low tech home tech
I just finished Haruki Murakami’s memoir-ish writing/running book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and I think it’s the clearest and most concise writing I’ve read about what it feels like to run. Picking this book up coincided with an attempt to ease back into running after a long, multi-year, pause. Somehow, […]
I’m on the always inspiring Garden Fork podcast this week talking with “East Coast Eric” about my adventures in 3D printing, woodworking disasters, and a really useful note taking program called Obsidian. If you subscribe to Eric’s podcast you get to hear an update on my Little Free Blockbuster Library.
I never thought I’d want or need a 3D printer but, somewhat impulsively, I picked one up on a buy nothing group I belong to. It’s a Creality Ender 3 V2, a budget printer that’s been around for many years. You can certainly get a much better printer, but this thing works perfectly for what […]
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here. All is well but I’ve been busy with a few projects that I’ve been meaning to blog about. I’m also gestating a zine as a venue for my more outré thoughtstylings. More on that in another post. My main DIY task for the past few months […]
I helped a friend take two cats she’s currently fostering to Santé D’Or to get their shots and I got to hang out with all the foster babies for a few minutes. The spicy cats have to wear a little tie so that people know to keep an eye on them. I watched this cute […]
When I see wildly divergent movie reviews I know to head straight to the theater. Such was the case with a new film, Rabbit Trap. Reading between the lines of the, mostly, bad reviews I could tell that this was probably going to be an interesting film that breaks the mold of Hollywood’s tired formulas. […]
One of the many benefits of woodworking as a hobby is the privilege of customizing furniture to fit your house. You can make a unique piece to fit a unique room. See also Gesamtkunstwerk, of which I’m an adherent, somewhat to the annoyance of my forgiving spouse. Most, but not all, of my furniture pieces […]
Forth of July fireworks here in Los Angeles start up in June with random explosions, including a few at odd hours, like 4:30 a.m. The identity of the weirdo early morning fireworks revelers is a great mystery to me. By around 8 p.m. on the 4th there’s a constant roar of fireworks all over the […]
An errand took me back into Los Angeles from my Pomona pet sitting gig today and I wanted to follow up on yesterday’s post about what’s going on. Whenever some big news event happens here, such as Trump’s chaotic immigration crackdown or the horrific fires back in January, the media tends to make it seem […]
To travel from one place to another, particularly in this, our fragmented postmodern age means to traverse liminal border spaces: highways, airport waiting rooms, bus depots, interstate highways–what Fredric Jameson calls the “hyperspace” of late stage capitalism. Yesterday I found myself on a longer than expected liminal journey, making my way, via public transit, from […]
I’ve discovered, as an Apple cult member since the 1980s, that their devices tend to last. But after a number of years Apple effectively makes them obsolete by no longer allowing you to update the system and then they end up in the landfill. A few years ago I tackled the arduous process of installing […]
Kelly and I made a pilgrimage this weekend to friend of the blog Daniel Hawkins’ spectacular and improbable Desert Lighthouse. The fully functioning, solar powered lighthouse sits atop a hill overlooking the town of Hinkley just west of Barstow. Hinkley is best known for unfortunate reasons, due to water contamination caused by the Pacific Gas […]
“East Coast” Eric over at Garden Fork has a new newsletter called Cool Stuff and it’s full of, well, cool stuff–like growing rhubarbs in the dark, waterproof Airtags for your puppers, and lots of pictures of puppers. Sign up here.
What could go wrong in a recipe with just four ingredients–flour, water, salt and yeast? When it comes to making bread, it turns out, a lot. In addition to the some recent, notable bread disasters, such as the one above, I felt that I had also fallen into a lazy rut, baking loaves that were […]
I’ve long kept an eccentric morning habit, reading the Daily Office Lectionary followed by some philosophy tome before the distractions of the day begin. The, often dense and ridiculous, readings have varied over the years and, if I have any regrets, its been that I’ve worked backwards rather than starting with the Greeks. Western philosophy […]
This week I managed to cross off a years-in-the-waiting “honey-do” request from Kelly: fixing the busted drawers in a built-in hallway cabinet. Our house, now in its 105th year, was built to less than perfect standards. The nailed together drawers just didn’t work anymore. The first step was to replace the wooden runners with high […]
If you’re a local you can do a favor for two of the many victims of the fires. Joseph Abrakjian and his partner Pam Watanabe, who run Seed Bakery, lost their home in Altadena. Thankfully, the bakery is still running. Please consider dropping by for lunch or breakfast. The food is amazing. Joseph generously helped […]
I have a goal in 2025 of reducing the number of subscriptions that parasitize my bank account. Towards that end I searched for an alternative to Evernote, a note taking app that I used to keep track of everything from financial information to bike tire sizes to combinations for locks. Sometimes it’s handy to have […]
I had hoped to begin the year with a few lighter posts about projects around the house, but the events of the past week have started 2025 off on a dark note. Yesterday, on my evening dog walk, I found a charred page from Winston Churchill’s book The Gathering Storm that must have come from […]
Early this morning a neighbor texted a photo of a charred page from a screenplay that landed on his roof over the night. That page likely drifted from the Eaton fire twelve miles northeast of us. Other than horrible air quality we’re safe but I made the mistake of checking the news on the cesspool […]
When I asked a friend what he was going to do for New Year’s Eve he told me that he was going to go to bed like he always does. Then he informed me that Kelly and I once hosted a small New Years gathering where we all sat around and listened to Art Bell’s […]
Even though it seems like Christmas cards are less of a thing (we get fewer every year) Kelly and I wanted to send some out. We weren’t happy with the commercial options so I went looking on the interwebs for some high resolution antique cards and found a nice selection in the digital collections of […]
Detail of a miniature of the Nativity, from the Bedford Hours, France (Paris), c. 1410 via Medieval Manuscripts .
A traveling exhibit from the Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum landed at Japan House this month and it’s both a fascinating look at the intricacies of Japanese joinery as well as a beautiful example of how to do good exhibit design. From the catalog, The exhibition is structured around the 5 pillars of daiku culture: a […]
“What I always expect from history is surprises, and surprises which I still haven’t succeeded in explaining, although I have made great efforts to understand.” – Jacques Lacan The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man It feels like we’re on the cusp of an epochal change with what has come […]
I gave a neighbor’s high school kid a ride to school last week and when he got into our beater car he informed me that the interior, “smells like a Jersey Mikes.” Before I could finish apologizing he informed me that this was a compliment. It turns out we’re both obsessed with sandwiches and the […]
There’s a hole in my late night soul once occupied by the late, great Art Bell. No talent can ever replace that voice, emanating as it did from the vast mysterious desert of the Southwest, spinning tales of the great mysteries of this land, from UFOs, to Bigfoot, to ghosts to the shadow people that […]
Our first book The Urban Homestead went to print just as the financial crisis of 2008 hit and its success I attribute, in part, to the well known fact that in times of economic stress people turn to subjects such as growing food, canning, mending, and preparedness. Enthusiasm for these subjects surged after the stock […]
Given the outsized coverage of the U.S. presidential reality show in the past eight years it seems that the old cliche “all politics is local” no longer holds. Never mind that in our highly interconnected world all politics is actually international. But you have to begin somewhere. I’ve focused on the local for the last […]
When we first moved back to Los Angeles in 1998 I had a recurring dream that our house had many more rooms than I knew about. That our long neglected bungalow needed a lot of work, no doubt, triggered these nightmares in my subconscious. I’d often wake up remembering a bible passage I’ve always found […]
10 year anniversary of the Detectorists The joy of clutter On fairy tales
One tip instead of a link this week: Sahara rockers Etran de L’Aïr are touring North American and you should go see them if you have a chance. Kelly and I caught their show at the Lodge Room last night and we want to turn into groupies and follow them around. The Tuareg people have […]
I wrote about it earlier this summer but want to remind my California friends to download the MyShake app. I was pet sitting for friends in Pomona last Saturday week when, in the early hours of Sunday morning around 3:51 am, the app’s loud warning sound beeped simultaneously with a 4.5 earthquake that rattled the […]
When I was up in San Francisco visiting family my friends there thoughtfully gifted me with a snack for my long Amtrak journey back to LA, Snoop Dogg’s O.G. Bar-B-Que Cheddar Cheese Puffs. Like other celebrity driven food products this cheese puff proposes a kind of synesthesia by asking us, “what would gangster rap taste […]
How Google is destroying Root Simple Medieval manuscripts online Communal Luxury: The Public Bathhouse Joy
It seems as though all the spaces we inhabit–from our offices, schools, markets, and malls to the innermost sanctums of our homes bask in an obscenely bright light reflecting off a banal ocean of white paint. We go about our lives in spaces as bright as surgical theaters thanks to all those ceiling cans Chip […]
I was binging the Garden Fork podcast and the host Eric mentioned the importance of colonoscopies. In August, I had one and the doctor asked me, as I left, to promise to tell everyone I know about the importance of this procedure. So here we go. Yes, it takes a day and a half away […]
Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning Oscar Wilde’s house decorating tips Cookies!
In September, when the rest of the country begins chugging pumpkin spice lattes and preparing for Christian Girl Autumn we, here in Los Angeles, enter into a month when our mild Mediterranean climate becomes more like a desert. This past weekend the temperature hit 111ºF (43.8ºC) and our neighborhood had almost 48 hours without power. […]
The last time I was on the Garden Fork Podcast, the host, “East Coast Eric” challenged me to build a Free Blockbuster Little Library and I finally made good on the promise. I managed to install this garishly painted DVD, VHS, CD and video game themed little free library in our parkway yesterday as the […]
The Tomb Effigy of François de Sarrà: A Grim Reminder of Mortality (Via @silverlakelee) Are songs from God? Download More than 2,500 Images of Vibrant Japanese Woodblock Prints and Drawings From the Library of Congress
The problem with watching films by Andrey Tarkovsky is that they make every other film seem like a waste of time. Even Tarkovsky’s lesser films are still better than any other film ever made. And you’re left wondering how a mere mortal could be behind work of such transcendent detail and beauty, particularly someone who […]
I’m working on a longer post on this subject that I’ll put up when I’m finished reading the Tanizaki Junichiro essay, “In Praise of Shadows” that this NHK doc is based on. Let’s just say our living spaces, particularly in the early 21st century, are completely over-saturated with light. HGTV wants us to live in […]
The price we pay, here in Los Angeles, for not having hurricanes and tornadoes (for the most part) is the ever present threat of an earthquake. Yesterday, a minor quake interrupted our brat summer here in Silver Lake. I heard it described as “4.5 on the hipster scale.” The New York Times couldn’t resist piling […]
Paintings of cats stealing food Where Facebook’s AI Slop Comes From The tiny gardens of Anne Ashberry Dog starts a house fire in Tulsa, Oklahoma We close with a joke for my LA friends
Back in May I began an overly ambitious look at why we’re all addicted to our devices via the ancient concept of Acedia. This task was a practical one in that I’ve found myself, way too often, lying in the internet gutter like a junky on a bender. After considering the notion of Acedia, heaven […]
Kelly and I attended a screening last night of a new documentary, seven years in the making, profiling the work of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, best known for the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. I read this book when it came out and it had a profound influence on […]
Vintage Smart (Fully Intact) FM Radio Uncover the Secret Lives of Snakes Strolling in the back alleys where the Enoden runs in Kamakura Help undue medical debt