Is Facebook Useful?

November 30, 2015

...vorite Facebook posts are by friends who post stuff that they are actually making or doing rather than linking to click bait articles. Curate my “friends.” I don’t mean that I’m going to unfollow everyone that I don’t agree with. One of the things I like about Facebook is hearing from people outside my own liberal, Los Angeles milieu. But I’m going to unfollow “friends” who only post finger pointing click bait rather than their own opinions. I wil...

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Restoring the Original Black Box: Our Western Electric 534A Subset

Mr. Homegrown

June 14, 2016

Appropriate Technology, Thoughtstylings

7 Comments

...posted a video of the interior of our ringer box in action. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what it sounded like when the phone rang in 1920s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2VHhmKTFsQ And, yes, I will be making this available as a ringtone in about a week. Though, I’ll note, you probably won’t be able to fix your iPhone 96 years in the future. Does your old house still have a ringer box?...

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That Sugar Film

Mr. Homegrown

July 16, 2015

Reviews

5 Comments

...both of which this film has in abundance. Show me don’t tell me is a film making mantra seared into my brain during the brief period I took classes and edited with Jean-Pierre Gorin (Full disclosure: my inner Gorin drives Kelly crazy and makes me a grumpy, no-fun movie going companion.) That said, what won me over to That Sugar Film is that its heart is decidedly in the right place. The strongest scenes were during visits to two disadvantaged com...

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Heirloom Expo in Photos

Mr. Homegrown

September 14, 2015

Food, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

6 Comments

I highly recommend making the trip next year to Santa Rosa to see the National Heirloom Exposition put on by the folks at Baker Creek Seeds. The centerpiece of the expo is the massive display of hundreds of different varieties of squash, melons, tomatoes and other edibles. It’s inspiring and frustrating all at once since, unless you have your own garden, you’ll never see such diversity at the supermarket. I came back with the will to improve our...

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Lost from the cradle of connection: the high price of driving

Mrs. Homegrown

September 11, 2015

Nature Awareness, Thoughtstylings, Transportation

20 Comments

...he way from the Santa Monica Mountains to Pyramid Lake. Cameras caught him making four freeway crossings in the past, and certainly he made more He had to cross highways. An adult mountain lion needs about 200 miles of home range to make a living. State officials call his death “Sad, but not surprising.” On August 10th, P32 became “roadkill.” Roadkill is an odd term, isn’t it? The road didn’t kill P32, a driver did. There’s some odd blameshifting...

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