Category — URBAN

A new book, How to predict the weather with a cup of coffee: And other techniques for surviving the 9-5 jungle, takes the survival tips of Tom Brown and Bear Grylls and adapts them for where most of us live – the urban environment.
You’ll never look at a hotel trouser press in the same way again . .

COOK A MEAL IN YOUR DISHWASHER
If your oven is broken, you can cook a meal in your dishwasher. For a tasty dinner which will be ready in just over an hour, season four salmon steaks and wrap them with dill and lemon in a foil parcel with tightly crimped edges.
Place on the dishwasher’s top shelf and set it to its longest, highest setting. A 2-3cm thick steak will cook perfectly on a 70-minute hot cycle.
BE A HOTEL ROOM CHEF (more…)

Time is slipping away...

So, just what does that mean? I can tell you from personal experience and from the responses I have received from people over the years that it definitely has different meanings to different people. From living completely without any utilities, no electricity, water or gas (think hunter’s cabin, wood stove, candles or kerosene lamps, no running water…), to generating one or more of these items on site yourself (think solar panels, wind power, methane digester…), I even had one person say that for him, living “off the grid” meant living so remotely that the government couldn’t find you, essentially hiding from the world. For some people it brings up a picture of a hermit living in a shack on a remote location, others envision a state of the art home that independently takes care of the needs of all occupants from food and water to electricity. (more…)

There's worse places to live

Architecturally, the dwellings run the gamut — railroad cars, travel trailers, plywood shacks, doublewides and two-story ranch-style homes.

Here in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, residents are beyond the reach of power lines and piped water. A few have solar panels or small wind turbines. For others, like a shanty built by  Liz Owens, 57, the cost of renewable power sources and drilling a water well is prohibitive. Generators and plastic water tanks are common yard features.

The local County is concerned about the proliferation of informal development. The area consists of nearly 50,000 acre and half-acre lots platted decades ago by Amrep Southwest.

Lots have been selling for less than $5,000 this year, said Tracy Venturi, a Realtor familiar with the area. (more…)

Many stars are termed “eco-celebrity,” but few have taken their commitments as seriously as Daryl Hannah.

The actress first made famous as a beautiful android in the dark thriller Blade Runner, and most recently as a one-eyed assassin in 2003 and 2004′s Kill Bill Vol. I & II, is a save-the-world girl at heart. She became a vegetarian at age 11 (more…)

Field - cynical bag

There is it seems no limit to the craven way the media accepts celebrity claims to have gone eco.

Chain-smoking New York designer and stylist Patricia Field (Sex and the City, Ugly Betty) has teamed up with Diet Coke to create a limited edition shopping bag design – “made entirely of recycled plastic bottles.”

Says one particularly moronic tabloid: “Patricia Fields shows you can be a fashionista and a green goddess at the same time with this must-have shopper bag” (Now Magazine).

The idea of Diet Coke as a fit partner for an eco-initiative is as repellent as the drink itself.  And there is something particularly shameless about a snobbish stylist and fashion designer (two of the most wasteful occupations on the planet) putting herself forward as a savior of the environment. (more…)

Dobreski or is it Vrcakovski?

Off-Grid.Net readers have finally helped us unmask the culprits behind the  Magniwork magnetic generator scam.

The fraudsters have been swindling gullible buyers with a $50 DIY guide to building a magnetic power generator which claims to produce free energy. Physicists and energy experts have dismissed the product as nonsense.

The brains behind the operation is a shady East European scientist and entrepreneur known as Igor Dobreski. His main accomplice and web-master is a slightly more engaging but still dishonest character called Vojdan Vrcakovski. (more…)

Click to buy There is too much information around about how to go green.  Many are left wondering who to trust and just how they can individually make a difference.

Every day we make hundreds of small choices that can influence our future and the planet’s. (more…)

Reading, learning, it’s what I enjoy doing. Before the internet, I would go to the three local libraries in my hometown, I would check out as many books as each on would allow, take them all home, read-read-read until I had gotten through all of them, then I return the books to their respective homes and start all over again. I tended to read non-fiction, I preferred them over fiction most of the time. With the exception of a few notable authors such as Stephen King, Jean M. Auel, and such…

With the advent of the internet and ebooks, I mostly read what I can get in digital format, including audiobooks. So these last couple of books I’ve read, I have held in my hand, turned pages, it was quite old-school for me. J I love it. Now, on to the book review. (more…)