Book Review: My Side of the Mountain

...ok-learning alone. He needs a kindly old man to demonstrate the whole fire making process to him. So not only does the book show that failures are the merely part of the road to success, it also teaches us that sometimes we can figure things out by ourselves, if we persevere, but that sometimes we need good books, and sometimes we need good people to help us and show us the way. Erik and I speak of this often, in our books, on this blog and in our...

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The Sound of One Hand Snapping

...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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LED Light Bulbs

...act fluorescents to LED lights, since LED bulbs have a more directed light making them perhaps better for applications such as bedside reading lights, where you don’t want to bother a dozing partner. LEDs, due to their exceptionally long life — upwards of 60,000 hours — are also great for installation in hard to reach locations where the lights will be on continuously. LED lights, however, still bust the wallet with their high price. This issue re...

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Block Party Weekend

...SurviveLA dropped in this weekend on a block party thrown by the apartment homesteading pioneers at the Los Angeles Eco-Village. Founded in 1993, the Los Angeles Eco-Village is a so called “intentional community” of folks who, basically, give a damn and are interested in improving our forlorn, polluted, and abused city. The block party featured ecologically savvy and self-reliant touches such as solar ovens to cook the vegetarian buffet and photov...

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Yucca!

...ntal irrigation and have multiple uses and the yucca plant, in addition to making rope, can also be used for basket weaving, as a detergent, a white wool dye, a quiver for your arrows, and it also produces edible flowers, seeds, and fruit. Some important distinctions here. First of all we are not talking about “yuca” which is another name for the cassava plant, a tropical shrub of the spurge family. There are also many species in the yucca family,...

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