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Whose Land Is It Anyway?


As the West prepares to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta – the cornerstone of our civil liberties – a small eco-village is under threat.

The Magna Carta stopped a powerful king from seizing the possessions of the rich and powerful barons. It was agreed in Runnymede. In June the Queen and President Obama will join 5000 other dignitaries there.

But in the wood next door, a few yards from the historic place where the Barons met, are 40 hand built homes. Living there are hard-working, eco-minded people who are doing the right thing. Musicians and web designers, factory workers and chefs – looking after themselves and the land – not one of the 60 or so residents are claiming benefits, they say.

Now a fence is being built around the village.

But not just any fence – its a 6 foot tall, black,steel fence – with nasty spikes on top. “Its just to protect folks from the building work next door” say the property developers that own the land.

Ironically, the Magna Carta was originally composed of two parts – it included the Charter of the Forest, which gave Freemen the right to scavenge in the woods for fuel and food.

Not any more it seems.

We will follow the fortunes of Runnymede eco-village int he coming weeks.…

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April 1, 2015 1 Comment
Community

Keyhole garden

keyhole1-6877246

It’s so nearly spring, I am itching to get out and do some gardening, I’ve been getting seed catalogs, the siren song of the gardener. About a year ago (+/-) I discovered another method of raised bed gardening, it’s called a keyhole garden for obvious reasons, it looks like a keyhole from above.

From what I can see, you make a round raised bed with a notch in it that goes to a central basket that holds compostable materials, kitchen scraps, fruit & veg, egg shells, coffee grounds (including the filter), paper, cardboard, grass clippings and the such. The garden is watered through this middle part, transferring the nutrients from the decomposing material in the middle to the garden that surrounds it.

The notch is important, it allows easy access to the central basket to add more compost and water, you also need to be able to reach every part of the garden area, so don’t make it too large, you can always build more keyhole gardens as needed.

I have seen many materials used for the outside, from bricks, to pavers, rocks, some are cemented in to make a permanent structure, others are just dry stacked so they can be removed later, it can even be made from wood, metal or plastic. I watched many videos on how different people make theirs, some do it very simple, others more elaborate, one I saw this evening looks pretty good, but I saw the builder do something I probably wouldn’t do, after marking out the circle, he used a fork to dig up the soil, the reason I wouldn’t do that is because you aren’t using THAT soil to plant in, you are placing layers of cardboard, paper and mulch type materials in the base, you don’t add soil until the last foot, so disturbing the base layer of soil is not necessary and it seemed to me it would be counter productive.

Here are a few videos you can watch to get a better idea of how this is done, enjoy!




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March 11, 2015 No Comments
Mobile

Free calls and wi-fi – forever

free-wifi_callingIf you are not paying rent or a mortgage then your cellphone bill is your biggest expense, right?

Wrong.

Remember the early days of Internet wi-fi?

You could go just about anywhere with your laptop and find a wi-fi hotspot with no password – because most people did not bother with passwords. Remember sitting outside offices, libraries or homes checking email?

Now that era is coming again – but with passwords this time – and using your smartphone instead of a laptop – and able to make calls, as well as send and receive data. There are even maps of the free wi-fi hotspots online – such as Wifimap – with free apps for your smartphone.

The phone companies should be scared – very scared – because its quite possible to live off free wi-fi connections permanently – and legally this time around.

You still have to buy a smart-phone – or use the one you got from AT&T once your phone is out of contract – but with a mixture of free wi-fi in bars and other public places, plus a bit of help from friends or even strangers,there is no need to ever pay a phone company bill again.

You can send texts via Whatsapp, do your voice conversations on Skype or Google voice – paying them, not the phone company, for the occasional call direct to a phone. And if your connections and timing are mission critical yet you still don’t want to pay for them – there are a host of free services springing up. The majority of mobile data traffic flows over Wi-Fi, and more access points are being built daily. There are commercial efforts to build cellphone businesses on Wi-Fi, too, from companies such as startup FreedomPop and pay-TV heavyweight Cablevision Systems Corp.

Tens of thousands of people in the U.S.are already doing it.

The most important thing when choosing a wifi calling app is voice & video quality without any lags. Choose one of these free wifi calling apps to voice or video chat with your loved ones for free.

Tango (Voice & Video calling)

A very popular wifi calling app for android and iOS, besides from voice and video calling, users can send cool fun animations in IM and also video messages. The voice call quality is great and Tango has the best cross platform compatability, its available for computer, android, iOS, and even windows phone.
Vtok enables voice and video calls to google contacts, you can use it as an alternative to google talk client on android. Works on Wifi & 3G, select the front or back camera and you can also choose to enable or disable video call anytime continuing with voice. The best part is you can even talk to other person who is using google chat on mac or pc.

Nimbuzz (Voice calls only)

This free wifi calling …

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March 2, 2015 2 Comments
People

Book Review – The Utopia Experiment

dylanevansThe Utopia Experiment by Dylan Evans – Picador, $15.99, UK version €15.99

LIFE wasn’t so bad for author Dylan Evans in 2006. He was about to turn 40. He’d a good job at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence research, working in a robotics lab in Bristol. He lived in a cottage he’d bought in the Cotswolds and he’d found a girlfriend he fell in love with.

He tossed it all to one side, however, so he could live in a field in the Scottish Highlands.

Evans wanted to find out what it’d be like to live in a post-apocalyptic world — a real-life role- play where people had to make their own clothes, generate energy and forage for their food.…

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February 28, 2015 No Comments
Alsford forecasts Australians unplugging from the system
Urban

Why Australians are getting off the grid

New South Wales, 22 Feb – Dr Kristin Alford, a futurist and founder of Adelaide-firm Bridge8 which consults to governments and the private sector, describes her work as getting people to think “more efficiently” about the future. She says part of the problem is that governments look at future problems with a “past or present mindset”.

Forget about the complex tax arrangements of Google and Amazon that are sapping governments’ ability to collect tax. These problems will be dwarfed as technology and the economy evolves to the point where ordinary taxpayers turn their backs on the mass-market, mass-distribution model that has dominated society since the Industrial Revolution. Instead local products and services will be king.…

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February 22, 2015 No Comments
Off-Grid Undertaker Don Byrne works on a hand-made pine coffin in his outdoor studio on a 32-acre homestead in Bear Creek, N.C. Byrne lives off the grid, with no electricity and running water. In the background is his son, Niko, 4. He builds the coffins with antique hand tools, selling them for about $875 to $1,000 to people who want a simple, ``green'' burial.
People

Off-Grid Undertaker

Anti-consumerist pioneer, Duke University grad, walks away from middle class life to live the simple life in a 12×12 cabin …

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January 19, 2015 No Comments
Community

Kicked my freezer-fridge conversion out

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Not away, but outside, I’m still using it, but with the colder temps and the more overcast days, I decided to let nature work for me instead of against me. A couple of weeks ago, PB moved the chest freezer to fridge conversion out on the front porch, it’s right next to the grill, it seems my front porch is really turning into an outdoor kitchen minus the plumbing.…

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January 11, 2015 5 Comments
India, yurt vacation, unplugged,
Land

Indian getaways

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Here’s some ideas about where you could holiday off the grid in India…

MARITIME ADVENTURE

Sunbathe on pristine-white sand beaches, hunt for seashells and swim in the warm sea. Aquatic enthusiasts could take a dip and get `up close and personal’ with some of the world’s rarest underwater marine life, including schools of dolphins, sharks and manta rays in Andaman and Nicobar Islands. …

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January 4, 2015 1 Comment
Community

Illegal to be off-grid?

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Apparently it is illegal in some places, Florida makes off-grid living illegal – mandates all homes must be connected to an electricity grid.

It’s no secret that an opposition to sustainable living exists. Earlier this year, Texas state brought several SWAT teams to a sustainable community and threatened to shut it down. Each one of the community members were initially handcuffed at gunpoint. It was called “The Garden of Eden Community,” and was totally self sustainable. …

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May 25, 2014 6 Comments

Battery desulfator review part two

A couple of months ago, I began testing a battery desulfator called the Wizbang Plus, it’s a simple device that you attach to your batteries, it creates an electric pulse that essentially “knocks” the sulfation off of the plates inside the batteries. Sulfation is the reason why batteries eventually fail. They hold less and less of a charge until they need to be replaced.

When I first hooked up the desulfator, I used it on 2 separate systems, an older battery on one and newer batteries on another. On the older battery, I’ll say that it seemed to work better, I could see a significant difference, enough that I am going to keep it hooked up, it is a slow process though. …

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February 1, 2014 No Comments
Community

How to go off-grid with little money…

areyouready
How to get off-grid with not a lot of money… that is the holy grail, right? I see many people posting messages here and on other websites, all saying very much the same thing, they want to be independent, to have a piece of land, to have a small place to live, to be off-grid, but they don’t have the money to do it, they often want to join other people in hopes of pooling resources, or just jumping on someone else’s bandwagon.

I am here to tell you it is possible to do this without resorting to illegal means and without having to join with other people or a group to get off-grid.…

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August 25, 2013 20 Comments
Community

Prepping on a budget – part 7 – getting started

start

It’s NOT too late to start prepping! If you are still breathing, and you are reading this, it’s not too late to start prepping! Even though the main stream media is doing its utmost best to make preppers look like the bad guy, that’s not your problem, your focus needs to be on taking care of yourself and your family, the more people you are responsible for, the more you need to buckle down and get ready for whatever may be coming down the pike.

The USA is still considered a prosperous country with lots of safety nets, I’m here to tell you that we are on a very slippery slope, what is at the bottom of that slope? Well, look around at what’s going on in other countries that were once prosperous and see where they are now. With the dollar being devalued quicker and quicker, hint that means the buying power of a dollar is less and less, saving money, ie savings accounts, hiding it under your mattress and such shouldn’t be your top priority right now, unless you already have a major stock of food and other necessities put back.…

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February 18, 2013 5 Comments