2014: The Year in Review

...h. October I Made Shoes In October we hosted an intense three day turnshoe making workshop with Randy Fritz. This was one of the more commented upon things we did this year. I ran into Randy over the holidays and he promised to return for another workshop in 2015. November Compostible Holiday Decor Kelly did an amazing job decorating the house for Christmas this year. No more cheap plastic crap! December Who Killed the Non-Electric Toaster One hig...

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Ghee for the skin

...he way it feels. More will follow, I am sure. I’m going to experiment with making body butter and lip balm with it. Do any of you use ghee for medicine or skin care? (Also, I’ll be making my own ghee soon, and will post on that, but in the meantime, there are loads of recipes for it out there. It’s basically just boiled butter–anybody can make it. You can also find it ghee in many “regular” super markets these days, as well as in health food store...

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The Year We Gave Up Our Smart Phones

...ve to eat is freeze dried Beef Stroganoff in a Martian prison of their own making. We used their stranding as an opportune moment to rid our culture of the things that were holding us back. My own personal smart phone addiction recovery path began back in 2018. I was building the most complex project I’ve ever attempted, a chest of drawers. It required intense concentration and I kept getting interrupted by the ping of text messages, junk phone ca...

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What You Can Do to Make Our Streets Safer

...ve never seen a road they don’t like and have spent the past hundred years making our cities into dangerous traffic sewers (see this article). Their lobbyists have a seat on municipal traffic commissions and they have the ear of our politicians. Thankfully there’s an alternative. If you want roadside assistance you can sign up for the Better World Club or just use the towing service offered by your insurance company. The tow trucks all come from t...

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2022 in Review: Cats, Mushrooms and Politics

...inez campaign. Thankfully Hugo won in November and has already got to work making our streets safer and helping tenants and unhoused people. Tech I put up a 10 meter and 2 meter radio and did a little bit of amateur radio stuff. I’m not great at it but did manage to make digital contacts as far away as Indonesia with ancient Radio Shack equipment. I also figured out how to decode airline data transmissions but did not figure out why I would want t...

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