Le Phone Freak

May 6, 2019

...illiness. What caught my eye with this oddball piece of transitional phone technology is the punch card, invented in the early 19th century to control looms. I’m tackling Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow this spring after one failed attempt to read it in the 1990s. The book is full of loom metaphors such as this one, “While the great Loom of God works in darkness above,/And our trials here below are but threads of His Love.” The loom repre...

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The Sound of One Hand Snapping

Mr. Homegrown

August 25, 2006

Tools

1 Comment

...rs, and driven hundreds of nails with it, hanging molding, fixing windows, making furniture, and countless other tasks. It’s possible, in fact, to drive nails with this thing without using a hammer and it’s especially useful in tight spaces where there is not enough room to swing a hammer. If SurviveLA ever sells out, it will be to whore ourselves out to the folks at Spring Tools who manufacture this elegant, simple and effective tool right here i...

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Made in the shade- Passive cooling

Homegrown Neighbor

September 28, 2009

Domesticus

14 Comments

...s in the Winter can allow sunlight to enter your house in the cool season, making them ideally suited to passive heating and cooling. You can also shade your windows. Solar shades project out over a window, thus blocking the highest angle of the sun. When the angle of the sun is lower and the heat and sun less extreme, in Winter and during sunset and sunrise in summer, sunlight can still get in the windows. A roof that projects past the walls of t...

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The Energy Environment Simulator

Mr. Homegrown

January 22, 2014

Water and Power

15 Comments

...extreme, your own personal zombie apocalypse. One of the energy sources is labeled “new technology.” This could either be solar or that UFO doughnut from the Thrive movie. The only info we have on it is that it was manufactured by Tenntronics, a defunct company that was in business from the late 1960s through the late 1980s. It came with a handsome storage cabinet that also serves as a pedestal. Photo: Niklas Vollmer I’m guessing that the Energy-E...

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La Alternativa

Mr. Homegrown

September 17, 2006

Resources

...tree. What we like most about Gálvez is that she is a strong proponent of urban gardening, maximizing every available space for food, a contrast to Martha Stewart’s useless pesticide and fertilizer drenched flower gardens. See the the film Power of Community How Cuba Survived Peak Oil for more on Cuba’s inventive urban gardening. While we hope that the US does not face a Cuban style economic crisis, we at SurviveLA believe that it’s time for la a...

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