Yep, a lot of the Taunton stuff is nice. I try to keep my eye on Fine Woodworking and have a number of their books tucked about the place in odd corners.
No, I'm talking about electric lighting fixtures. Some of them big, dangly things made out of metal. Hand made glass insulators at the original incoming to the house. Nifty stuff. A house I lived in in town still had all of its gas fixtures intact though, and functioning. I know what a gas fixture looks like. I've used them. I know what a gas fixture converted to electric looks like too. We've got a lot of those in town as well. That house was built in 1823 though. Pre Victorian, Greek Rivival.
Sadly the wonderful Italianate Victorian mansion we once bought from an 87 year old woman who was born in the house only had a couple of the original fixtures left. Lots of plaster moldings on the ceilings though and all the iron floor registers.
When I said proximate to GE I meant very proximate. I'm living back in town at the moment, in a 17th century neighborhood. My house is one of the new ones though. Only about 100 years old. Edwardian. Nice old place, but clearly more "modern" than houses built only a few years before. We liked being modern around here. Turn of the century you know. Time for new style. Still had a coal bin in the basement when we acquired it. With coal in it. I used to love to follow the coal trucks around the neighborhood when I was a kid and pick up stray lumps. If I go up to my attic window and look out I can see where the first tungsten filement lightbulb was made. They had already been making generators there for nearly 40 years at the time.
We were very proud about being modern here in those days and had a history of being so. We had passenger rail service in 1831. Before that was the Erie Canal. We had already been the major port of embarcation for all points west before that. And now, we were the City that Lights the World. Some family members still have first printings of Maxfield Parish's Edison-Mazda promotional paintings. You can find their cheap reprints in just about any poster shop in the world these days. Ecstasy is my favorite, but I have to make due with a modern poster of that one.
And virtually every house built here in the 1920s, and for miles around, well out into what was farm country in those days, had electric lighting installed as original equipment. And any number of Edwardians beat them to it; and some Victorians even before that. Do you think Edison wouldn't have electric lights in his house?
Later on the first commercial television broadcast in the world was made just four blocks from me. Just around the corner from where Lafayette used to stay when he was in town and right next to Washington's prefered lodgings. And then the first color broadcast. The building now houses the science department of a local college.
Then something went wrong. We became the cockroach capital of the world. Hailed as such on news broadcasts across the country. C'est la vie.
Anyway, at least in the more populous areas of the northeast a farm house built in the 20's with electric lighting was no particular rarity. Some cities were already installing their second generation power plants by 1920 to keep up with the demand as it spread, not only throughout the city, but out into the surrounding countryside. Some of these towns had installed electric street lamps in the 1880s which meant there were now 50 year olds who had lived with electric lights since they were children and simply took such for granted. Older construction, already fitted for gas, well, sometimes those didn't get electricity until much later. Sometimes much, much later. The house I lived in with gas lighting was in the early 60s. It's all gone now. Someone "restored" the house.
In the Tennesse Valley and out in the middle of nowhere Iowa, well, perhaps things were different.
But around here; we used the power of The Man who Made Lighting and the lamp made by the Wizard of Menlo Park.
No, it's not really. While he lived in his cabin in the woods (only a mile out of town mind you) he also kept his commercial schoolroom, lectured, made few of his out of state tourist journies, sold his produce commercially and continued to be an active member of the transcendentalist literary movement.
It was, as he stated, an experiment in minimalist living, and the form it took was that of a gentleman farmer and scholar reduced to the barest essentials. He also happened to love nature.
No, I've never met a "back to nature" person who PETA would want to have much to do with. PETA isn't much for slaughtering livingstock and keeping milk cows and hunting. PETA are the very antithesis of the back to nature folk and can only exist in cities. The Amish are religious Luddites, not back to nature people, perfectly civilized and like it that way and very effective capitalists. They tend to think of the back to nature folk as city loons, and they're right.
The back to nature folk are sort of a cross between hippies, survivalists and new agers.
They're not only anticapitalist, they're antimoney and often antitrade. They have some vague romantic notions about "being one" with nature and try live totally and completely self sufficiently, by farming mostly, with some hunting and gathering thrown in, and making absolutely everything themselves, eschewing everything they perceive as technology (without any apparent realization that farming itself is a technology, as is a house and a candle and a steel hoe). They can't quite make up their minds about whether they want to be hermits or communists. They virtually all come from cities (country folk think of them as city loons, and they're right) and they virtually all fail.
You can do mountain man/hermit just fine if you want. A good knife and you're set. A gun is really, really nice to have though, and matches make life easier. Every one I've known also has some product to sell now and again, even if it's only racoon hides. But then a good knife is actually pretty high technology. A gun is even higher. You're not going make your own of either out in the woods or on your little farm thingy. You have to buy them.
The only back to nature folk I've ever met who "made it" were the ones that eventually realized that the way you make a living from a farm was by being a farmer. You grow crops in excess of your needs. You sell them and then you spend the money on things you need. Things that other people make in excess while you're farming. Things like oil lamps, plough blades, maybe a radio, or a knife, or an electric generator, or, gasp, modern medicine ( 'cause those natural herbs just didn't seem to do the job after all on little Johnny's appendicitis).
Because farming is a technology of civilization. Go figure.
Thoreau sold crops and taught school. For money. To buy things with. Things he couldn't make himself. Like flour (remember I said don't grow grain?) paper and ink. His family owned a factory in town that made pencils.
I only know of one way to go completely back to nature that works. Full blown late stone age living. It can be done. There are certainly at least a few people living like that right now, although fewer every year (The knife and the T-shirt seem to have made it nearly everywhere now). I've tried it as an experiment (just because it's the sort of thing I do sometimes for fun. Really). I can do it. Others less suited for it than I have managed with a little extra to work with. Selkirk, for instance. It isn't what most people would call "fun." Oh yeah, don't get sick.
City person. In the woods. Naked.
Riiiiiiiight.
They don't even know how to make a proper pointy stick.
Well, off the grid really only means just that. Not dependant on the grid. The grand infrastructure of corporate supplied services. It doesn't necessarily imply self sufficient; and there are whole off the grid communities scattered about.
Of course in Mexico I lived in villages that were off the grid and yet otherwise perfectly normal villages, largely self sufficient, but only as a village. The buddy system has some real advantages. That's one of the advantages of going off grid in a camper or boat, even if you're solo. When you need a buddy you can find one and they take care of each other.
But yeah, if you're out in the middle of the Atlantic on a 20' boat you'd damned well better be able to take care of yourself, and if you can that's probably the best place to be if things go all to hell.:)
I can't say I recommend self dentistry as anything but an emergency measure though.
Let's say that off the grid means not dependant on services and implies the ability to be self sufficient when and where the need arises. You have a certain security that way.
Right now I'm obviously not off the grid (Ok, I could be actually. I've powered a compter by pedal generator, but I'm not). In fact I'm city dwelling.
But when all the lights went out last summer most of mine didn't. People couldn't buy food because all the stores are computerized these days. I had plenty of dried stores on hand and fresh produce in the yard. None of it went bad in the fridge because I don't rely on refrigeration. My toilet didn't flush, but that's because my toilet doesn't flush.
I passed a powerless night almost exactly as I always do. Entertaining the neighbors for a bit with my guitar, then reading a physics journal and working on my greek for a bit by the warm glow of my oil lamps. (No Slashdot though).
And if push came to shove I know how to make my own oil to fuel them. Petroleum isn't exactly the only source of hydrocarbons in the world.
So at the moment I'm quite the little urban urchin. No one should get the idea that I'm Grizzly Adams or anything. Nor am I a Luddite. My shelves aren't lined with anti tech survivalist tomes, unless you consider O'Reilly manuals, Halliday & Resnick, the CRC manual and The Theory of Rotating Stars survivalist tomes. Yes, my light is an oil lamp, but the cabinet it sits on is stuffed with electronic componants and test gear.
I just play the game by different rules and values and with a skill set appropriate to those rules and values.
On the other hand, yeah, I'm perfectly capable of wandering off into the state park and flat out disappearing in the woods and remaining there in comfort, by my own standards, for as long as I like, and can get to those woods in a day, with all my gear, without recourse to a motor vehicle. I can get by with little more than a sturdy knife and box of matches (just to make it easy the first few days) if I have to and occasionally do just that. I part it's my technical background that allows me to do it. Physics, astronomy, chemistry, engineering, biology and the history of those are all very valuable things to know out in the woods alone. The average survivalist can survive like that. I can live.
And oddly enough I'm not sure exactly how I came by those skills, per se. I mean obviously I learned them over time, and I've read a great deal, and "practiced," but I didn't take courses or anything. They don't cover roots and berries in Diffy Calc. It's just the way I've always lived, since I was a child, I like to do things on my own and I picked things up as a went along, even most of my science; and invented three quarters of it simply by paying attention and thinking about things.
I've thought of it. It would take a few volumes.:) Just the idea of living off the grid is a full book. Witness Walden.
Well, lessee again. Dirty never killed anyone you know. Unsanitary will kill you, unpleasantly at that, but it's a modern city myth that dirty and unsanitary are the same thing. In any case, what makes you think you'll suddenly forget how to wash? Going off the grid doesn't mean suddenly forgetting everything you know about living. Get some water. Use it. In one of the adobe huts I lived in, the shabbiest one of the bunch, I had to clamber down a nearly sheer embankment 1/4 mile to a spring for water. I didn't go dirty. I just hauled water.
I remember reading a piece on the web about some guy who lost his job and decided to live in a tent. He was in your position. He had money. He didn't "have" to, but the idea of living cheaply, "close to nature" and off the grid appealed. So he left his apartment, got a tent, found some woods and moved in. (Come to think of it one of my physics classmates as an undergrad lived on campus in a tent for two years before they made him stop. He prefered it. Us physicists are weird you know). Then he got another job, but continued to live in the tent for awhile. He didn't last. He hated doing things like having to walk too far every morning to jump in an ice cold stream to wash.
Well, he obviously never bothered to think very much about what he was doing. Why did he suddenly forget you can go to K-Mart and pick up a collapsible 5 gallon water jug with a spigot on it? Did he do something daft like not buy a good camp stove? And if he did, why did he suddenly forget that he could use it to heat bath water? For that mattter why didn't he bother to acquire an army surplus collasible bath? (There's an entire episode of M*A*S*H that revolves around one of these for goodness sake). Or he could have obtained a five gallon paint bucket on trash day, some old hose to go with it and made himself a gravity fed shower, which, in fact, could also double as a complete gravity fed plumbing system (even cities still have gravity fed water tanks. You shouldn't have to be from the woods to think of this). Fresh water is a dear commodity when blue water sailing. You can't waste it on showers. Running out can be fatal. But no one need go dirty. You take an old fashioned tea kettle. Fill it with salt water. Put it up to boil. Fresh steam comes out the spout. You catch it on a sponge and have a nice, toasty warm sponge bath.
So you're afraid of being dirty. So don't be dirty. Wash. There's a couple dozen perfectly nifty ways to accomplish this if you don't get locked into thinking that "wash" means "upstairs bathroom."
Bored. Books are cheap. You go to a library sale on the last half day and walk away with shopping bags of books at a couple dollars a bag. A lot of O'Reilly books are showing up at these these days. All the "dime" novels you can choke down. Complete encyclopedias for next to nothing. Even lots of books directly relevant to living off the grid like gardening books. Our ancestors read a lot.
They played a lot of music too. Get ahold of a fiddle or something.
But on the whole I've never found being bored to be an issue except when leading a fairly conventional life. Living off the grid is active and interesting as all hell. You have do things, make things, invent things and think about things. The greatest thing about it is there's very little distinction between labor and leisure. The concepts lose most meaning when you don't have a boss. Work is leisure. leisure is your work. There's no "job." It's just living. Living can be fun.
Ok. Family issues. I'll add a book. J. Krishnamurti; Think on These Things. Chapter 11. Conformity and Revolt. It might give you something to, ummmm, think on. The rest of the book isn't too bad either.
RV squatting in the woods. Actually, there's a small, very loosely knit community that's doing exactly that right now
Depends on where you're from I guess. I've lived in three. They all had original art deco electric lighting fixures in them. One still had the original wiring (shudder).
Remember that in the 1920s rural farmhouse didn't necessarily mean out in the boonies. More often than not it meant being situated right about where your suburb is now since they hauled fresh produce into the city, often on a daily basis. They didn't fly the stuff in from Argentina and a farm had to be proximate to the city.
This sort of farmhouse generally got electric lighting about WWI in my neck of the woods (upstate NY, proximate to General Electric).
You seem to know a lot about this off the grid stuff. I read many of your posts and come off as this geeky woodsman how-stuff-works kind of guy.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
You saved money. Good for you. Most people in your position live a bit above their means and end up with all sorts of payments they can't make when the job goes away. You're ahead of the game already and show evidence of the sort of thinking that might make it off the grid.
An Adobe hut in Mexico is a lovely way to live. I spent a few months in a couple back in the late 60s. $20,000 should last you about 20 years if you live a bit American. You can live off the interest damn near forever if you aculturate. Yes, it really is that cheap to live there. Adobde is absolutely delightful to live in in the appropriate enviroment (desert}. Hell itself in the wrong one (rainforest). I've tried both. I enjoy it for a time, the desert is lovely, but I'm from the northeast mountains and start longing for trees and meadows after awhile. A bit of ocean doesn't hurt either.
Books. Lessee. There really aren't too many good ones. Most of them are written by "back to nature" types. There's a difference between back to nature and off the grid. One is a philosophy (generally propounded by city folk), the other is just living. Just living, on the whole, works better as a philosophy of living than a "philosophy of living" does. The trick is to adopt the proper mindset and adapt yourself to the life, rather than trying to force the way of life into some preconcieved notion of "the way things should be."
On the whole "nature" doesn't give a shit about "the way things should be" and just goes about her business as usual. If you get squashed along the way, well, that's natural.
The people who actually live like this don't normally write books about it. It's just normal life to them, why write about it?
But there are some exceptions and a handful of books not overtly intended for off the grid living that can be invaluable.
First off there's Walden of course, if only for inspiration, but there's a fair amount of very practical advice on living in there. Remember, the whole point was an experiment in living. Throw in Life Without Principle. If you read this and say "Yes! That's what life is all about" you'll probably have a shot at living off the grid. Anybody contemplating any sort of nonconventional living ought to read these. They're both available on the web.
One of the most valuable books you can possibly own if you're going to build any sort of shelter, from a shed to a mansion on the edge of town is Rex Robert's "Your Engineered House." If you've read my posts much you've heard me mention this one before. It's a must. Written in a conversational style that you can read like a novel and illustrated with his own crude pen drawings this book is a marvel. He covers everything in this book and will leave you wiser about home building than an entire library shelf full of other books.
***BUY THIS BOOK***
Did I make myself clear?:)
It's out of print. You'll pay at least triple it's original cover price to acquire it used (I'm not the only one who reveres this book. Last time I looked there were copies available on Amazon), maybe double that if you want a really clean copy with dustjacket. Pay whatever you have to. Diamonds aren't cheap.
Square Foot Gardening. How to grow the most food, the easiest. Forget everything you know about farming. Conventional farming is medieval ideas about how to grow food en mass for the masses. You want modern ideas about how to just grow food for you. This one will get you started. Supplement with any book about container gardening that catches your eye.
I'm afraid I've never seen a single book beyond the technique of growing food off the grid that was worth a crap though. Honestly, they're all pretty much garbage. You can cherry pick them for bits of info though
Actually, yes. Although not at the moment. A few years ago I was playing with LEDs a lot while working on data aquisition stuff. I thought it would be cool to use only rehargable LED lamps to light my place. I rather dislike cords. It worked quite well actually, and I intend to fit my next boat out the same way.
Mind you I didn't use them as a replacment for normal lighting as we know it. I used them more like a high tech oil lamp or candle so most people might have found the system lacking.
Japanese style lanterns make particularly lovely LED lamps. Quick, cheap and easy to make if you just want a little mood lighting without the fire risk of the real thing. Or try the old punch some holes in a coffee can trick.
Soon the lure of the light switch called though and I returned to using conventional electric lamps and conventional oil lamps. It was an interesting experiment though. I still keep a couple of LED paper lanterns on poles about the place for fun.
If I were going to build off the grid (like that boat or the cabin in Montana) I wouldn't have any hesitation about lighting it with a combination of LEDs and oil (never put your eggs all in one basket).
Ok, I tried that. Got a nifty little samadhi out of it after awhile. Not necessarily the mantra I'd recommend, but it functions.
Here, now you try one.
UPnP, not RPnP. UPnP, not RPnP.
Give it about 10 minutes before it configures the port to the Tao. Unless, of course, your firewall is configured to block the Tao's ip (as I suspect is the case), then it might take rather longer.
Yeah, UPnP is pretty nifty. Just think about it. All you have to do is install a piece of software and it can give itself whatever firewall permissions it thinks it needs to do whatever deed it thinks it needs to do, and all without involving the user.
And imagine never having to flash firmware again. The device simply keeps track of available upgrades and flashes itself.
Why, Belkin could give us a new popup coded directly into firmware every week. That way you never have to get tired of looking at the same one over and over again.
I, too, have heard him talk about his expliots. . .
Ah, but I have not heard him talk about his exploits. I have only had him in writing.
This is a legitimate issue and there is certainly reason to think that my opinion might change if I were subjected to Mr. Ramos on a more visceral level.
Opinions are like that, in the meantime I'm still stuck with my impressions and you're still stuck with yours.
I didn't know that personal stalkers could prove useful at times.
Yes, that is much the response I would have made myself had not Time-Warner decided to fuck around with the system yesterday. It's still going up and down. When it's up mail comes in, but won't go out.
So much for "unlimited access" being interpreted as meaning access at will.
In fact he is not even a hacker/cracker but pretty much a poser with a little bit of "skillz".
Oddly enough this is part of his point. His only tool for entry into unauthorized territory at the NYT was a browser.
What he did then is another story.
But he specifically uses only those tools that any moderately savvy net users would have to create his hacks. He doesn't "crack."
He types urls. That's the scary part.
I've read some of the things he's written and some interviews with him. He is an astonishingly bright and articulate man for his age in America. He doesn't talk like a punk or a hacker, knows exactly what he's doing and why and can elucidate it. I've not noted any tendency to bragadocio. He tells what he did, simply and clearly as a factual statement. When asked questions he seems to answer them truthfully even though that might well land him in trouble. Far from a braggart he seems without artifice. He turned himself in, handling the process in a remarkably mature and skillful manner (he didn't go into "hiding" to evade arrest. He used his freedom to arrange his voluntary appearance for arraignment through the proper channels and handled by a public defender. He or his public defender maintained proper communitcaitons with the courts the whole time he was in "hiding"). The story linked to here on Slashdot doesn't even begin to cover the issues and facts of the case. It's just your typical police press release. Naturally it makes it him out to be a simple hood. They all do you know.
Notice it mentions that he's admited to breaking into other sites but neglects to mention that many of those sites ended up sending him thank you notes for having done so.
He did things that were wrong. He admited publicly that he did them when he could have just kept his mouth shut and gotten away with it. He turned himself in and he has plead guilty to that which he admits he has done.
He is a criminal. He will suffer the consequences.
The problem is that people aren't given proper training to understand the truthful answers you give them, even when you include such training in the explanation.
All they hear is "I don't know."
"Well Jeeeeezus. I thought you were supposed to be some kind of expert or something. If I wanted to be told 'I don't know' I could have asked my retard cousin Vinnie. I'm gonna go watch the FOX special on this. Those boys talk straight and tell me The Answer.
The problem is fostered in our lower schools. They are taught "facts," and are given tests to determine if they have memorized those facts well enough to regurgitate them, i.e. give the "right" answer to the question. Even mathmatics is treated as simple arithmetic where you manipulate some numbers to come up with a predetermined correct outcome.
All of this teaches science not just as facts, but as a field where things are simply either correct or incorrect. Knowledge as a collection of preapproved facts and for every question there as an answer.
Whereas science, that is to say the real sort of science that Feynman is talking about, isn't about known true facts so much as it's about the limitations on our knowledge and why those limitations exist and what we might do to expand those limitations.
If they haven't had the proper background, fairly early in life, when you explain these things to people as well as it's possible to explain them all the vast majority hear is:
"I don't know."
Then wander off muttering that the problem with scientists is that they refuse to give you straight answer, never suspecting that that's good science.
After a decade or four of this even most scientist legitimately trying to exlain things properly get frustrated and devise a set of stock answers. When given these stock answers people respong "Whoooooa! Really? Hey, that's pretty neat" and walk away with a smile on their face. Perhaps a wee bit better educated on a facts basis but no wiser.
It doesn't stop me from telling things as they are, but I've found over the years that the only real audience is children. They listen, they pay attention, they learn.
And I hope they then grow up to hear more than "I don't know" when told the truth as we actually know it, especially if they get elected to congress.
For that matter I hope they grow up to be scientists who tell the truth . . . and get elected to congress.
Your basic point is absolutely correct. However I'll take the opportunity to be a bit pedantic and point out that this issue has an important difference that distinguishes it from file sharing.
It involves actual property and not merely IP rights.
And that property does not belong to the RIAA.
So long as the RIAA is saying "Hey, you, we're the music industry trade organization and if you don't give us your bootlegs we'll call the cops" and people respond "Hey man, I don't need no rap. Chill, take the shit," well, they're within their rights, but the second they take so much as one CD against the will of single alleged bootlegger (and if the alleged bootlegger was lead to believe they had the legal authority to confiscate it was against their will) without due process of law (in which case they have presumption of innocence until a court of law finds otherwise), then they're good, old fashioned, we're going to take your stuff. ..thieves.
Slashdot Mirror
If personal home pages are unsuited, then so are corporate home pages, as there is nothing inherantly different about the two.
:)
Aha! I think we're on to something here.
XML, for those people who when asked "What part of 'Hello World!' don't you understand?," say:
"Ummmmmm, that one?
"Ok, is this better?":
Hello World
"Oh, well geez. Why didn't you say that the first time?
KFG
I forgot about that one. :)
KFG
Yep, a lot of the Taunton stuff is nice. I try to keep my eye on Fine Woodworking and have a number of their books tucked about the place in odd corners.
KFG
No, I'm talking about electric lighting fixtures. Some of them big, dangly things made out of metal. Hand made glass insulators at the original incoming to the house. Nifty stuff. A house I lived in in town still had all of its gas fixtures intact though, and functioning. I know what a gas fixture looks like. I've used them. I know what a gas fixture converted to electric looks like too. We've got a lot of those in town as well. That house was built in 1823 though. Pre Victorian, Greek Rivival.
Sadly the wonderful Italianate Victorian mansion we once bought from an 87 year old woman who was born in the house only had a couple of the original fixtures left. Lots of plaster moldings on the ceilings though and all the iron floor registers.
When I said proximate to GE I meant very proximate. I'm living back in town at the moment, in a 17th century neighborhood. My house is one of the new ones though. Only about 100 years old. Edwardian. Nice old place, but clearly more "modern" than houses built only a few years before. We liked being modern around here. Turn of the century you know. Time for new style. Still had a coal bin in the basement when we acquired it. With coal in it. I used to love to follow the coal trucks around the neighborhood when I was a kid and pick up stray lumps. If I go up to my attic window and look out I can see where the first tungsten filement lightbulb was made. They had already been making generators there for nearly 40 years at the time.
We were very proud about being modern here in those days and had a history of being so. We had passenger rail service in 1831. Before that was the Erie Canal. We had already been the major port of embarcation for all points west before that. And now, we were the City that Lights the World. Some family members still have first printings of Maxfield Parish's Edison-Mazda promotional paintings. You can find their cheap reprints in just about any poster shop in the world these days. Ecstasy is my favorite, but I have to make due with a modern poster of that one.
And virtually every house built here in the 1920s, and for miles around, well out into what was farm country in those days, had electric lighting installed as original equipment. And any number of Edwardians beat them to it; and some Victorians even before that. Do you think Edison wouldn't have electric lights in his house?
Later on the first commercial television broadcast in the world was made just four blocks from me. Just around the corner from where Lafayette used to stay when he was in town and right next to Washington's prefered lodgings. And then the first color broadcast. The building now houses the science department of a local college.
Then something went wrong. We became the cockroach capital of the world. Hailed as such on news broadcasts across the country. C'est la vie.
Anyway, at least in the more populous areas of the northeast a farm house built in the 20's with electric lighting was no particular rarity. Some cities were already installing their second generation power plants by 1920 to keep up with the demand as it spread, not only throughout the city, but out into the surrounding countryside. Some of these towns had installed electric street lamps in the 1880s which meant there were now 50 year olds who had lived with electric lights since they were children and simply took such for granted. Older construction, already fitted for gas, well, sometimes those didn't get electricity until much later. Sometimes much, much later. The house I lived in with gas lighting was in the early 60s. It's all gone now. Someone "restored" the house.
In the Tennesse Valley and out in the middle of nowhere Iowa, well, perhaps things were different.
But around here; we used the power of The Man who Made Lighting and the lamp made by the Wizard of Menlo Park.
And we lit the world.
KFG
No, it's not really. While he lived in his cabin in the woods (only a mile out of town mind you) he also kept his commercial schoolroom, lectured, made few of his out of state tourist journies, sold his produce commercially and continued to be an active member of the transcendentalist literary movement.
It was, as he stated, an experiment in minimalist living, and the form it took was that of a gentleman farmer and scholar reduced to the barest essentials. He also happened to love nature.
No, I've never met a "back to nature" person who PETA would want to have much to do with. PETA isn't much for slaughtering livingstock and keeping milk cows and hunting. PETA are the very antithesis of the back to nature folk and can only exist in cities. The Amish are religious Luddites, not back to nature people, perfectly civilized and like it that way and very effective capitalists. They tend to think of the back to nature folk as city loons, and they're right.
The back to nature folk are sort of a cross between hippies, survivalists and new agers.
They're not only anticapitalist, they're antimoney and often antitrade. They have some vague romantic notions about "being one" with nature and try live totally and completely self sufficiently, by farming mostly, with some hunting and gathering thrown in, and making absolutely everything themselves, eschewing everything they perceive as technology (without any apparent realization that farming itself is a technology, as is a house and a candle and a steel hoe). They can't quite make up their minds about whether they want to be hermits or communists. They virtually all come from cities (country folk think of them as city loons, and they're right) and they virtually all fail.
You can do mountain man/hermit just fine if you want. A good knife and you're set. A gun is really, really nice to have though, and matches make life easier. Every one I've known also has some product to sell now and again, even if it's only racoon hides. But then a good knife is actually pretty high technology. A gun is even higher. You're not going make your own of either out in the woods or on your little farm thingy. You have to buy them.
The only back to nature folk I've ever met who "made it" were the ones that eventually realized that the way you make a living from a farm was by being a farmer. You grow crops in excess of your needs. You sell them and then you spend the money on things you need. Things that other people make in excess while you're farming. Things like oil lamps, plough blades, maybe a radio, or a knife, or an electric generator, or, gasp, modern medicine ( 'cause those natural herbs just didn't seem to do the job after all on little Johnny's appendicitis).
Because farming is a technology of civilization. Go figure.
Thoreau sold crops and taught school. For money. To buy things with. Things he couldn't make himself. Like flour (remember I said don't grow grain?) paper and ink. His family owned a factory in town that made pencils.
I only know of one way to go completely back to nature that works. Full blown late stone age living. It can be done. There are certainly at least a few people living like that right now, although fewer every year (The knife and the T-shirt seem to have made it nearly everywhere now). I've tried it as an experiment (just because it's the sort of thing I do sometimes for fun. Really). I can do it. Others less suited for it than I have managed with a little extra to work with. Selkirk, for instance. It isn't what most people would call "fun." Oh yeah, don't get sick.
City person. In the woods. Naked.
Riiiiiiiight.
They don't even know how to make a proper pointy stick.
KFG
Well, off the grid really only means just that. Not dependant on the grid. The grand infrastructure of corporate supplied services. It doesn't necessarily imply self sufficient; and there are whole off the grid communities scattered about.
:)
Of course in Mexico I lived in villages that were off the grid and yet otherwise perfectly normal villages, largely self sufficient, but only as a village. The buddy system has some real advantages. That's one of the advantages of going off grid in a camper or boat, even if you're solo. When you need a buddy you can find one and they take care of each other.
But yeah, if you're out in the middle of the Atlantic on a 20' boat you'd damned well better be able to take care of yourself, and if you can that's probably the best place to be if things go all to hell.
I can't say I recommend self dentistry as anything but an emergency measure though.
Let's say that off the grid means not dependant on services and implies the ability to be self sufficient when and where the need arises. You have a certain security that way.
Right now I'm obviously not off the grid (Ok, I could be actually. I've powered a compter by pedal generator, but I'm not). In fact I'm city dwelling.
But when all the lights went out last summer most of mine didn't. People couldn't buy food because all the stores are computerized these days. I had plenty of dried stores on hand and fresh produce in the yard. None of it went bad in the fridge because I don't rely on refrigeration. My toilet didn't flush, but that's because my toilet doesn't flush.
I passed a powerless night almost exactly as I always do. Entertaining the neighbors for a bit with my guitar, then reading a physics journal and working on my greek for a bit by the warm glow of my oil lamps. (No Slashdot though).
And if push came to shove I know how to make my own oil to fuel them. Petroleum isn't exactly the only source of hydrocarbons in the world.
So at the moment I'm quite the little urban urchin. No one should get the idea that I'm Grizzly Adams or anything. Nor am I a Luddite. My shelves aren't lined with anti tech survivalist tomes, unless you consider O'Reilly manuals, Halliday & Resnick, the CRC manual and The Theory of Rotating Stars survivalist tomes. Yes, my light is an oil lamp, but the cabinet it sits on is stuffed with electronic componants and test gear.
I just play the game by different rules and values and with a skill set appropriate to those rules and values.
On the other hand, yeah, I'm perfectly capable of wandering off into the state park and flat out disappearing in the woods and remaining there in comfort, by my own standards, for as long as I like, and can get to those woods in a day, with all my gear, without recourse to a motor vehicle. I can get by with little more than a sturdy knife and box of matches (just to make it easy the first few days) if I have to and occasionally do just that. I part it's my technical background that allows me to do it. Physics, astronomy, chemistry, engineering, biology and the history of those are all very valuable things to know out in the woods alone. The average survivalist can survive like that. I can live.
And oddly enough I'm not sure exactly how I came by those skills, per se. I mean obviously I learned them over time, and I've read a great deal, and "practiced," but I didn't take courses or anything. They don't cover roots and berries in Diffy Calc. It's just the way I've always lived, since I was a child, I like to do things on my own and I picked things up as a went along, even most of my science; and invented three quarters of it simply by paying attention and thinking about things.
It's just life.
KFG
I've thought of it. It would take a few volumes. :) Just the idea of living off the grid is a full book. Witness Walden.
Well, lessee again. Dirty never killed anyone you know. Unsanitary will kill you, unpleasantly at that, but it's a modern city myth that dirty and unsanitary are the same thing. In any case, what makes you think you'll suddenly forget how to wash? Going off the grid doesn't mean suddenly forgetting everything you know about living. Get some water. Use it. In one of the adobe huts I lived in, the shabbiest one of the bunch, I had to clamber down a nearly sheer embankment 1/4 mile to a spring for water. I didn't go dirty. I just hauled water.
I remember reading a piece on the web about some guy who lost his job and decided to live in a tent. He was in your position. He had money. He didn't "have" to, but the idea of living cheaply, "close to nature" and off the grid appealed. So he left his apartment, got a tent, found some woods and moved in. (Come to think of it one of my physics classmates as an undergrad lived on campus in a tent for two years before they made him stop. He prefered it. Us physicists are weird you know). Then he got another job, but continued to live in the tent for awhile. He didn't last. He hated doing things like having to walk too far every morning to jump in an ice cold stream to wash.
Well, he obviously never bothered to think very much about what he was doing. Why did he suddenly forget you can go to K-Mart and pick up a collapsible 5 gallon water jug with a spigot on it? Did he do something daft like not buy a good camp stove? And if he did, why did he suddenly forget that he could use it to heat bath water? For that mattter why didn't he bother to acquire an army surplus collasible bath? (There's an entire episode of M*A*S*H that revolves around one of these for goodness sake). Or he could have obtained a five gallon paint bucket on trash day, some old hose to go with it and made himself a gravity fed shower, which, in fact, could also double as a complete gravity fed plumbing system (even cities still have gravity fed water tanks. You shouldn't have to be from the woods to think of this). Fresh water is a dear commodity when blue water sailing. You can't waste it on showers. Running out can be fatal. But no one need go dirty. You take an old fashioned tea kettle. Fill it with salt water. Put it up to boil. Fresh steam comes out the spout. You catch it on a sponge and have a nice, toasty warm sponge bath.
So you're afraid of being dirty. So don't be dirty. Wash. There's a couple dozen perfectly nifty ways to accomplish this if you don't get locked into thinking that "wash" means "upstairs bathroom."
Bored. Books are cheap. You go to a library sale on the last half day and walk away with shopping bags of books at a couple dollars a bag. A lot of O'Reilly books are showing up at these these days. All the "dime" novels you can choke down. Complete encyclopedias for next to nothing. Even lots of books directly relevant to living off the grid like gardening books. Our ancestors read a lot.
They played a lot of music too. Get ahold of a fiddle or something.
But on the whole I've never found being bored to be an issue except when leading a fairly conventional life. Living off the grid is active and interesting as all hell. You have do things, make things, invent things and think about things. The greatest thing about it is there's very little distinction between labor and leisure. The concepts lose most meaning when you don't have a boss. Work is leisure. leisure is your work. There's no "job." It's just living. Living can be fun.
Ok. Family issues. I'll add a book. J. Krishnamurti; Think on These Things. Chapter 11. Conformity and Revolt. It might give you something to, ummmm, think on. The rest of the book isn't too bad either.
RV squatting in the woods. Actually, there's a small, very loosely knit community that's doing exactly that right now
Ah, thank you. I hadn't even noticed the paperbacks. I may have to pick up a couple of copies as gifts.
I'll keep my hardcover though. I like hardcovers.
KFG
It's about having enough IPs for all the *anything* in the world. . .
Ah, well, you seem to take it as axiom that this is a Good Thing.
I do not yet see it so; so you'll have to convince me.
Procede.
KFG
Depends on where you're from I guess. I've lived in three. They all had original art deco electric lighting fixures in them. One still had the original wiring (shudder).
Remember that in the 1920s rural farmhouse didn't necessarily mean out in the boonies. More often than not it meant being situated right about where your suburb is now since they hauled fresh produce into the city, often on a daily basis. They didn't fly the stuff in from Argentina and a farm had to be proximate to the city.
This sort of farmhouse generally got electric lighting about WWI in my neck of the woods (upstate NY, proximate to General Electric).
KFG
You seem to know a lot about this off the grid stuff. I read many of your posts and come off as this geeky woodsman how-stuff-works kind of guy.
:)
Thank you. Thank you very much.
You saved money. Good for you. Most people in your position live a bit above their means and end up with all sorts of payments they can't make when the job goes away. You're ahead of the game already and show evidence of the sort of thinking that might make it off the grid.
An Adobe hut in Mexico is a lovely way to live. I spent a few months in a couple back in the late 60s. $20,000 should last you about 20 years if you live a bit American. You can live off the interest damn near forever if you aculturate. Yes, it really is that cheap to live there. Adobde is absolutely delightful to live in in the appropriate enviroment (desert}. Hell itself in the wrong one (rainforest). I've tried both. I enjoy it for a time, the desert is lovely, but I'm from the northeast mountains and start longing for trees and meadows after awhile. A bit of ocean doesn't hurt either.
Books. Lessee. There really aren't too many good ones. Most of them are written by "back to nature" types. There's a difference between back to nature and off the grid. One is a philosophy (generally propounded by city folk), the other is just living. Just living, on the whole, works better as a philosophy of living than a "philosophy of living" does. The trick is to adopt the proper mindset and adapt yourself to the life, rather than trying to force the way of life into some preconcieved notion of "the way things should be."
On the whole "nature" doesn't give a shit about "the way things should be" and just goes about her business as usual. If you get squashed along the way, well, that's natural.
The people who actually live like this don't normally write books about it. It's just normal life to them, why write about it?
But there are some exceptions and a handful of books not overtly intended for off the grid living that can be invaluable.
First off there's Walden of course, if only for inspiration, but there's a fair amount of very practical advice on living in there. Remember, the whole point was an experiment in living. Throw in Life Without Principle. If you read this and say "Yes! That's what life is all about" you'll probably have a shot at living off the grid. Anybody contemplating any sort of nonconventional living ought to read these. They're both available on the web.
One of the most valuable books you can possibly own if you're going to build any sort of shelter, from a shed to a mansion on the edge of town is Rex Robert's "Your Engineered House." If you've read my posts much you've heard me mention this one before. It's a must. Written in a conversational style that you can read like a novel and illustrated with his own crude pen drawings this book is a marvel. He covers everything in this book and will leave you wiser about home building than an entire library shelf full of other books.
***BUY THIS BOOK***
Did I make myself clear?
It's out of print. You'll pay at least triple it's original cover price to acquire it used (I'm not the only one who reveres this book. Last time I looked there were copies available on Amazon), maybe double that if you want a really clean copy with dustjacket. Pay whatever you have to. Diamonds aren't cheap.
Square Foot Gardening. How to grow the most food, the easiest. Forget everything you know about farming. Conventional farming is medieval ideas about how to grow food en mass for the masses. You want modern ideas about how to just grow food for you. This one will get you started. Supplement with any book about container gardening that catches your eye.
I'm afraid I've never seen a single book beyond the technique of growing food off the grid that was worth a crap though. Honestly, they're all pretty much garbage. You can cherry pick them for bits of info though
Yeah, that's the problem with "demo" homes like this. They always have neat looking, and completely doofy shit in them.
You're supposed to go "OOooooooo! Ahhhhhhhh!"
But mostly you end up saying "Well, That's kinda dumb. What kind of clueless moron thought that up?"
In the end what really sells a new technology is showing how it can mold into your existing conventional home completely unubtrusively.
What would really be impressive is a picture of a 1920's farm house kitchen with a caption:
"This home is completely lit by LEDs -- and you can't even tell!
KFG
Actually, yes. Although not at the moment. A few years ago I was playing with LEDs a lot while working on data aquisition stuff. I thought it would be cool to use only rehargable LED lamps to light my place. I rather dislike cords. It worked quite well actually, and I intend to fit my next boat out the same way.
Mind you I didn't use them as a replacment for normal lighting as we know it. I used them more like a high tech oil lamp or candle so most people might have found the system lacking.
Japanese style lanterns make particularly lovely LED lamps. Quick, cheap and easy to make if you just want a little mood lighting without the fire risk of the real thing. Or try the old punch some holes in a coffee can trick.
Soon the lure of the light switch called though and I returned to using conventional electric lamps and conventional oil lamps. It was an interesting experiment though. I still keep a couple of LED paper lanterns on poles about the place for fun.
If I were going to build off the grid (like that boat or the cabin in Montana) I wouldn't have any hesitation about lighting it with a combination of LEDs and oil (never put your eggs all in one basket).
KFG
. . . build yourself a cabin in Montana.
I rather like that idea actually. I favor the Bozeman area. Do you have any information about cabin broadband availability in the region?
KFG
Ok, I tried that. Got a nifty little samadhi out of it after awhile. Not necessarily the mantra I'd recommend, but it functions.
Here, now you try one.
UPnP, not RPnP. UPnP, not RPnP.
Give it about 10 minutes before it configures the port to the Tao. Unless, of course, your firewall is configured to block the Tao's ip (as I suspect is the case), then it might take rather longer.
KFG
Yeah, UPnP is pretty nifty. Just think about it. All you have to do is install a piece of software and it can give itself whatever firewall permissions it thinks it needs to do whatever deed it thinks it needs to do, and all without involving the user.
And imagine never having to flash firmware again. The device simply keeps track of available upgrades and flashes itself.
Why, Belkin could give us a new popup coded directly into firmware every week. That way you never have to get tired of looking at the same one over and over again.
Sign me up.
KFG
I, too, have heard him talk about his expliots. . .
Ah, but I have not heard him talk about his exploits. I have only had him in writing.
This is a legitimate issue and there is certainly reason to think that my opinion might change if I were subjected to Mr. Ramos on a more visceral level.
Opinions are like that, in the meantime I'm still stuck with my impressions and you're still stuck with yours.
And he's still going to jail.
KFG
I didn't know that personal stalkers could prove useful at times.
Yes, that is much the response I would have made myself had not Time-Warner decided to fuck around with the system yesterday. It's still going up and down. When it's up mail comes in, but won't go out.
So much for "unlimited access" being interpreted as meaning access at will.
KFG
In fact he is not even a hacker/cracker but pretty much a poser with a little bit of "skillz".
Oddly enough this is part of his point. His only tool for entry into unauthorized territory at the NYT was a browser.
What he did then is another story.
But he specifically uses only those tools that any moderately savvy net users would have to create his hacks. He doesn't "crack."
He types urls. That's the scary part.
I've read some of the things he's written and some interviews with him. He is an astonishingly bright and articulate man for his age in America. He doesn't talk like a punk or a hacker, knows exactly what he's doing and why and can elucidate it. I've not noted any tendency to bragadocio. He tells what he did, simply and clearly as a factual statement. When asked questions he seems to answer them truthfully even though that might well land him in trouble. Far from a braggart he seems without artifice. He turned himself in, handling the process in a remarkably mature and skillful manner (he didn't go into "hiding" to evade arrest. He used his freedom to arrange his voluntary appearance for arraignment through the proper channels and handled by a public defender. He or his public defender maintained proper communitcaitons with the courts the whole time he was in "hiding"). The story linked to here on Slashdot doesn't even begin to cover the issues and facts of the case. It's just your typical police press release. Naturally it makes it him out to be a simple hood. They all do you know.
Notice it mentions that he's admited to breaking into other sites but neglects to mention that many of those sites ended up sending him thank you notes for having done so.
He did things that were wrong. He admited publicly that he did them when he could have just kept his mouth shut and gotten away with it. He turned himself in and he has plead guilty to that which he admits he has done.
He is a criminal. He will suffer the consequences.
But he's not your garden variety scumwad.
KFG
But he was a nice badger, with friends. They danced, we played, they fed me mushrooms.
I don't remember much after that.
KFG
The problem is that people aren't given proper training to understand the truthful answers you give them, even when you include such training in the explanation.
All they hear is "I don't know."
"Well Jeeeeezus. I thought you were supposed to be some kind of expert or something. If I wanted to be told 'I don't know' I could have asked my retard cousin Vinnie. I'm gonna go watch the FOX special on this. Those boys talk straight and tell me The Answer.
The problem is fostered in our lower schools. They are taught "facts," and are given tests to determine if they have memorized those facts well enough to regurgitate them, i.e. give the "right" answer to the question. Even mathmatics is treated as simple arithmetic where you manipulate some numbers to come up with a predetermined correct outcome.
All of this teaches science not just as facts, but as a field where things are simply either correct or incorrect. Knowledge as a collection of preapproved facts and for every question there as an answer.
Whereas science, that is to say the real sort of science that Feynman is talking about, isn't about known true facts so much as it's about the limitations on our knowledge and why those limitations exist and what we might do to expand those limitations.
If they haven't had the proper background, fairly early in life, when you explain these things to people as well as it's possible to explain them all the vast majority hear is:
"I don't know."
Then wander off muttering that the problem with scientists is that they refuse to give you straight answer, never suspecting that that's good science.
After a decade or four of this even most scientist legitimately trying to exlain things properly get frustrated and devise a set of stock answers. When given these stock answers people respong "Whoooooa! Really? Hey, that's pretty neat" and walk away with a smile on their face. Perhaps a wee bit better educated on a facts basis but no wiser.
It doesn't stop me from telling things as they are, but I've found over the years that the only real audience is children. They listen, they pay attention, they learn.
And I hope they then grow up to hear more than "I don't know" when told the truth as we actually know it, especially if they get elected to congress.
For that matter I hope they grow up to be scientists who tell the truth . . . and get elected to congress.
KFG
For every complex problem there is a simple solution that. . .
Well, actually this one works like a charm, don't it?
KFG
Your basic point is absolutely correct. However I'll take the opportunity to be a bit pedantic and point out that this issue has an important difference that distinguishes it from file sharing.
.thieves.
It involves actual property and not merely IP rights.
And that property does not belong to the RIAA.
So long as the RIAA is saying "Hey, you, we're the music industry trade organization and if you don't give us your bootlegs we'll call the cops" and people respond "Hey man, I don't need no rap. Chill, take the shit," well, they're within their rights, but the second they take so much as one CD against the will of single alleged bootlegger (and if the alleged bootlegger was lead to believe they had the legal authority to confiscate it was against their will) without due process of law (in which case they have presumption of innocence until a court of law finds otherwise), then they're good, old fashioned, we're going to take your stuff. .
KFG
Paying for non-free software is tantamount to slaves buying their own chains.
They make me buy my own mechanics tools to fix their cars too. They said something about it being a piracy issue.
What's with that?
This DMCA thingy really sucks.
KFG
What's a speed bin?
It's almost, but not entirely, unlike a Wall of Death.
KFG