Events

Nick Rosen appearances this month

Utah public radio, USA on 20th August at 9AM MST for one hour

OFF-GRID FESTIVAL on 14th August at 3pm

Contact nick@off-grid.net with any questions or to meet at festival.

FOR A FESTIVAL DISCOUNT – follow this link:

https://offgrid.eventbrite.co.uk/?discount=OFFGRID10

Here’s another few bits and pieces from the website to whet your appetites:
https://offgrid-festival.co.uk/off-grid-2014-one-planet-community-festival/
https://offgrid-festival.co.uk/line-up-a-z/
https://offgrid-festival.co.uk/build-the-change-off-grid-2014/

https://www.facebook.com/offgrid.festival.page

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Total Luxury with no Utilities

Zanzibar, Tanzania new hotelA luxury hotel with no mains utilities is being built on the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania.

The Uzuri Hotel Resort, anticipated to open in early 2016, will be a village resort including 60 individual cabanas and five larger villas, together with restaurants, bars, yoga, meditation spaces and massage cabanas.

The cabanas will make use of shade and sea breeze to help create a natural ventilation system within the hotel interiors. Rain water will be harvested and two wells will be built on site to pump salty water into a desalination plant, supplying clean, fresh water to the whole resort.

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Stars of “America Unplugged” are modern MacGyvers

Building a tiny homeRyan Lapinski always wanted to be MacGyver, the TV character solving problems with a bit of candle wax and a plastic bag.

“I watched that show religiously … that pretty much got me interested in outdoors. Blame it all on MacGyver, I guess,” he said.

The 26 June show in the new series “America Unplugged,” on the Sportsman Channel, will feature. Lapinski and his wife, Adda Lamon, as they build an off-grid home in East Brady, Pennsylvania.

“Ever since I was a little kid, I just preferred camping over being in a structure,” said Lapinski, 38, a native of the South. (“Pick a Southern state and chances are, I’ve lived there for a little bit.”)

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Solar Flares set to strike Friday

Three solar flares in the past 48 hours let forth a giant spray of particles from Earth’s sun. There is a risk that the particles will KO a large number of the planet’s satellites and communication systems.

A ‘coronal mass ejection’ (CME), a huge cloud of irradiated particles and a magnetic shockwave, could strike on Friday.
The flares already caused brief disruptions to high frequency communications, such as radio broadcasts and aircraft communications, disrupting military radio and aircraft control towers.

The X-grade solar flares were on Tuesday morning at 7.42am and 8.52am – X being the most powerful kind of solar flare – and a third X-class flare early yesterday.

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America Unplugged – new series

Sportsman Channel is getting unplugged in a new TV series about people living off-grid.

Premiering June 5 at 8 p.m. (ET) America Unplugged, hosted by former U.S. Navy SEAL Cade Courtley, author of SEAL Survival Guide: A Navy SEAL’s Secrets to Surviving Any Disaster
will look at the stories of eight Americans who have chosen to live off the land, including generating their own electricity.

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Fox Schlock Seeks to Shock

My goodness, are those people at Fox Network total scumbags or what?

Their latest big idea is a show called Utopia where a bunch of “ordinary people” live in an off-grid community for a year and make up the rules as they go along.

So they can design their own Utopia for a year. Is that because Fox thinks we are too shallow to understand building a Utopia might take a little longer than that?

Or will it be like the new Bear Grylls show “Island,” where Channel 4 TV in the UK have put actors and professional soldiers in with the “ordinary” guys? And said they have to get their own food and water, but then surreptitiously fed them.

Fox contacted me the other day asking for my help with Utopia.

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Willand Devin couple win court battle - go off the grid
Events

Devon smallholders win right to build home

A young family has won the right to live off the grid on their smallholding after a battle to get planning permission.

Dinah and Stig Mason were refused permission to build a house on the four-acre site in Willand, classified as open countryside.

Changes to planning laws mean the Masons can now convert an old barn on the site.

Mrs Mason said: “We’re ecstatic. We can finally live the life that we choose.”

We are going to have to spend a lot more money, but we have got our dream”

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Building WIld

The task is simple — take cabin-building to new extremes. Tackling this on “Building Wild” are opposites.

Pat “Tuffy” Bakaitis knows cabins; he has five of his own. One is just to visit with his family; another is for what he calls his “happy hour” crew. “It just gets trashed every Friday night,” he said.

Paul DiMeo knew little about the cabin world. “It’s a lifestyle that a part of me longs for,” he said.

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China’s housing crash may topple global economy soon

So now we know what China’s biggest property developer really thinks about the Chinese housing boom and its consequences for the rest of the economy.
A leaked recording of a dinner speech by Vanke Group’s vice-chairman Mao Daqing more or less confirms what the bears have been saying for months. It is a dangerous bubble, and already deflating. In the year when China’s economy was set to overtake the USA in size, China may instead decide to get the trauma over and done with sooner rather than later. But the rest of the world should be under no illusions as to what this means.

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Goodbye World – movie launch

Goodbye World film posterThe big question for survivalists who choose to build themselves a cocoon is : do we fight them or feed them?
Filmmakers have become intrigued with this issue recently, with World War Z, It’s A Disaster, This is the End, After Earth, Oblivion, The Fifth Season, and Cloud Atlas all tackling the subject. Now add Denis Hennelly’s Goodbye World to that list.
In this heart-warming indie movie releasing in USA Friday 4th April, James and Lily live off the grid, raise their young daughter in a cocoon of comfort and sustainability.

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Regulator control of Banks weakens sharply

The financial system is at even greater risk of crashing now that it was in the lead-up to the collapse of Lehman’s bank in 2008.

That is the conclusion of TWO separate reports issued in the past 24 hours, one from the Bank of England and the other from the US Federal Reserve.

The crisis is looming because Western banks have quietly expanded their lending in the less regulated Asian markets. And regulatory changes brought in amidst intense lobbying by the banks themselves, have made matters WORSE, by blurring the lines of oversight.

Six years after the crash, the financial system is no nearer to a transparent system whereby every transaction between banks can be traced and tracked, so that a dollar which goes into Citibank in New York, and then re-emerges out of the Caymans into UBS Zurich can be identified.

Scandalous but hardly surprising.

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Community

Nine last minute DIY Christmas gifts

christmas-presents

In this last weekend just before Christmas, some of us are still behind on gifts, and often there are extra friends, family and such who would appreciate a heartfelt, handmade gift. Thanks to the internet, there are loads of ideas on making quick and inexpensive DIY gifts, and more importantly, there is still time to put some of these together before the big day!

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