org/download/2012_cdw3d_dvd_set >

almost forgot! here’s a rundown of the disc organization from the readme on disc 1001_cd3wd. That way you can prioritize your downloads based on your needs (such as if you have limited bandwidth or drive space or whatever else for local conditions).

Each is approximately 4.3 GB:

-  #1001 – medicine, health, water, sanitation
-  #1002 – material from practical action, ITDG, appropedia, etc..
-  #1003 – vocational education, construction, metalwork, electrical trades, auto
mechanics, woodwork, metalwork etc
-  #1004 – agriculture
-  #1005 – more agriculture and also all Portuguese titles and most French and Spanish titles
-  #1006 – the upgrade disk – material additional to the cd3wd release of 2011/12, plus the rest of the French and Spanish titles