Retro Recomendo: Nature

Recomendo - issue #458

Our subscriber base has grown so much since we first started eight years ago, that most of you have missed all our earliest recommendations. The best of these are still valid and useful, so we’re trying out something new — Retro Recomendo. Once every 6 weeks, we’ll send out a throwback issue of evergreen recommendations focused on one theme from the past 9 years.

Learn from Nature

Asknature.org is a free online tool where you can search thousands of nature’s solutions to various challenges. Like how a decentralized society helps ants to recover from a food shortage or how maple tree seeds twirl in a tornado-like vortex to increase the reach of where their seeds are planted. Just ten minutes a day exploring this website will get you thinking differently. — CD

Amphibian love songs

A few years ago I took an unforgettable night time tour in a Costa Rican jungle to listen to frog calls, and discovered that humans aren’t the only musicians on Earth. This playlist titled Amphibian Love Songs and Soundscapes took me back to that magical evening. — MF

Star gazing navigation

Stargazing apps on your phone are magic. They work like AR-augmented reality — overlaying the night sky with outlines of constellations, star and planet names, paths of the moon, and even satellite, comet and asteroid sightings. The apps are uncannily accurate, and easy to understand. There are free apps and expensive subscriptions, but I use Star Walk 2 which cost $3. It’s the best $3 space investment I’ve ever made. — KK

Namibia live stream

This live feed of a watering hole in the Namib Desert streams live 24/7. I drop in a couple times a week and I’ve seen so many different animals sharing the waterhole. I’ve seen zebras, wildebeests, warthogs, ostriches and lot of different birds. The camera has a microphone and night vision, so you’re always connected to this magical and awesome wildlife. — CD

Nature live cams

For a dose of awe and wonder head over to Explore. org and choose from almost 100 live nature cams available at any time. There’s ocean cams, bears, gorillas, puppies and kittens and other animal sanctuaries (this sheep barn can be pretty mesmerizing to watch when they’re in for the night). — CD

Identify nature app

There is utility and pleasure in being able to identify wild creatures and plants. But it’s a steep learning curve. The fastest way I found to learn is via the iOS app Seek, which will identify flowers, plants, fungi, animals, bugs instantly. It’s kind of magical. You point your phone at the specimen and it tells you the species about 95% of the time (in North America). The other 5% it can often identify the family. Someone called it Shazam for nature. The app is patient; you can keep asking it to ID the same thing you asked about before and it will will answer again with no judgement. Seek is free; it was developed by folks who did iNaturalist, an app that uses crowdsourcing to identify species, but Seek uses machine learning to render the ID instantly. I’ve been impressed by how well this magic works. Kids and teachers love it. It gives them a superpower to name everything around them. — KK

Gar’s Tips & Tools – Issue #197

Access to tools, techniques, and shop tales from the diverse worlds of DIY

5 Newbie Tape Measure Mistakes

I have watched so many tape measure tips and tricks videos over the years that you’d think I’ve seen everything. But there’s always more to learn about any tool, so it’s always worth giving them a peek. In this Honest Carpenter video, he covers things like not marking under the curve (that’s built into the tape for stability and strength), not marking too close to the case, and understanding how the end tab works for getting accurate inside and outside measurements. All pretty basic stuff, but definitely a must-watch for any beginner.

The Best Adjustable Wrench Might Surprise You

Adjustable wrenches are a must-have in any toolbox, but do you really need to spend over $100 on a Snap-On to get the best? Todd of Project Farm recently test-compared budget-friendly options (as low as $10) against high-end models ($136), putting them through strength, precision, and grip tests. Surprisingly, the $25 Milwaukee outperformed many competitors, offering a solid grip, six points of contact for better stability, and resistance to self-adjustment under vibration. Craftsman and SK also delivered impressive results at a fraction of Snap-On’s $136 price. For pros who need the absolute best and don’t mind paying for it, Snap-On still dominated in turning power and durability, but if you’re looking for big bang for your buck, Milwaukee is the way to go. Want a wrench that won’t round bolts and will literally last a lifetime? Weight, precision machining, and a solid adjustment screw make all the difference.

Getting Rid of Toxic Liquids

Did he just say he uses diapers? That was my response when I overheard an artist friend talking to another artist about how he gets rid of waist acrylic paint instead of dumping it down the sink. He buys cheap adult diapers, keeps them in his studio, and then when he’s done cleaning his brushes and tools, he dumps the waste water into the diaper. That got me thinking about other safe disposal methods for other toxics. Below is a video of Dirt Farmer Jay discussing various methods of getting rid of latex paint. What are some of the methods you use for getting rid of nasty liquids in in the shop?

Buying Locally

I’ve also always been a fan of the concept of resilient community, efforts to create local communities that are strong, that have intelligent systems in place for natural disasters and other threats, that encourage sustainability, small businesses, local farm-to-table, etc. Lately, I’ve made it more of a priority to support small businesses here in my small town, and every time I do, I feel like I’m contributing positively to our community’s growth and well-being. It feels good to go to the local hardware store, talk to actual people who know tools and materials, and buy from them rather than an online source. I also try and support small online businesses, like Taylor Toolworks and Adafruit.

3D Printed Soldering Station/Fume Extractor

I love this 3D-printed fume extractor that The Byte-Sized Engineer created to marry with the iFixit portable soldering station. As Zach points out, there are instances where you need your electronics to be away from your workbench. This little set-up is perfect for that. In the video, Zach tests out different ways of powering the 12-volt PC fan for the extractor before settling on using the second USB-C port thoughtfully included in the soldering station. He added a USB-C breakout board and a USB-C Power Delivery ‎‎(PD) board. Some CAD work and 3D printing later, and he now has a sweet little portable, battery-powered soldering station.

3D-Printable Solder Scroll

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A post shared by Prusa3D by Josef Prusa (@josefprusa)

In more 3D printing and soldering news, the 3D guru himself, Josef Prusa, posted this to his Instagram channel. It’s a solder spool pencil where your feed the solder to your workpiece with a scroll wheel.

More of Your Inspired Objects

I’m still getting fun and interesting responses to my inspired object piece from a few issues ago:

Michael Finn:
The Europiccola from La Pavoni is not just a thing of beauty, but an elegant tool that one must practice and work at to achieve coffee brilliance. Even if I never become a latte artist, my Europiccola will be my favorite expression of coffee making. This one is from 1983 rebuilt and used every day.

John Young:
My candidate is my Nikon F camera. This 56-year-old photo shows me, still in high school, using one that I bought from a returning Vietnam vet. After using it heavily in high school and college, it served me through a 30-year newspaper career and still functions as new after thousands of rolls of film. The design of the Nikon F — if not the durability –was mimicked by just about every camera-maker into the digital age. Few shop tools outside of a hammer could survive that level of use and abuse while maintaining functionality — certainly nothing as complex as a camera’s mechanisms.

Gar’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales is published by Cool Tools Lab. To receive the newsletter a week early, sign up here.

Last-minute Ticket Savings/Best Food Cities/40K Amtrak Points

Nomadico issue #151

Airlines Where it Pays to Wait

Is it better to buy flight tickets way ahead of time or wait until the last minute? The answer sometimes depends on the airline, as this study on last-minute ticket prices in the USA lays out. The conventional wisdom that it’s best to plan ahead is true for JetBlue, Hawaiian, and United. On those you’d pay 16% to 30% more than if you booked ahead. On the other hand, you could score a deal by waiting until the last minute for Alaska, Southwest, Frontier, and Spirit. It only averaged 3.6% and 3.1% less for those last two though, so do it for convenience rather than savings unless your trip will be on Alaska Air (a 22.6% difference).

Best Food Cities in the World?

You’ll surely find plenty to quibble with in this Time Out rundown of the world’s best cities for food (Medellin ahead of Lima and Mexico City, Cairo but not NYC or Tokyo?) Turns out that affordability was one of the factors and they asked locals to chime it, so cities full of picky cynics apparently didn’t fare well. Having any city in Central America on a list like this is just plain wrong, but it’s still fun to look through and think about for future trips. Plans for Lagos anyone?

Expat Stories From Mexico

If you’re looking to escape to another country, Mexico has a lot going for it and has great air connections to get in and out. Many of the articles out there don’t dig very deep into what life is really like for expats through, so if you want the real deal, check out this book from resident Janet Blaser called Going Expat Mexico. It contains 24 in-depth stories from those who have made the move, including one chapter from yours truly. Get it here in paperback or for Kindle.

40,000 Amtrak Points

I’ve got an Amtrak trip from Montreal to Albany coming up in June after recently riding from Atlanta to Charlottesville to go visit my mom and sis. The economy class legroom is more than you get in domestic business class on a plane, there are no luggage fees, and the staffers on my last trip were quite helpful. We arrived on time even. If you love train travel and you’re an American in the market for a new credit card, through the end of April you can get 40,000 Amtrak points by getting this one. If I didn’t live in Mexico I’d be jumping on it pronto.

A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.

What’s in my NOW? — Crystal Mangahas

issue #210

Crystal Mangahas is an Associate Professor Business at a community college in her town, after a career in management consulting and non-profit management. She occasionally contributes to her friend’s Steve’s podcast called Intern Steve and found on MixCloud.com.

PHYSICAL

• The FEED tote bag is my everyday bag and it’s almost perfect. It’s roomy with the right number and size of pockets. I need to pay someone to make a similar design but using oilcloth (or similar) fabric and with a zipper on top. This is my third bag: they come in a few colors, but are only available used at this time.
• I’ve been following Neil Finn since his days in Split Enz with his brother. My absolute favorite album of his is Crowded House: Recurring Dream on vinyl, preferably. I never grow tired of this music.
• Coleur Nature napkins are my favorite for our dining table because of their beautiful patterns and durability. I have the Pansy and Jardin styles, and I’m saving for the Poppies print.

DIGITAL

• The Signal Messenger app is easy to use, has end to end encryption, and is run by a foundation. I like that messages can be set to automatically delete after a certain pattern and group threads are straightforward.
• Libro.fm is my choice for listening to audiobooks, which I do everyday. I like that I can support my local independent bookseller when I buy audiobooks.

INVISIBLE

After all my years of cooking, I still need this advice from Alton Brown who explains how to read a recipe:

1. Sit Down: That’s right…sit down at the kitchen table and simply read the recipe all the way through. Don’t make notes, don’t make lists, just read.

2. Read It Again: Highlight any special procedures or sidebars that might change your timeline, like bringing butter to room temperature or soaking dry beans— that’s the one that used to get me. Be careful to note punctuation. For instance, “1 cup chopped nuts” is not the same as “1 cup nuts, chopped.” The first reference measures the nuts after chopping, whereas the latter measures before chopping.

It continues at https://altonbrown.com/how-to-read-a-recipe/.

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Memento Mori / Atlas Obscura

Issue No. 62

MEMENTO MORI – SPECTACULAR BOOK OF ESSAYS AND 500 PHOTOS OF THE DEAD AMONG US

Memento Mori: The Dead Among Us
by Paul Koudounaris
Thames and Hudson
2015, 208 pages, 9 x 13.3 x 1 inches (hardcover)

Buy on Amazon

One of my most unforgettable travel experiences was visiting the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora, near Prague. This small 19-century monastery chapel would be unremarkable, except that it is decorated with thousands of human bones and skulls. There are skull- and femur-decorated columns, hanging garlands of bones, a chandelier made of every bone in the human body, and a replica of the Schwarzenberg family coat of “arms” – that also includes leg, finger, scapula, and coccyx bones! The memory of that space makes any Halloween display seem tame and unimaginative.

If Kutná Hora isn’t in your travel plans, check out Memento Mori, a spectacular book of essays and photographs by UCLA PhD and art historian Paul Koudounaris. His 500 color photographs here are arresting, both in subject matter and photographic technique. The handsome hardbound book includes a stunning centerfold of a bejeweled and gold-encrusted mummy. The detail and visual opulence of the photo justifies the giant four-page spread. I enjoyed reading the informative essays about the use of human bones as a form of remembrance in cultures around the world, from Europe to Thailand, Japan to Peru, and from ancient times to the present day. Here’s just one fun fact: there are two venerated human skulls (ñatitas) enshrined in the homicide division of the national law enforcement agency in El Alto, Bolivia. These two cranium crime-stoppers have provided “clues to difficult cases and have been credited with helping to solve hundreds of crimes.” – Bob Knetzger

ATLAS OBSCURA – THE INTRIGUING WEBSITE OF LIFE ODDITIES MOVES TO ILLUSTRATED BOOK FORM

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders
by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton
Workman Publishing Company
2016, 480 pages, 7 x 10.5 x 2.1 inches (hardcover)

Buy on Amazon

It’s a big world we live in, full of fortune-telling fox-woman hybrids, libraries where books are chained to the shelves, rusting shipwrecks, and amusement parks at the bottom of salt mines. The website Atlas Obscura collects the most intriguing of them, and now Atlas Obscura is in book form, perfect for flipping through while waiting for water to boil. It’s plentifully illustrated, with photographs or drawings on every page.

This is not The Book of Lists, and it is not for young children. Many of the entries concern war or atrocities, and some photos are gruesome; the world is full of mummified limbs. The authors treat the subjects respectfully, and have done their research. The story of the Bicycle Tree in Washington State, for example, has both the glurgy and the factual versions.

Some entries are not location based, such as the two pages of entheogens from around the world, or the list of abandoned nuclear power plants. But most entries have the latitude and longitude for each attraction, and sometimes street addresses; you could use this as a guidebook for a particularly unconventional wanderjahr. – Sara Lorimer

Books That Belong On Paper first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair. Sign up here to get the issues a week early in your inbox.

Garden Supplies

Tools for Possibilities: issue no. 133

Best source for gardening tech

Peaceful Valley

Organic gardeners, both backyard and commercial, know this mail-order outfit as the premier source for organic farming supplies. They’ve got everything: Natural pest controls, insect traps, cover crop seeds in bulk, sticky tape in all varieties. I mean where else can you buy a gallon of milky spore disease (for Japanese beetles), or white fly parasites in quantities of a thousand, or red worm *eggs*, with a side order of bat guano? Not only do they carry mulching film in standard black, but they also have it in innovative silver, green or red colors as well — each spectrum producing different effects for different plants.

But this catalog is also useful in other ways. Non-gardeners and green householders will find hard-to-find products such as poison-free cockroach traps which use cockroach pheromones.

Best of all, Peaceful Valley collects the best gear for growers of any type. Here is your source for plastic deer fencing, the world’s best walk-behind Italian tillers, superlative hand tools, the best selection of drip irrigation supplies, and — my favorite — reusable foam seedling trays. You’ll find this source absolutely essential if you grow anything.

This catalog is a throwback to the mail order catalogs of old. 1) They tend to only sell the best stuff, not just the best-selling or most profitable , and 2) they still print it on paper. You can spend several evenings reading it with great profit. You get a short course in state of the art practices for small time farmer and serious gardening.

They have a pretty good website, too (but not as informative as the paper catalog). And they are easy to work with. — KK

Optimistic dreambooks

Garden and Seed Catalogs

Gardening catalogs are the very epitome of dreambooks. Some are quite beautiful, all ripe with the promise of fulfillment in a slightly other universe, but here are the three that make late winter in the heartland a little less bitter:

Seedsavers Exchange puts out a gorgeous catalog and promotes Earth-respecting attitudes with no preaching or guilt-laying. Their online version is, to my mind, among the best designs of its kind. Their descriptions usually include a few words about the histories and sources of their heirloom varieties — makes it hard not to feel involved with the ancient epic of how “weeds” got turned into the exquisite diversity of crop plants we take for granted these days.

Johnny’s Selected Seeds is a commercial version of a labor of love. It’s a real working catalog with limited color photos but a large and well-selected inventory of standard, heirloom, and organic veggie, herb, flower, grain, and covercrop seeds. What makes the catalog special is its generosity with information. If you need a tomato that resists some particular kind of rot, you’ll probably find it here. You’ll probably find it in other catalogs, too, but won’t necessarily know it. There’s extensive cultural, climate, and harvesting info that makes me resent almost all other catalogs for their lack of same. Johnny’s really wants their seeds to grow strong and prosper.

Gardens Alive is a southern Indiana seller of products for organic/”environmentally responsible” gardening and growing. Natural fertilizers, biocontrols (they grow critters like parasitic wasps and nematodes themselves), natural lawn magic, redworms, composting accessories — a fairly thick little catalog with basic graphics and all kinds of dreams for the garden geek. Dozen-page guides to plant diseases, nutritional lacks, bugs. I get the same kind of thrill pawing through this jammed volume that I used to get with Edmunds or American Science and Surplus or the fireworks spreads, or, well, Whole Earth Catalog — It just makes my hands itch to get out there and tinker. — David Walker

Specialty root source

Potato Garden

Ever since I encountered fingerling potatoes in European restaurants I wanted to grow some of my own. I find these small fat-finger-shaped tubers have a nuttier, richer taste than regular potatoes. Potato Garden in Colorado is a mail order source that sells a dozen varieties of fingerlings and it’s been fun trying various breeds. Potato Garden also introduced me to scores of strains in “main” potatoes. And they offer an exotic variety of live starters for other root crops, such as garlic, onions, and sun chokes. Their catalog provides enough basic info about growing and storing roots that it serves as a one-stop short course. For spring delivery you need to order early. — KK

• Sun Chokes: Native of North America, a type of sunflower whose tuberous roots have been eaten for millennia by Native Americans. The first recorded discovery of sunchokes in America apparently occurred in Native American gardens along the eastern coastline in the early 1600’s. The Indians called them “sun roots”. Sunchokes are delicious eaten raw as they have a crisp, juicy texture like water chestnuts. We like to slice or grate them for a zesty addition to any fruit or vegetable salad. We have found that steaming or boiling is the best way to cook them, with a little butter and Real Salt.

Once a week we’ll send out a page from Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. The tools might be outdated or obsolete, and the links to them may or may not work. We present these vintage recommendations as is because the possibilities they inspire are new. Sign up here to get Tools for Possibilities a week early in your inbox.

What’s in my NOW? — Crystal Mangahas