[technotarek]

My father and I built a solar powered dog house heater in the 80s. We got the idea and plans from a Detroit area newspaper. The “cell” was simply plywood painted black behind a piece of glass with room in between for air movement. It successfully raised a fully sealed box (perhaps almost 1sq meter) to 40 deg C in the dead of Michigan winter. It also got me a blue ribbon at the science fair. I’ve been intrigued by solar power ever since, but only in terms of tracking the science progress.

[black_puppydog]

I've been working on my parents to put this thing in their garden: https://frank.geekheim.de/?p=2476

I'd do it myself but I'm a city dweller with not even a balcony... :|

[colpabar]

This is pretty cool on its own but the fact you did it before the internet using a newspaper is very interesting. I really struggle to imagine how I'd do anything without looking online.

[jimmyswimmy]

There used to be bookstores and magazine shops. I don't quite mean to say these no longer exist outside of airport waiting areas but they were ubiquitous. Libraries were a source of knowledge rather than a place to get free wifi. Wikipedia's predecessor came as a shelf of books.

This sounds snarky but I don't mean it as such. It's what was available and how much knowledge was passed around. It wasn't hard to learn about even esoteric things if you had a good library. It was hard to find more than one such book though, so there wasn't as much opportunity for expansion of knowledge by comparing approaches.

I like the internet age better though it has become more challenging to separate fact and fiction. The library didn't have too many fake science books.

[pjc50]

> The library didn't have too many fake science books.

As a kid, I found the UFO section of the library and read all kinds of interesting and almost certainly not true things. It was conveniently next to the programming books ..

[vmh1928]

Pre-internet people subscribed to specialized periodicals. Home Power and Mother Earth News were two. Both were filled with case studies and DIY projects and the back pages had "send $5 for plans to build your own low-head hydro." I'm sure there were more publications (Stewart Brand's publications come to mind, Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly for two.) The archives of Home Power (1987 - 2018) are here: https://www.homepower.com/

Popular Mechanics and other "Popular xxx" magazines are also examples. If you were lucky your local library subscribed so you could read them there (hopefully people hadn't stolen the issues or ripped pages out.)

[ghaff]

Ay one level, obtaining knowledge was different. You went to libraries--assuming you had access to a good university or city one--and good bookstores, which were also somewhat limited outside of major cities. You called people or wrote them letters. Etc.

It was however also just harder and more limited. I definitely had projects in school that required looking through the library stacks and probably ended up with more "winging it" and depending on one or two old sources than would be the case today.

[drewcoo]

Or if you couldn't find it in a library, you could call a librarian: company, city, university, or otherwise.

I enjoyed the film Desk Set. Katherine Hepburn is one of those librarians, working at a pseudo-NBC company in the 50s. (As a special bonus, it features early movie mainframe hijinks.)

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/desk_set

[ivankolev]

A little on a tangent, but I've been thinking that it might be valuable to keep this offline knowledge infra around for backup, afaik properly stored book has lifespan that is still an order of magnitute longer than any digital storage.

[ghaff]

It's a complicated question.

On the one hand, barring natural disaster/fire/water leaks/etc., your library book will last a good long time--at least until the library gets rid of it because they need the space and no one's checked it out recently. On the other hand, even with inter-library loan, it's not super-accessible especially if it's in, say, a private university library. And if something does happen to it, it's gone.

On the other hand, a single digital copy won't last as long. But subject to a lot of factors and caveats, copies of that digital artifact can last indefinitely.

[ivankolev]

Yes, trade-offs all the way down :) Physical damage of the nature you described affects many forms of digital storage too, though I doubt vermins will find them very palatable. And there could be many copies of a book, to your second point. There is also the question of the specialized equipment needed to read the digital media. As I said, trade offs. I try to maintain a personal book library just because I was an avid reader growing up, in the pre-internet days, and I don't want to see the future generations go pure digital, but maybe it is inevitable.

[phamilton]

I did something similar with a solar oven. Painted a mason jar black and then used aluminum foil to build a concave reflector. It worked ok, but I was able to get water above the pasteurization point (160* F).

[jhallenworld]

Young me went to a solar exhibition at Brookhaven National Labs around 1978 or so. They had an electric car (maybe the Electrovette?), photo electric panels and outside someone showing how to make a forced air solar heater. It was an insulated box with a glass or plexiglass window to allow light in. Inside was an array of cut up soda cans, all painted black. A port for air inlet and a port for outlet and voila.

[I'm pretty sure this was in BNL's old graphite research reactor building, which was open for tourists. I've since learned that this was an air-cooled reactor like the one in the famous UK Windscale accident, and that it has now been completely disassembled.]

Solar was big then- I remember a talk about it at the local library also. People were making parabolic solar hot-dog cookers.

[SV_BubbleTime]

I assume you took this down in the summer? Or you had a dog oven?