computers (65)

Poppa’s Got A Brand New Carry-on Bag

May 25, 2014 at 5:32 pm

I’ve always had backpacks for airplane travel, eschewing suitcases and wheeled bags. I figured it was a good workout to have the weight on my shoulders, and I always walked up the stairs instead of using escalators, and never took the moving walkways. BUT on my last trip, I had so much weight, it wore me out. This time I got an Osprey rolling pack (with day pack, wheels, and shoulder straps), a new Da Kine day pack, and cut down on clothing as much as I could. Much improved.

   Even though I have a (11″) MacAir laptop, a bunch of camera gear, couple of books, and on this trip, a digital projector, the weight is on wheels — such a relief. Well, duh.

   Airports are stressful enough as it is. I’ll get my workouts in other ways. The strap is for a fairly aerodynamic camera bag, in which I have my new Olympus OM5-D10 with 3 lenses — gonna carry it in my city explorations here. The vest is a Columbia Omni-Shade — lightweight, bunch of pockets Also, stealth vaping — heh-heh — works in airports.

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I’m Doing 2 Presentations on Tiny Homes on the Move at the Maker Faire in San Mateo This Weekend

May 14, 2014 at 5:20 pm

This thing is huge — 50,000 people. And fun! Surprising to me because I’m hardly nerd-oriented. There’s a wide range of things going on here, from ultra-geeky to downhome funk. This’ll be the 4th time I’ve gone and I always have a great time. It’s savvy, friendly, interesting, and very well run. I wander all over the large fairgrounds with my camera. It’s great for kids, all kinds of robots wandering around, ingenious mobile vehicles, 3D printing (hot right now), the “HomeGrown Village” hall for gardening, homesteading, building, food preservation, etc.

   I’m doing 2 presentations on Tiny Homes On The Move:

    -Saturday May 17th, 3:30 PM on the Maker Square Stage in the Homegrown Village

    -Sunday May 18th, 3:00 PM on the Center Stage. Click here.

-Kevin Kelly will be talking about his best-seller Cool Tools at 1:30 PM Saturday on The Center Stage.

-Snowboarder Mike Basich (our star builder in Tiny Homes) will be talking about his remote mountain homestead and homemade ski lift at 2:30 Sunday on The Center Stage (just before me).

One thing: traffic is heavy. Check out the Faire’s suggestions. You can bring a bike and park a mile or two away. General Faire info here.

Finally: Lew and Evan will be manning a Shelter Publications booth in one of the maker halls on how we make books. They’ll be giving away free copies of the Tiny Homes on the Move mini-book and selling copies of the full-size book for $20 apiece (cheaper than Amazon).

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WikiHouses: Frames Cut Out of Plywood With 3D Software

February 18, 2014 at 3:59 pm

Good things come in small packages. Lacy Williams, an architecture student, and her boyfriend, Patrick Beseda, built a WikiHouse to live in during a field project in Utah

From: Jon Kalish

Subject: DIY Houses In The Internet Age: Some Assembly Required: NPR

Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2014

To: lloyd kahn

Click here.

Go read the comments. There’s a ton of ’em, mostly skeptical. My fave is “I approve of this article. The Big Bad Wolf.” 🙂

jk

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The Treadmill Desk

May 16, 2013 at 6:29 pm

“I am writing this while walking on a treadmill. And now you know the biggest problem with working at a treadmill desk: the compulsion to announce constantly that you are working at a treadmill desk. It’s a lot like the early days of cell-phone calls, when the simple fact that you were doing what you were doing seemed so amazing that most conversations consisted largely of exclamations about the amazingness of the call. …

“…people don’t run at treadmill desks. They walk at one or two miles per hour, which is slow enough so that it doesn’t interfere with typing or talking or reading. …”

-Susan Orlean in the May 20, v2013 issue of The New Yorker here.

What a brilliant idea. I’m looking on Craig’s List for a treadmill.

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Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, the book that changed the world

May 5, 2013 at 4:05 pm

From an article (long one) in yesterday’s The Observer, by Carole Cadwalladr, here. Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images

“…But then, it’s almost impossible, to flick through the pages of the Catalog and recapture its newness and radicalism and potentialities. Not least because the very idea of a book changing the world is just so old-fashioned. Books don’t change anything these days. If you want to start a revolution, you’d do it on Facebook. And so many of the ideas that first reached a mainstream audience in the Catalog – organic farming, solar power, recycling, wind power, desktop publishing, mountain bikes, midwife-assisted birth, female masturbation, computers, electronic synthesizers – are now simply part of our world, that the ones that didn’t go mainstream (communes being a prime example) rather stand out.…

“It changed the world, says Turner, in much the same way that Google changed the world: it made people visible to each other. And while the computer industry was building systems to link communities of scientists, the Catalog was a ‘vernacular technology” that was doing the same thing.…

“John Markoff, who wrote What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, says, simply: ‘Stewart was the first one to get it. He was the first person to understand cyberspace. He was the one who coined the term personal computer. And he influenced an entire generation, including an entire generation of technologists’.…

 

“Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, tells me how he first came across the Catalog when he was still in high school ‘and it changed my life. But then it changed everybody’s life. It inspired me not to go to college but to go and try and live out my own life. It was like being given permission to invent your own life. That was what the Catalog did. It was called “access to tools” and it gave you tools to create your own education, your own business, your own life’.…”

Sent us by Vic Long

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Ike & Tina Turner – On The Road: 1971-72

April 12, 2013 at 6:53 pm

Big night for me last night. After months of study and procrastination, I finally have a computer hooked up to the house TV. A Mac Mini, wireless keyboard with trackpad, and I have, like a trained monkey, learned to go between computer, TV, and DVD player. I wanted the computer rather than a “smart TV,” so as to have the full monty of options (not be limited by a smart TVs functionality).

 

Rick set it up and walked me through it, and last night I gingerly went into Amazon Prime and found: “Ike & Tina Turner – On The Road: 1971-72.”

   It’s grainy and handheld, like a home movie, and I was mesmerized. OMG! What a beautiful woman! Tina and the girls together – dancing and singing are just hi voltage — stunning. The roughness of the documentary is comfortable, you feel like you’re there. The photography is non-intrusive. The band, I mean Ike may have been a mean son of a bitch, but what a band! (“Proud Mary” is a great album of Ike and Tina’s, with chronological order of songs.) Tina is shown cooking, talking, rehearsing with the girls, she’s down to earth.

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Blogger Problem — No Response from Support

April 8, 2013 at 3:00 pm

Rick, who handles tech maintenance for this blog has been unable make changes on the blog’s template for the last several months. He’s tried repeatedly to get in touch with Blogger support, with no success. (Blogger no longer offers any direct support — just a forum where users can commiserate and try to answer each other’s questions).

The problem in detail is here. The quick summary is that every time he tries to get to the Edit Template page, it redirects immediately to a blank page, so that no edits can be made, and the template can’t even be replaced with an older backup.

This has been going on since Blogger stopped access through the old interface several months ago.

No support email gets any response, and repeated posts on the forum don’t either. Many other reports can be found in the forums concerning people who can’t get any help from Support.

If any of you have any suggestions, or especially if you have an inside track to some human being at Google who might help, we would really appreciate it. It’s time to change the masthead and update the listings for our books.

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Stretching eBook Gets Big Award!

February 11, 2013 at 1:30 pm

This is a big deal — what Rick (Gordon) has done here, that is. I’ve fended off doing various electronic versions of our powerhouse book Stretching (over 3-1/2 million sold) for over 10 years. We couldn’t find anyone to do what we wanted to do here, so Rick, our production chief and tech genius, did it himself. It’s just now out — for iPad & iPhones (not for any Amazon tablets).

Publishing Innovation Awards; Winner, Enhanced eBook: Stretching:

“This longtime bestseller from Shelter Publications celebrates its 30th anniversary in print with this ebook edition that thoroughly realizes the platform’s potential, proving that a simple concept can be the basis of a vastly improved product through careful, intelligent use of the technology. Stretching excellently performed its task — going beyond the print edition to create an excellent ebook.”

-Publishing Innovation Awards.

Here is the list of winners. Avalon Publisher Bill Newlin wrote us:

“A belated congratulations on this award!  It really is a big deal, particularly since the Enhanced Ebook category had the stiffest competition by far, including an entry from Workman and movie tie-ins from Disney and Harper Collins.  Truly a victory for integrity and craftsmanship, you should be very proud.”

 Stretching eBook available here: https://shltr.net/stretching-ibooks. If you happen to purchase it and truly think it’s wonderful, it’d be great if you posted a review in the iBookstore and on GoodReads https://www.goodreads.com.

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