Get a Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor From Your Local Public Library!

...you can check out just like a book. I’ve got one right now and I’ve been running around the house checking out our gadgets. Some appliances, such as the refrigerator, that cycle on and off need to be left plugged into the Kill A Watt for at least a day or longer to get an accurate result. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K2uBZKLOEg I found the instructions for the Kill A Watt a bit confusing. Naturally, I looked up a YouTube video for a clearer ex...

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The Technological Disobedience of Ernesto Oroza

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-XS4aueDUg When Cuba fell into crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union, artist Ernesto Oroza was just graduating with a degree in industrial design in a country with no industry or use for his skills. Almost all the engineers had abandoned Cuba forty years earlier during the revolution, so even before the “Special Period” of the early 1990s people had to improvise their own technology with cast-off parts. Oroza...

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Epic Homesteading Fiascos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QVhuNho0FI Kudos to Eric of Garden Fork for keeping the cameras rolling after this disaster. I think I would have been too dispirited to hit record. It’s particularly frustrating when months of work end in one catastrophic moment. In terms of personal disasters, skunks tearing through our salad beds comes to mind, as well as ruining three five gallon batches of home brewed beer one after the other. These sorts of...

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Random Acts of Beauty

...e, above, shows Burges’ extreme commitment to ornament and detail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRDD2hfAxAk Lastly, when it comes to screen time, I’ve been thinking about re-watching the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker, in particular. Like all of Tarkovsky’ work the film is poetic and ambiguous. In Stalker, Tarkovsky addresses two of the issues that keep me up at night: ecological disaster and a culture that has become overly literal minded....

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