Search Results for: label/build it/page/14/2011/04/making-it/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

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Your Open Floor Plan is a Death Trap

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Design
23 Comments
...g a door to confine a fire is no longer possible in newer home geometries. Building codes for commercial spaces require a certain amount of compartmentalization. Residential codes don’t require the same level of fire prevention through compartmentalization. In the interest of fire safety, perhaps it’s time we start requiring more walls in new homes and prevent those house flippers from removing walls in old homes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D...

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

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Bikes, Transportation
6 Comments
...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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A Report from the 2014 Heirloom Expo in Santa Rosa

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Gardening
5 Comments
...had a great time, as usual. I’ve attended every year since its inception in 2010. The Expo features mind boggling displays of what can only be called vegetable porn. Hint: if you hang around after the conclusion on Thursday evening you can score the display items. For two years in a row we’ve gone home with a rental car stuffed with heirloom watermelon and squash. But the real draw for me are the seminars and panel discussions. Above, some of the...

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Return of the Walkman?

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Appropriate Technology, Water and Power
15 Comments
...(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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