Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Dealing With the Crisis of Overconnection

February 19, 2013

...who among us actually feels better after an info-crack bender? Published in 2010, William Power’s Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age , is a reasonable, balanced and practical guide to navigating our hyper-connected age (and how ironic it is that the fast pace of technological change makes “BlackBerry” a quaint reference in 2013–the book, however is more relevant than it was in 2010). Powers does...

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Reader Feedback About Facebook

Mr. Homegrown

March 2, 2018

Thoughtstylings

8 Comments

...wess that I don’t possess but it’s the kind of solution that we in the DIY homestead world need to consider. We’re about making and doing things, right? One of those tasks might be creating the open source and decentralized internet we were promised in the 1990s before large, thuggish robber barons like Facebook arrived on the scene. I’ve blogged in the past about mesh networks set up with old routers and, apparently, this is what’s being done in...

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California Gardening Guides

Mr. Homegrown

May 27, 2020

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

2 Comments

...few useful links for Californians on how to start a vegetable garden. All gardening advice is local. One of the tricky things about California is that we live in a Mediterranean climate and most of the information on what, how and when to plant vegetables is written for places where it snows. So here’s a few links courtesy of our Extension Service that should help you get started with your vegetable garden: Burpee California Planting Guide Vegeta...

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Admitting Gardening Mistakes

Mr. Homegrown

August 17, 2015

Garden Design, Gardening

15 Comments

...As Hermann von Pückler-Muskau advises in his 1834 book Hints on Landscape Gardening, I know of nothing more pathetic than when a failed detail is allowed to remain as an eyesore in a completed project, rather than being removed and replaced by a better idea, simply because it has already cost such and such in the first place, and changing it might cost again as much. . . Once changes have been found advisable, though, it is also dangerous to put...

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On the Many Frustrations of Gardening: Pierce’s Disease

Mr. Homegrown

July 5, 2009

Gardening, Mistakes

17 Comments

Damn Pierce’s Disease! I really wish that glossy gardening magazines would, every once in a while, devote some space to capturing some of the soul-crushing disappointments of tending plants. Can we please have a cover of Sunset Magazine featuring an aphid and slug infested cabbage? Frustrations are compounded when a beloved perennial plant you’ve been growing for years comes down with a fatal disease. Such was the case when my flame seedless grap...

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