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All Articles:

2022

  • How to Build a Bike Generator with Control Panel
  • The Revenge of the Hot Water Bottle

2021

  • The Printed Website: Volume III & The Comments
  • Fascine Mattresses: Basketry Gone Wild
  • How to Build a Low-tech Solar Panel?
  • How to Design a Sailing Ship for the 21st Century?
  • Urban Fish Ponds: Low-tech Sewage Treatment for Towns and Cities
  • How Sustainable is High-tech Health Care?
  • Vertical Farming Does not Save Space

2020

  • How to Make Biomass Energy Sustainable Again
  • Thermoelectric Stoves: Ditch the Solar Panels?
  • Fruit Trenches: Cultivating Subtropical Plants in Freezing Temperatures
  • How Sustainable is a Solar Powered Website?
  • Low-tech Magazine in Spanish, French and Other Languages

2019

  • Too Much Combustion, Too Little Fire
  • The Printed Website: Second Volume Out Now
  • Mist Showers: Sustainable Decadence?
  • How to Make Wind Power Sustainable Again
  • Reinventing the Small Wind Turbine
  • Low-tech Magazine: The Printed Website
  • Heat your House with a Mechanical Windmill

2018

  • Keeping Some of the Lights On: Redefining Energy Security
  • How Circular is the Circular Economy?
  • How to Build a Low-tech Website?
  • Could we Dredge the Netherlands without Fossil Fuels?
  • We Can't Do It Ourselves
  • Ditch the Batteries: Off-grid Compressed Air Energy Storage
  • History and Future of the Compressed Air Economy
  • How Much Energy Do We Need?
  • Bedazzled by Energy Efficiency

2017

  • How to Run the Economy on the Weather
  • How (Not) to Run a Modern Society on Solar and Wind Power Alone
  • Could We Run Modern Society on Human Power Alone?
  • Heat Storage Hypocausts: Air Heating in the Middle Ages
  • Vietnam's Low-tech Food System Takes Advantage of Decay

2016

  • Why the Office Needs a Typewriter Revolution
  • The Curse of the Modern Office
  • How to Get Your Apartment Off the Grid
  • Slow Electricity: The Return of DC Power?
  • Power Water Networks

2015

  • Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s
  • Reinventing the Greenhouse
  • How to Build a Low-tech Internet
  • The 4G Mobile Internet that's Already There
  • Why We Need a Speed Limit for the Internet
  • How Sustainable is Stored Sunlight?
  • How Sustainable is PV Solar Power?
  • How to Keep Warm in a Cool House
  • Radiant & Conductive Heating Systems
  • Restoring the Old Way of Warming: Heating People, not Places

2014

  • The Revenge of the Circulating Fan
  • If We Insulate Our Houses, Why Not Our Cooking Pots?
  • Well-Tended Fires Outperform Modern Cooking Stoves
  • Modular Cargo Cycles
  • How Sustainable is Digital Fabrication?

2013

  • High Speed Trains are Killing the European Railway Network
  • Heat Your Clothes, Not Your House
  • Burning the Bones of the Earth: Lime Kilns
  • Power from the Tap: Water Motors
  • Back to Basics: Direct Hydropower
  • Scale Models of Bicycles
  • The Mechanical Transmission of Power (3): Endless Rope Drives
  • The Mechanical Transmission of Power (2): Jerker Line Systems
  • The Mechanical Transmission of Power (1): Stangenkunst

2012

  • How to make everything ourselves: open modular hardware
  • Electric velomobiles: as fast and comfortable as automobiles, but 80 times more efficient
  • Cargo cyclists replace truck drivers on European city streets
  • The solar envelope: how to heat and cool cities without fossil fuels
  • The art of producing sustainable consumer goods: basketry

2011

  • How to downsize a transport network: the Chinese wheelbarrow
  • Gas bag vehicles
  • Medieval smokestacks: fossil fuels in pre-industrial times
  • The bright future of solar powered factories
  • Pedal powered farms and factories: the forgotten future of the stationary bicycle
  • Bike powered electricity generators are not sustainable
  • The short history of early pedal powered machines
  • Floating / mixed links and updates (5)
  • Insulation: first the body, then the home
  • Aerial ropeways: automatic cargo transport for a bargain

2010

  • Hand powered drilling tools and machines
  • Automata: engineering for a post-oil world?
  • Boat mills: water powered, floating factories
  • The velomobile: high-tech bike or low-tech car?
  • Recycling animal and human dung is the key to sustainable farming
  • Piston-powered aircraft from the 1950s were as fuel-efficient as the current average jet
  • UNESCO sets up online Traditional Knowledge Database
  • Lost knowledge: ropes and knots
  • How to tie the world together: online knotting reference books
  • The status quo of electric cars: better batteries, same range
  • The sky is the limit: human powered cranes and lifting devices
  • How to make your own low-tech vertical farm
  • Packing / mixed links & updates 4
  • Wood gas vehicles: firewood in the fuel tank

2009

  • Trolley canal boats
  • How (not) to resolve the energy crisis
  • Cars: out of the way
  • Rings of fire: Hoffmann kilns
  • How to make everything yourself - online low-tech resources
  • Wind powered factories: history (and future) of industrial windmills
  • Water powered cable trains
  • Shoveling / mixed links & updates 3
  • Get wired (again): Trolleybuses and Trolleytrucks
  • Electric road trains in Germany, 1901 - 1950
  • The monster footprint of digital technology
  • Fighting marine debris: the dustcarts of the sea
  • Ball de bastons
  • Small windmills put to the test
  • Sailing at the touch of a button
  • Cargo ships, then and now
  • Who killed the electric grid? Fast-charging electric cars
  • The Museum of Old Techniques
  • Truckloads of hard disks
  • Camping in the clouds: the Aeromodeller II
  • Moonlight towers: light pollution in the 1800s

2008

  • Only idiots travel by train
  • Hunting / mixed links 2
  • Sunbathing in the living room: oven stoves and heat walls
  • A do-it-ourselves guide
  • Building backwards / mixed links & updates 1
  • Tiles as a substitute for steel: the art of the timbrel vault
  • Los Grumildos: low-tech mechanical puppets on the fringes of society
  • When rich women built houses
  • Viva Las Vegas: LEDs and the energy efficiency paradox
  • The age of speed: how to reduce global fuel consumption by 75 percent
  • Urban windmills harm the environment
  • A steam powered submarine: the Ictíneo
  • Invention & Technology Magazine
  • Carbon sequestration: bury the idea, not the CO2
  • The Citroen 2CV: cleantech from the 1940s
  • Life without airplanes: from London to New York in 3 days and 12 hours
  • Is ecotech the new asbestos?
  • Mechanical calculators: computing without electricity
  • The pinhole camera: low-tech photography
  • Bring back the horses
  • Leave the algae alone
  • Photoshop in the early 20th century
  • Why bottled water is good for the environment
  • Life before television
  • The ugly side of solar panels
  • A world without trucks: underground freight networks
  • Reinventing the wheel
  • Download, print, fold, paste
  • The right to 35 mobiles
  • Faster internet is impossible
  • The digital oubliette
  • Why the electric car has no (wireless) future
  • Satellite navigation in the 18th century
  • The world's factory hall
  • Gaming unplugged
  • Cars on hot air
  • Information damages the environment

2007

  • Heat your house with car tyres and earth
  • Email in the 18th century: the optical telegraph
  • Wind up your laptop
  • Floating windmills: energy from the clouds
  • Water eats energy: desalination
  • Solar powered cars
  • Supercomputers reach their limits
  • Build your own windmill
  • The revival of the sailing ship
  • Nuclear reactors, but no fuel
  • Airships: green, slow air cargo
  • Second hand bits and bytes
  • High speed trains: planes on wheels
  • Lego for Big Boys: habitable shipping containers

Also check out our short posts at No Tech Magazine.

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  • Can We Make Bicycles Sustainable Again?
  • What if We Replace Guns and Bullets with Bows and Arrows?
  • When Lethal Weapons Grew on Trees
  • How to Build a Practical Household Bike Generator
  • The Revenge of the Hot Water Bottle
  • The Printed Website: Volume III & The Comments
  • Fascine Mattresses: Basketry Gone Wild
  • How to Build a Low-tech Solar Panel?
  • How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?
  • Urban Fish Ponds: Low-tech Sewage Treatment for Towns and Cities

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