Hi and welcome to the rabbit hole!
If you’ve just arrived here from the Facebook page “Ptec3d/ss40y” then hey – maybe you’ll want to stick around here and find a whole new cloud of social, environmental, techo, and entertaining content.
From here you can enjoy my latest 20 articles and perhaps use the link on that page to subscribe to the once a week newsletter so you’ll get to see it all.
Social Presence:
This site (O Hai Corona . com) was a blog I started when COVID first became A Thing. I decided to collect as much information on SARS-CoV-2 as I could. It’s since become a site about (COVID, still, naturally, but now also) various health topics as I find them.
The Latest 20 Articles
There’s a “magic list” that automatically updates the list with the last 20 articles when I post something new, so you can always bookmark that and check what’s newest. The same page also has links to subscribe to my newsletter and to go to my Ko-Fi page and donate the price of a cup of coffee either once-off or monthly.
Other Social Presences
Find me on Mastodon (http://mastodon.au/@ptec3d) and
BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/ptec3d.bsky.social) for instant messaging,
Facebook page (https://facebook.com/PTEC3DSS40Y) for the FB page,
and I even have the group on MeWe. (https://mewe.com/group/6521d69d2cf8177af9faa451)
I recommend the articles list.
Bonus Link
You could go here https://helpstopcapitalism.neocities.org/escape-the-noise to find alternatives to the inevitable enshittification of social media by the Big Few that are working hard to make social media a tool for their enrichment at our expense.
So – What Do PTEC3D and SS40Y Do?
SS40Y is my mantra and stands for Solutions (S) For (4) Nothing (0) Yet (Y.) As I’ve often said, that one idea you have can become something huge, one day. Build it, and they’ll come. I’ve often had ideas – and then not pushed for them hard enough – and then seen them succeed wildly for someone else – to not believe that I should always keep on working on them.
PTEC3D is my online handle for all of those ideas and activities. I want to see the world recover from fossil fuels, from resource theft and exploitation, I want to show bad actors up for what they are. I also want to make some physical differences to the planet, make life better. Not everything has to be exploitation, greed, and destruction. And I want you to come away feeling the same way.
Solutions For Nothing Yet
As a mantra, as a thought to keep in the back of my mind, this is a good guiding principle. There are no solutions too way out. There are no solutions that might not one day become important.
:- The president of IBM thought in 1943 that there’d be a market for maybe five computers in the entire world. That’s true. And also, as we walk around with computers in our pockets that are more powerful than maybe 5,000 of those early machines, now proven to be totally wrong.
:- Bill Gates did say that “640k of RAM should be enough for anyone” – that is a hill I would gladly die on because I was around when he said it, in the early 1980s, and Microsoft have been going like buggery to erase that quote and retcon it. In today’s world where 16Gb is considered a minimum for high quality graphics and video tasks or for gaming, we can say that the one of the richest tech geeks in the world failed to see a solution that’s now obvious to us.
Hence – no idea is ever totally without merit, and many ideas if you follow through, will snowball beyond your wildest dreams. Had IBM just closed up the computer division and kept just making cash registers and calculators, we might be living in a far different world. Had Martin Cooper not called Joel Engel in 1973 because people thought mobile phones were a wanky waste of space, we’d be in a really strange world.
So I always write down my ideas, and try to make them work, and try to disseminate them for other people to read and spark them into new ideas.
PTCE3D (PrawnTech3D)
Since the groovy 1970s I’d been watching and reading obscure sh*t all over the world. My library card was always in use, I also spent any spare money on tech journals, sci-fi, books on engineering – the secondhand book store was my other other haunt. I knew from personal experience that I noticed summers were getting warmer, my vegetable gardens doing really odd things like bolting to seed when they should have only just been starting to produce, some crops over-wintering that were normally only annuals. In the 1980s I discovered BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) and started chatting to people all around the planet – and discovering that many of them were having similar experiences.
But I was just one young adult that had spent most of his youth in places other than cities back then and didn’t know what to do about it. It took the Internet in the latter 1990s to start me really thinking about what I could do. I was also inducted into a small club of (back then) about three other blokes that were techie (audio/video, IT, amateur radio, private pilots, that kind of techie) which blossomed into a group of between thirty and forty that had regular weekly lunchtime meetings for whoever could make it that week. And the guy that started it all was a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic guy ten years older than myself. The gentleman passed away a few years ago and I’ve moved interstate but several of that group still meet weekly to this day, twenty-four years later. That’s one hell of a legacy.
And I bought a really cheap 3D printer around then, because I’d been wanting to start making small machines that anyone could use to recycle plastics, and a printer was the easiest way to achieve that. Long story short – the organisation was named after a seafood popular in Australia – the humble prawn (aka ‘shrimp’ for some reason – it seems some people have never seen a banana or tiger prawn then) and I took that online handle because it was close to the group’s name so it’s still a bit of an homage to the man behind that group.
PTEC3D and all the blogs are there to share tech news, political news and world sustainability and de-fossilisation news, harass exploitative corporations, shame greedy supermarkets, show progress I’m making with the recycling and also with easy growing of vegetables to remove some food miles out of your life. That kind of thing. I try to keep each post to a specific but also fairly broad topic so that people can just pick those that are of interest to them, but then with lifelong undiagnosed ADHD I have that classical thing where I can never decide what thing belongs in what category so there’s a bit of overlap betwe . . .
I really recommend the articles list. And my Ko-Fi page.
But you can expect to read articles about good tech/bad tech, new sustainability tech, new electrification / de-carbonisation articles, the odd joke, the odd recipe, some personal opinion and always activism, trying to get my readership informed, activated, and involved. Glad to have you along!