Deep Work

...wport, could be just the person to lead us out of our distraction with his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. The book can be boiled down to this: thou shalt schedule uninterrupted blocks of time to focus on single, important tasks. And, yes, that includes thinking about how we spend our leisure time too. If you allow incoming texts and notifications to define your day you’ll turn into a human router, pushing around f...

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077 Radical Mycology

...Ecology and the primary author behind Radical Mycology, a nearly 700-page book on accessible mycology and mushroom cultivation. During the podcast we discuss: What are fungi? How to cultivate edible and medicinal mushrooms How to establish a mushroom bed in your garden Tempeh Peter’s cultivation how-to videos Growing mushrooms in an apartment Easy to grow mushroom: King Stropharia Source for spawn: Field and Forest Plugs Improving soil with fungi...

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George Rector: M.F.K. Fisher’s Dirty Old Uncle

...or, c.1937. Rector (1878-1947) was a restaurateur and popular author. This book is ostensibly a cookbook–I don’t know what else it would be–but it doesn’t have recipes per se. Instead, he just mentions how to cook things as he’s steaming along. I’m in love with the hardboiled yet strangely comforting prose (though I do have to ignore the casual sexism and racism of the period). Seems most cookbooks these days range from bland to, at best, passiona...

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How to Design and Fabricate Homestead Projects

...raw lots of ideas out quickly. For learning how to draw there is no better book than Drawing From on Right Side of the Brain. Once you go through that you’re ready for a fun book I’m currently making my way through called Sketching for Architecture + Interior Design. Modeling Lastly it’s time to get those ideas in the free version of the 3d program Sketchup. You can learn Sketchup in an evening or two and it has really helped separate the wheat fr...

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Root Simple: 2015 in Review

...affiliate got a lot of comments (Our Amazon Problem) as did my post on Facebook distraction (Is Facebook Useful?). How-to posts I really wish that I could do more how-to posts, but the fact is that they are the most time consuming. We did manage to do a few good ones: Stuff you Learn When the Power Goes Out (with El Niño storms approaching, it’s time to review this one), Restoring a Built-In Ironing Board, Three Things I’ve Learned from Baking Bre...

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