Your Open Floor Plan is a Death Trap

...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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Saturday Linkages: Cat Houses, Office Gyms, Cooking in Compost and More . . .

A cat house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright Makin’ Gourmet meal cooked in compost: http://www.7dvt.com/2012earthiest-roast … The Fixer’s Manifesto http://manifesto.sugru.com Short film about Safecast, the hackerspace-created, crowdsource radioactivity monitoring project http://boingboing.net/2012/11/21/short-film-about-safecast-the.html … Vintage Cat House Designed by the Office of Frank Lloyd Wright – http://www.moderncat.net/2012/11/09/vintage-c...

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Reviving an Ancient iMac

...rs ago I tackled the arduous process of installing a solid state drive in a 2010 iMac, thus giving it a new lease on life. Unfortunately, it could only run a very old operating system making many of the applications I use unavailable. Just last week I discovered OpenCore Legacy Patcher, a free means of loading more recent operating systems on old Macs and other hardware devices. There’s a helpful YouTube tutorial if you want to give this a try: ht...

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Saturday Linkages: Fueling Up

...work … Free Heat for Your Home: Homemade Briquettes and Logs http://naturalbuildingblog.com/free-heat-for-your-home-homemade-briquettes-and-logs/ … Thoughtstylings Mark Bittman: A Simple Fix for Farming http://nyti.ms/VjNlZb Fueling up: http://we2our2.blogspot.com/2012/10/fueling-up.html … Health The Island Where People Forget to Die http://nyti.ms/S3Mitk Bikes Nice graphic showing why taking the lane is a good idea. http://ow.ly/eIgHH (via Commut...

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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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