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Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection has been running some new stunning ads on TV. They are stunning to me because it shows that we may finally be reaching the point where we're no longer fighting over the reality and actually moving to a place where we will take some serious...
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So here's a cool idea I came across in GOOD: There's a website called CarbonRally.com where you read about ways to help the environment by cutting CO2 emissions. Well, that's not such a big deal, since there are about 5 billion websites out there dedicated to helping people help the...
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As much as I like talking about me, sometimes I like to talk about others as well. This week I wanted to talk about a local crafter/maker who runs My Imaginary Boyfriend. Her work has been in a number of magazines like Adorn and Bust and featured on boingboing and a whole host of...
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So maybe I have been spending too much time just cribbing from EcoGeek, but boy do they do a good job. Today's article on Chicago's Merchandise Mart (a 4 million sq. ft. building with its own zip code) is pretty eye opening. Aside from Ecogeek's recent realization that buildings use...
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Actually, a bit more. At Shell's yearly Eco-Marathon, the winner this year was a French team from St. Joseph La Joliverie, who went 7,148 miles on a single gallon of fuel. It makes 4 dollar per gallon gas seem like a real bargain.
Of course, these cars will not be coming to a...
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OK, so you can't buy any of these cars new today and the safety regulations pretty much have eliminated them from ever being mass produced again, but I love these little microcars. The video is from a show called Top Gear, an English show for fans of car buffs, fans of things getting blown...
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So I was browsing around my normal haunts for a green energy story to write up and came across this short excerpt about starting your own country over at WorldChanging:
Step 1: Make sure you are eligible
As tempting as it might be to declare your cubicle a sovereign state, customary...
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So I know this is Jason's title, but I'm going to borrow it for today. We've had a number of people, myself included, who are having some browser issues and so I thought we could all share our tips and tricks for getting the site up and running on our respective setups. For myself, I...
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I've done a lot of work related to the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) over the years. This area of the code generally covers commercial construction and multi-tenant housing for things like handrails, door swings and door hardware, ramps and thresholds, etc.
San Francisco has some...
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Just came across an interesting piece (via EcoGeek) that looks at green power and sets up a matrix of "response scenarios" for global warming. It's a pretty cool way of at least analyzing the road ahead. The drivers in the matrix are centralized/decentralized and...
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Yesterday, I spent the day with some dear friends of mine who just had their first kid. He's was born Friday and as we were hanging out we got to talking about baby-proofing. I haven't done a lot of it, though I have installed some of these devices for a long-term care facility so I'm...
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One of my recent projects was replacing all of the 100 year old double hung windows in a house with new windows. During the project, I also had to rebuild a pass though, which was also single hung. I love these old windows because the mechanics are so simple yet so over the top...
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I got a call to do a job out in Concord, CA last week and set up an appointment for Monday. When I got out to the job, the guy was looking for someone to run some plumbing and electrical for a new pool heater and pump. Didn't seem like a big deal at first.
When I got out there, the...
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I've talked before about Smart, a car company owned by Chrysler that cranks out really sweet little cars for the European market and are planning full roll out in America next year. It's time to add another feather to their cap. The Financial Times just came out with a story about the...
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I've been doing a lot of thinking about switches over the last week both because I've had a bit of electrical to do and because politics is one of the most metaphorical of businesses. Electrical and electoral ideas about power are poorly matched for a number of reasons, and when the terms...
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A little while back, a buddy of mine (well, acquaintance anyway) set up a blog called Ecogeek.com He's an awesome guy and I've been remiss in not cross posting most of his stuff. Anyway, stolen directly from the pages of EcoGeek for your reading pleasure:
An Off-Grid Vertical Farm...
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One of the challenges that has come up during this phase of this construction project is dealing with the coved ceilings. Coving was done in the public rooms (entry, parlors, dining room) of many American houses from 1900 up until the Second World War. There are some post war examples...
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Sometimes, in the course of a repair or remodel, things need to be broken in order to fix them. I was in Minnesota recently visiting family and my cousin had an outlet that didn't work. She'd recently had a cable line installed and she thought the cable guy had nicked it. After...
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After taking some time in St. Paul and Chicago, I'm back to the house full time. Now that the lower floor is done (well, almost done), we're looking at the plaster upstairs. When we lifted the house, the already cracking plaster became even more loose. No large chunks have...
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Oh, how I love this stuff. Though the idea has been around for a while and the term has existed since the 80's (as a take off on cyberpunk), the Steampunk style of design seems to be coming into its own. The idea behind steampunk is to recreate the aesthetic of 1800-era design by...
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In our ever expanding quest to rid ourselves of our reliance on foreign oil, there is a new hydrogen generation process that is making the rounds. The idea is that aluminum and water react to create aluminum oxide and hydrogen, and by adding gallium to the mix, the aluminum continues to...
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Things have been quite busy in the MakesThingsGo house these last two weeks. A week and a half ago, we decided to talk to our real estate agent about selling the condo and she advised us to put in on the market the following Sunday. So the race was on.
First up was getting the...
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Last weekend, I went to the Maker Faire in San Mateo with a two day gathering of hackers, builders, geeks, etc who take advantage of all the technology scattered about and try to put some of it to new uses. It was an incredible day.
Some of the highlights included the folks at the...
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"The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." - William Gibson
It looks like Congress is moving on trying to get some reforms into patent law, and there is a bill currently pending that is going into markup in Congress right now. While this is sort of...
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The season is rapidly coming upon us where we need to get our houses ready for the long slow roast of summer. I'm planning on spending the next few weeks talking about different things you can do with different levels of difficulty and cost to make your home more pleasant this summer, cut...
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Few things distinguish houses of different eras better than the trim used to decorate them. Moldings have a lexicon and a language all their own, in the same way that flowers once did. But the use of trim and different types of molding can still be used to transform a common...
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This week I'm tying up the electrical on the space I'm working on. One of the challenges has been the vast number of three and four way switches involved. I've got a staircase with a landing that leads to a door, so code requires a switch at the top and bottom of the staircase and one...
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Busy week this week. First of all, after many times around the loop, PG&E is replacing my gas meter tomorrow. I'm very excited to get back to where I was three weeks ago. When they took the meter, it seems they also deleted the "point of service" in their computer,...
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You'll have to forgive me for going back to this topic. I was all ready to do an in depth how-to on hooking up a tankless water heater with pictures of the unit I installed this week. I even wore my B.com shirt for the day. Then the memory stick in my camera went out so it was a...
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This isn't another David Blaine stunt. A scientist named Lloyd Godson is going to seal himself inside a box and drop the box underwater to become part of a self-contained ecosystem for 2 weeks. He'll be eating algae and using algae to process the air he breathes and using a stationary...
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So just when you think you're on the home stretch in a building project, a new wrinkle comes up. As most of you know, I'm entering the final stages of a very long building project with my girlfriend. This week, we're getting the hot water heater (a tankless Takagi) and I was getting...
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As a lot of you know, I was in Bako this weekend for the Bloggers' Roundtable or whatever we're calling it now and I was also help my mom out with a few projects around the house. So we added an outdoor outlet for her fountain and patio lights and hung up a hammock.
The outdoor outlet...
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First, on a personal note, I just passed the last of the pre-final inspections on the house I'm working on, which is a great relief. I went to get the last structural inspection (just some roof nailing stuff) and realized that the plumbing and electrical hadn't been signed off as OK...
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I've been holding off on writing about green autos for a number of reasons. There is a lot of info out there, a lot of new tech out there, pluses and minuses and hidden costs etc. There are hybrid cars that get bad milage (including some hybrid cars that get worse milage than their...
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A few weeks back, I posted something about an old phone device I had found under a house. I kept toying with it and had made some headway. Then, the other night, I was having trouble sleeping and was flipping through some old catalogs I have. Very old in this case. They...
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Looks like California was only slightly ahead of the curve. In news last night, Australia has decided to ban regular light bulbs by the year 2010.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/...
Federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull is announcing today that...
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Pete’s comment the other day about churches tapping into the power of God by way of renewable energy got me to thinking about writing up another bit on some of the stuff going on in the realm of renewables. One of the exciting developments that is just getting started is using algae...
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So I've been talking for a little bit about putting together something on swapping out outlets and switches and have hesitated simply because I wanted to include pictures and animations and a YouTube video link and Smell-o-vision and...well, you get the idea.
At some point though, a good plan...
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Every once in a while, I come across something that I have never seen before and cant figure out. Sometimes the context helps to solve the problem. Sometimes a Google search will bring up the answer. Other times, you end up with something that you just can't suss out. This...
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Electricity is the heart of modern life. While you can’t have a city without plumbing, our modern way of life is truly enabled by electricity. Everything you do it touched by it and a century after it began to make its way into our lives, we still haven’t figured out...
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Since I’ve been on a plumbing rampage lately, I thought we’d continue by hitting sinks, and showers and tubs (Oh my!). These are all basically the same thing on different scales; a bathtub or shower is just a walk-in sink. So how does it all go together? We’ll...
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Ah, the mystery of the toilet. Push a button, press a lever, pull a chain and your waste magically disappears. In this age of computers and plastics, the toilet is a dinosaur of modern invention, essentially unchanged in a hundred years. Despite this, most people have a lack of...
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As promised, I’m taking a look today at hot water and how to make it hot. We know that most of the water that comes into your house is about 40-60 degrees, depending on the season, how deep your incoming water line is, etc. So how do we turn that tepid water into a nice warm...
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There is a lot of talk about being green these days and a lot of ways to do it. Since most of us aren't building homes from scratch, what are you doing to make your own home more green?
I suggest compact fluorescent lighting as the first step. Fluorescent bulbs generally outlast...
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