How Much Can You Carry on a Bicycle?

...ery store trip. And the haul being inspected for self righteousness by the cats: The Xtracycle easily accommodates four heavy grocery bags. If you bring some bungee cords, you can carry even more (cat litter!). I can load up a full grocery cart and transport home just as many items as we used to in the car. Longtail bikes handle just like regular bikes. Their long wheel base, in fact, makes them more stable. And I’m always surprised at how easy it...

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003 Cooking From Scratch, Tortillas, Fencing and Listenter Questions

...ek on the Root Simple Podcast Kelly and Erik discuss cooking from scratch, making tortillas, bathroom cats, fencing and answer a reader question about chickens in small spaces. If you want to leave a question you can call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to [email protected]. The theme music is by Dr. Frankenstein. Additional music by Rho. A downloadable version of this podcast is here. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store. Note...

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Everything Must Go Part 4: How to Fold Your Clothes

...may seem a little extreme, but this simple change in behavior seems to be making all the difference in our dresser drawers. Very simply, KonMari politely insists (while flicking her pink glitter cat o’ nine tails) that we shape our all of our foldables into neat rectangular packets and stand them cheek-by-jowl in our drawers, rather like file folders in a standing file. As someone who has always folded clothes into squarish shapes and stacked the...

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A ceramic oil lamp

...much, I made a little seashell oil lamp the very first project in our book Making It. As a child of the electric age it continuously amazes me that I can make light so easily with cooking oil. Also, in reproducing these lights, I feel a connection to history. I’ve no doubt that my ancestors gathered around fish oil lamps in the north and olive oil lamps in the south. To add to their charms, they aren’t based on petroleum–as paraffin tea candles ar...

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Saturday Tweets: Yuri Gagarin Pesach KonMari, Stick Shifting and a Procedurally Generated Infinite CVS Receipt

...ar with a stick shift and clutch pedal requires the use of all four limbs, making it difficult to use a cellphone or eat while driving. Lapses in attention are therefore rare, especially in city driving.” https://t.co/sbnOiaRhNp — Alissa Walker (@awalkerinLA) March 26, 2019 “The 66-year-old had Googled directions to her neighborhood and found that the app had changed the name of her community from the ‘Fruit Belt’ to something called ‘Medical Park...

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