Making It

...ctions for a wide range of projects, from building a 99-cent solar oven to making your own laundry soap to instructions for brewing beer. Making It is the go-to source for post-consumer living activities that are fun, inexpensive and eminently doable. Our goal in this book was to provide really stripped down, simple projects that use only inexpensive, easy to source materials. We also tried to use the same materials and ingredients over and over a...

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Building a Makeshift Treadmill Desk

...s, although I’m standing on the side rails … Say something about your blog/homestead/books . . . I’m the author of the novel Place Last Seen (Picador USA, 2000), and have been blogging at Livingsmallblog.com since 2002. I’ve written for Culinate.com, Ethicurean.com and have a cookbook review column at Bookslut.com. I’ve been published in the Best Food Writing of 2010, and am currently working on a book proposal for a nonfiction book about finding...

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Urban Farm Magazine

...elly Yrarrazaval of Orange County. All of these fine folks have repurposed urban and suburban spaces to grow impressive amounts of food, a common sense trend popular enough to have spawned this new magazine. Editor Karen Keb Acevedo says, “Urban Farm is here to shed a little light on the things we can all do to change our lifestyles, in ways we think are monumental as a whole, yet at the same time, barely noticeable on their own.” The first issue...

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Bar Codes on Veggies

...rket, consumers use camera equipped cell phones to scan the QR code on the label. The code links to a mobile website detailing origin, soil composition, organic fertilizer content percentage (as opposed to chemical), use of pesticides and herbicides and even the name of the farm it was grown on. Consumers can also access the same information over the Ibaraki Agricultural Produce Net website by inputting a numbered code on each label.” Though we’re...

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Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Dealing With the Crisis of Overconnection

...quaint reference in 2013–the book, however is more relevant than it was in 2010). Powers does not take a finger waving “eat your Brussels sprouts” approach. Rather, he acknowledges the immense potential and usefulness of computers and smart phones while offering sage advice on using them intelligently. He draws on an unlikely set of philosophers, inventors and writers: Socrates, Seneca, Johannes Gutenberg, William Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin,...

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