July Linkages

...f “lip-smacking Peach & Lavender Butter” to promote her upcoming series of homesteading books. Look for a new contest each month. English’s “Canning & Preserving”, published by Lark Books, will be available April 2010. The third and fourth books in the series, “Home Dairy” and “Beekeeping”, will be available in April 2011. Hopefully we’ll be having English on our new Homegrown Evolution Podcast that will debut when we can get our computer, seen ab...

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Two apps for choosing bike routes: one good, one bad

...anes and paths were. Now, there are apps for that. The Good: Google Maps In 2010, a bike option was added to Google Maps. While not perfect, it works surprisingly well. Combined with a little familiarity with what streets are good and bad to ride on, I now find that I rarely look at the city’s bike maps anymore. Here’s an example: one weekend this month, Kelly needed the car and I had to across town, from the La Brea Expo line station to the new W...

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Return of the Walkman?

...(Sport WM-FS397, to be exact). Here’s an “exploded” view: The BBC, back in 2010, gave a 13 year-old a Walkman to review. Here’s what the kid said: It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassett...

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Book Review: The Blood of the Earth: An Essay on Magic and Peak Oil

...hat you believe you depend on, and that you also know is quite dependent itself on our complex, petroleum-fueled industrial system. Go without it now, so you know it’s possible. And that really, it’s not that bad to go without. Save One Thing: Consider how wide reaching our knowledge base is now, yet how fragile, since so much of our knowledge is tied up in digital media. Choose one thing you want to be able to pass on to future generations. Maybe...

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Plastic or Wood?

...these are the new rules. We are going to phase as many plastics out of the homestead as we can. We won’t toss what we have in the landfill right now, but when it is time to replace it, this is how it’s going down: Wood and metal utensils instead of plastic Glass storage containers instead of Tupperwear Wool blankets instead of Polarfleece blankets Down filling instead of polyester filling (even for allergy sufferers)* Silk and wool fabrics for ath...

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