Craghoppers Clothing/Cheap Japan Flights/SE Asia Hotspot

Nomadico issue #160

Craghoppers Clothing is Back in the USA

Ever since ExOfficio went into decline after a buyout (they only sell underwear now), it has been more difficult to find tough travel clothing meant for adventurers. That was partly because UK apparel company Craghoppers pulled out of the U.S. market for a while. I’m happy to say they’re back in action at CraghoppersUSA.com and I’ve been trying out some of their “guaranteed for life” rugged shirts and pants, many items treated with Insect Shield to keep the bugs at bay. They also make treated skorts, leggings, and other items for women too. See my rundown here and get 15% off if you click from there or directly here with code TL15.

ZipAir for Cheap Japan Flights

Via partner Kevin Kelly (and of Recomendo), we’re getting reports of people finding crazy low flight prices to Japan on budget airline ZipAir. (They’re so cheap the domain is zipair.net—couldn’t afford the .com!) Kevin says one friend got a $300 round trip from the USA West Coast to Japan and another found a round-trip deal for $276. Lie-flat business class flights can be as low as $1,408 from Los Angeles to Tokyo if you pull up the next few months of dates. The website looks like a Coding 101 school project and the contact info is limited though, so be sure to have travel insurance in place. And expect to pay add-on fees.

Travel Fee Avoidance for Canadians

I often highlight tips for keeping transaction fees to a minimum while traveling, but I’ll be the first to admit that USA citizens have a lot more options than those in most other countries. My blogging buddy Bri Mitchell covered the best steps for Canadians though in her Substack newsletter The Weekly Traveler. Get the scoop here on what she advises for travelers from Canada in terms of debit and credit cards on the road.

Southeast Asia’s Top Nomad Hub

Chiang Mai has been the top digital nomad destination in Southeast Asia for about as long as people have been working remotely from a laptop. Bali was a close second, with Canggu especially getting plenty of transplants. James Clark of Nomadic Notes knows the scene in the region better than anyone though and his recent travels have convinced him that Da Nang in Vietnam is now the champ. Getting my attention: “part of the 27 km coastline that goes all the way to Hoi An” and “beer is somehow cheaper than a coconut.”

What’s in my NOW? — Musa Gathuru

issue #215

My wife and I call Kenya home, but we love to visit other places. We love to read, and we love to learn new things. As long as I am learning something new, I am happy. — Musa Gathuru

Links:
Productivity Blog
Travel Blog

PHYSICAL

• Beat up old guitar: my guitar is an old guitar that a friend gave me after she fell off a bodaboda (local motor bike transport) in Uganda and got the side bashed in. It sounds reasonably okay, and probably matches my skill level since I started to learn late in life. Here’s the thing: Since I started learning to play, it has brought me immeasurable pleasure and joy, even when the sounds emanating from it were more akin to an animal dying than actual music. And not just playing and singing myself, but my enjoyment of other people’s music has intensified, since now I actually have an appreciation how skilled they actually are. I think everyone should learn how to play an instrument at some point in their lives. You are welcome.
• Beat up old book reader: I bought an old second hand Kobo book reader on ebay. It cost me 50$ and I use it at least once a day. I am on course to read 52 books this year as I have done the last few years since I rediscovered my love of reading. As Carl Sagan says: “What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs.” Apart from the bit about trees, everything he says applies to electronic books as well. My only challenge is remembering what I read. But my one invisible thing has helped me out with that.
• Macbook: I have tried a bunch of different laptops, and macs really do have it worked out. The perfect blend of usability, power, battery life and durability. And prettiness, which is an underrated quality to look for in a laptop. My last mac lasted 10 years before I had to upgrade it, which is pretty good value for money. I use my mac for pretty much everything. I don’t own a TV, so it is my entertainment center, communication, music, learning as well as the host of my 2 digital things.

DIGITAL

• Zettelkasten: A zettelkasten is a personal knowlege management system made famous by a German social scientist named Nicklas Luhmann. It made him so ridiculously productive that he pumped out more than 70 books and 400 scholarly articles in his lifetime. This was before computers, so his knowlege management system worked with index cards. I started managing all my notes and data using this system a couple of years ago, and in this short time I have built up a couple of thousand notes linked to each other. I use an app called ‘Obsidian‘ because it stores my notes in plain text that I can read on any computer or phone, and allows me to link between notes. You can view a subset at the link below, but the long and short of it is that I am soo thrilled to be able to find my information in a natural organic way. As Luhman says, it becomes a ‘second brain.’ It sounds freaky, but you can hold ‘conversations’ with since it keeps on throwing up interesting stuff that I created in the past. And since I created, it’s always interesting even if I forgot I wrote it!
• Johnny Decimal system: I tried a bunch of different file organization systems, and the JD system is pretty simple, and yet powerful enough to manage all my files. It applies to everything: task management, file storage, cloud file storage, etc. There is a simple index file which keeps track of the number assignment, and each folder gets a number in the format xx.xx. The genius of the system is that you are not allowed to have more than 2 levels of folders, so there is a kind of natural limit that forces you to keep things simple. Since I started using it I stopped spending ages looking for lost files, and know where everything is.

INVISIBLE

Barbell reading method

I have an exceedingly bad memory. I like to joke that my memory does not discriminate: I can forget your name, face and details regardless of your age, color, origin or gender. And it is not limited to forgetting names and faces. I can read entire books and not even remember whether I read the book or not. On more than one occasion I have reread a book in it’s entirety only to realise towards the end that I have actually read it before. Enter the Barbell reading method. Read once to get through the material. Mark sections that have value to you to revisit later. This may be electronically, or physically by highlighting. Then go back and process the marked sections. This is best done by rewriting the section (and this is important!) in your own words. You might do additional research, or draw charts, or mindmaps, or whatever you want. You might apply it to your own life, or area. You might think of examples. You might even change your mind and write down the reverse of what the original source says. The important thing is that this step makes it yours. Henceforth, this idea now belongs to you and can be used for whatever you want.

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Fragments of Horror / Woman Rebel

Issue No. 71

FRAGMENTS OF HORROR – WONDERFULLY CREEPY STORIES THAT ARE AS WEIRD AS THEY ARE ORIGINAL

Fragments of Horror
by Junji Ito
Viz Media
2015, 224 pages, 5.8 x 8.2 x 0.8 inches (hardcover)

Buy on Amazon

Fragments of Horror is a collection of eight wonderfully grotesque and creepy short stories. A seemingly bright and pretty architecture student terrorizes a family while having a bizarre relationship with their house. A boy tries to hold his body together after cheating on his girlfriend. The number one fan of a novelist finds herself in a sick situation trapped in the writer’s basement. A young woman who just eloped can’t understand why her new husband won’t come out from under his futon covers.

Written by horror manga artist Junji Ito, whose influences include H.P. Lovecraft, the stories are as weird as they are original, while the art is crisp and expressive. What I love is the way these stories, set in modern Japan, are about seemingly normal lives that take a twisted turn into the bowels of darkness. They remind me of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, the ones that start off in a stylish, mid-century modern house or office where sharp-looking people go about their ordinary lives… until a crack in normality suddenly appears, the creep factor sets in, and they enter the twilight zone. My only regret is that there aren’t more stories here, but fortunately Ito isn’t new to the genre and has many other titles that I’ll be picking up soon. – Carla Sinclair

WOMAN REBEL – PETER BAGGE’S GRAPHIC BIO OF THE CONTROVERSIAL FOUNDER OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD

Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story
by Peter Bagge
Drawn and Quarterly
2013, 104 pages, 6.8 x 9.1 x 0.7 inches (hardcover)

Buy on Amazon

When I think of Peter Bagge, I think of his work in Hate or Neat Stuff, both comics about teenage angst and living in suburban malaise. Therefore, when I saw he wrote Woman Rebel, a biography of Margaret Sanger (the woman responsible for Planned Parenthood), I was curious. Once I started reading, it made perfect sense. Discontent, anger, and frustration with the status quo translate perfectly to the life of Ms. Sanger. Margaret Sanger is most famously known as the founder of Planned Parenthood and for her endless fight for women’s access to birth control in the early 20th century. The book highlights key moments in Sanger’s life – it starts with her childhood (she was born in the 1880s to Irish immigrants) and takes us through her early work as a nurse, mother, and eventual activist.

What makes this biography unique are Bagge’s illustrations. His faces, especially the contorted, frustrated ones that work in Bagge’s earlier work (say, on his teenage anti-hero Buddy Bradley) cross over really well. There is a lot of sadness and anger in Sanger’s life, whether it was her mother (who had 18 pregnancies in 25 years) or Sanger herself facing the many smug and misogynistic critics attempting to halt her progress. There is a lot of emotion in this book, the same that made Sanger persevere.

After reading Woman Rebel, I went online to learn more about Sanger and was immediately slammed by my own ignorance as to what a controversial person she is today. Aside from any expected generic criticism of Planned Parenthood, she is described as a “racist eugenicist” and guilty of “black genocide.” Bagge addresses this controversy in his afterword “Why Sanger?” He delves into how she advocated birth control to women of the KKK (that’s right – the KKK – another reason why this book is full of surprises) as well as black women living in Harlem. Bagge gives lots of examples of how her legacy has been dissected over time, and Bagge’s description of her critics is great: “It’s an irony festival!”

Regardless of how you feel about Margaret Sanger’s legacy, this book is an illustrated education into a woman, that as Bagge puts it, “lived the lives of ten people,” and is directly responsible for the access women have to reproductive health care in 2016. The only actual criticism of this book for me is that I wanted more. The book could be twice the length, and dive deeper into more details of her life, because it seems they are endless. – Amy Lackpour

Chemical Experiments

Tools for Possibilities: issue no. 142

Best home chemistry lab book Illustrated Guide to Home

Chemistry Experiments

The very best chemistry experiment book for kids is the legendary and long-out-of-print book, the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. Published in 1960 during the heyday of home chemistry, it was meant to accompany the millions of chemistry kits that were sold each year to typical American kids. You got real experiments with real chemicals. Not like the so-called chemistry sets today which boldly (and insanely) advertise they contain “No Chemicals!”

Among many other things, the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments told you how to make chlorine gas from bathroom supplies, hydrogen from flashlight battery parts, and rayon from scrap paper, etc. You can see why it was not reprinted in the decades following because of concerns about safety. I used my copy, which is now worth $200 on eBay, to do all the experiments in the book when I was 12, and went on to build a chem lab in my basement. As many kids did.

You can get a decent free PDF version of the Golden Book on BitTrorrent. Even better, there’s a new great book for home-made experiments, updated for today: the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments from the tech publisher O’Reilly. The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments is aimed at home schoolers, high school students, and lifelong-learning adults. It is aptly subtitled “All lab, no lecture”

The Golden Book encouraged playing around with molecules, with no agenda beyond demonstrating the power, principles, and diversity of chemical reactions. The Illustrated Guide on the other hand is a basement laboratory manual meant to teach you the basic working principles of chemistry. How to mix a molar solution. How to titrate. How to do quantitative sleuthing. It claims that if you go through all the chapters you’ll be prepared to pass the college-level AP Chem Lab test. You would also be able to work in most laboratories. And of course, you would probably be able to follow most chemistry recipes from the internet, or at least to figure out what you need to make something chemistry-wise.

At the very least, this book should help cure any hysteria you — or your kids — might have about CHEMICALS. Sure, they can be dangerous, like your car. But we are surrounded by chemicals, and the only way to understand their real risks is to mess around with them.

Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments is a fantastic teacher for chemical literacy. It will show you or your kids how to work with chemicals, and why they are fun. Some of the experiments are visually entertaining. Others are scientifically important. It’s got wise advice about the few bits of equipment you’ll need for your lab. The Illustrated Guide very handily provides substitutions for ingredients whenever possible, so you can work around harder to acquire or expensive chemicals and gear. And it very conscientiously gives proper disposal instructions for substances at the end (the first I’ve ever seen in a chem book). The author is thrifty, using no more stuff then necessary, and always suggesting ways to purchase the minimum equipment.

Other than the hidden Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, there are simply no other decent books for the beginner chemical experimenter. The ones you find in libraries are simply useless trash. The stuff on the internet is haphazard and inconsistent. Follow the instructions here in the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments and you’ll be on your way to chemical literacy. — KK

• Everyone rightly treats strong acids with great respect, but many students handle strong bases casually. That’s a very dangerous practice. Strong bases, such as solutions of sodium hydroxide, can blind you in literally seconds. Treat every chemical as potentially hazardous, and always wear splash goggles.
• MAINTAINING A LABORATORY NOTEBOOKA laboratory notebook is a contemporaneous, permanent primary record of the owner’s laboratory work. In real-world corporate and industrial chemistry labs, the lab notebook is often a critically important document, for both scientific and legal reasons. The outcome of zillion-dollar patent lawsuits often hinges on the quality, completeness, and credibility of a lab notebook. Many corporations have detailed procedures that must be followed in maintaining and archiving lab notebooks, and some go so far as to have the individual pages of researchers’ lab notebooks notarized and imaged on a daily or weekly basis. If you’re just starting to learn about chemistry lab work, keeping a detailed lab notebook may seem to be overkill, but it’s not.
• CHEAPER BY THE POUNDDo not overlook the advantages of banding together with other home schoolers or like-minded hobbyists to buy chemicals in bulk. For example. a vendor may charge $3 for 25g of a particular chemical. $5 for lOO g, and $9 for 500 g. If you need only small amounts of chemicals, you may be able to cut your chemical costs dramatically by arranging with other homeschooling families or hobbyists to order chemicals in larger quantities and divide them among you.The cost advantage is particularly great for chemicals that incur hazardous shipping surcharges. For example, if you order 100 rnL of concentrated nitric acid for $5. the vendor may add a $35 hazardous material shipping surcharge, for a total of $40. But if you order a 500 mL bottle of concentrated nitric acid for $15, the same surcharge applies, for a total of $50. If you divide that chemical with four friends. each of you gets 100 mL of concentrated nitric acid for only $10.
• MICROSCALE EQUIPMENTThe recent trend in chemistry labs, particularly school and university labs, is to substitute microscale chemistry equipment and procedures for traditional semi-micro or macroscale equivalents. Microscale chemistry, often called microchemistry, is just what it sounds like. Instead of using standard test tubes, beakers, and flasks to work with a few mL to a few hundred mL of solutions, you use miniaturized equipment to work with solution quantities ranging from 20 pL (microliters, where one pL equals 0.001 mL) to a couple mL.Using microscale equipment and procedures has many advantages. Microscale equipment and procedures are less expensive than standard equipment and procedures, which is a major reason for the popularity of microscale chemistry. Using microscale equipment and procedures means that chemicals are needed in very small quantities, which are safer to work with and easier to dispose of properly. Microscale also makes it economically feasible to do experiments with very expensive chemicals, such as gold, platinum, and palladium salts. Setup and teardown is faster, allowing more time for actual experiments, and cleanup usually requires only rinsing the equipment and setting it aside to dry.Against these advantages, there are several disadvantages to microscale chemistry. First and foremost, everything is on such a small scale that it can be difficult to see what’s going on. For example, you may need a magnifier to examine a precipitate (or even to determine whether there is a precipitate). Because of the small scale, measuring or procedural errors so small that they would have no effect on a traditional scale experiment can greatly affect the outcome of a microscale experiment.

Best source for chemicals

Elemental Scientific

his is the best source for buying small quantities of chemicals — always a challenge in these days of chemical hysteria. Elemental Scientific will sell to individuals, online, with no paperwork or license needed. They have a very respectable selection of about 300 reagents and compounds. More than enough for most educational purposes, or for most basement experiments. You can purchase all kinds of acids, corrosives, poisons, explosives and dangerous stuff that you can not get elsewhere — but only in small quantities. That’s fine, because a small amount is often all you want for doing experiments, and many chemical supply outfits will sell only larger quantities if they sell to you at all. Elemental also offers glassware, lab equipment, and general experimental paraphernalia. They cater to homeschoolers and hobby experimentalists. If you’ve ever tried to buy chemicals elsewhere you’ll recognize what an incredible resource this place is. Most chemicals will be shipped UPS, but a short list of 18 especially hazardous chemicals need extra hazmat protection, which is an added charge. — KK

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.

Festivo/The Sound of Love/Zester

Recomendo - issue #466

Calendar of festivals

I try to coordinate my travel to exotic places with local festivals that occur at the same time. Trouble is, there’s been no easy way to find out which festivals are happening where. For example many traditional celebrations run on a lunar cycle. So I built a calendar that will show me all the festivals in Asia that are happening on a particular day. Or I can look at the map and see what festivals occur nearby and when. My site is called Festivo. It provides the local festivals of Asia—which are crammed with color, costumes, and traditions—in calendar format. It’s open and free to all, no ads. If enough people (besides myself) find it useful I will expand it to Europe, Africa, and the rest of the world. — KK

The Sound of Love

The website The Sound of Love offers a beautiful way to experience love songs. For four years, the creator collected comments found beneath love songs on YouTube, carefully selecting nostalgic and touching stories about longing, love, and loss. You can read these personal stories and memories here while you listen. There’s also a Spotify playlist featuring all the songs from The Sound of Love. (Discovered through Dense Discovery.) — CD

Wide zester

While I like my thin microplane for super-fine zesting, I use this wider grater from Allwin a lot more. The key difference is its curved blade profile — it really bites into whatever you’re grating. The wider surface area also means you can get through a block of parmesan or a big knob of ginger much faster than with a traditional narrow microplane. — MF

Contain your mess

My husband is the gardener of the family, and this Repotting Mat is his favorite gardening tool. It’s quick to snap together and contains all the soil mess when potting plants. He has two in different sizes. I imagine it would work well for keeping track of small parts too, if you’re working on other projects. — CD

Leak detectors

Three separate acquaintances of mine recently suffered significant, expensive flood damage in their homes as a result of water leaks while they were away. It’s not an uncommon disaster. After some research I settled on the best recommended solution: a set of wireless water sensors from GoveeLife ($100) that emit a loud alarm and send a text/email to my phone if they detect water leaking. I placed the 6 small wireless units below sinks, near toilets and water heaters, etc.—the most likely places to leak. They were very easy to pair with my home wifi and phone app. Downside is that in a few years their batteries will need to be changed. Upside is they really work and in my testing, just a small drip or a millimeter of water will elicit an immediate alarm and text/email message. — KK

Peanut butter hack — use a massage gun

After seeing a video of someone using a massage gun to force every last drop of mayonnaise out of a bottle, I decided to try in on a plastic jar of unmixed natural peanut butter. I pushed the business end of the gun against the side of the jar and marveled at how quickly the vibrations mixed the separated oil with the solids. A week later, the peanut butter remains perfectly blended. Note: I’ve only tested this on plastic jars; use caution with glass containers. — MF

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Book Freak 182: The Let Them Theory

Letting others live their lives will free you to live yours, by Mel Robbins

Get The Let Them Theory

The Let Them Theory is an approach to relationships and personal growth that teaches you how to stop trying to control things you can’t control — especially other people’s behaviors, opinions and reactions. Drawing from psychology, neuroscience and decades of research, Mel Robbins explains that when you let others be who they are and live how they choose, you free yourself to focus on what truly matters: deeper connections, better boundaries, and the ability to channel your energy into growth and happiness for you and others.

Here are four key pieces of advice from the book:

Stop Managing Other People’s Emotions

“You can’t want somebody’s sobriety or their healing or their financial freedom or their ambition or their happiness more than they do. You will be ready for your loved one to get better, way before they are. Which is why you need to remain in control of your response to the situation. You are not dealing with someone who is capable of rational thought or healthy decision-making.”

Let People Show You Who They Are Through Their Behavior

“People’s behavior tells the truth about how they feel about you.”

Focus on What You Can Control

“Every human being is dealt a different hand in life and you can’t control the cards that someone else is holding. The more time you spend staring at someone else, the more you miss the entire point of the game.”

Go First in Building Connections

“Let me be the first to introduce myself. Let Me be the first to say, ‘I’m new here. How long have you lived here?’ Let Me be the first to say, ‘‘If you ever want to go for a walk, let me know. Here is my number.’”

What’s in my NOW? — Musa Gathuru