Last month I finally got sick of cleaning peanut butter off DVD’s. Between me and the 4.5 year old, there probably was a whole jar of the stuff inside the dvd player, and a corresponding amount of skipping. We’d turned to online streaming services like Hulu, which sat on remote servers and were invulnerable to the mess, but they tied up my laptop every time the kid wanted to watch Finding Nemo, or Super Structures.  Also, I didn’t enjoy the vibe that was building up, where there was no separation between the machine I use for work and the one I use for vegging out.

It was finally time to realize a scheme I’d been mulling for a while: making a tiny little home theater PC (HTPC) that would allow my household to go diskless.  Here’s how I did it and how it’s working — which is great, even if some providers of content and software seem determined to keep users stuck in the past.

I got a little Acer Aspire Revo R1600 computer.  …more

Lately I’ve been obsessed with kitchen efficiency.  Not green efficiency, but efficiency in terms of work. I would prefer to spend my time enjoying food, not preparing it or cleaning up.  Why does my mother-in-law’s kitchen seem like such a breeze to work in while my own kitchen felt so awkward?  And how can I save work without spending $20K-$100K on a major renovation?

I embarked on my own amateur analysis of kitchen flow and modded my kitchen to match.  My work began with this kitchen work flow diagram:

I’m not much of a graphic artist, but it succinctly shows why it can be so hard to do work efficiently in the kitchen: …more

I refit this end of the attic in my 1922 house as a play area for my son.  I wanted this attic to continue to feel like an attic, even though I was finishing it off.  So I did the walls and ceiling in tongue & groove beadboard, a material which was also used when the house was built.  It has new fireproofing and insulation underneath.  Other features inlcude: marmoleum sheet scraps for flooring, with soft padding underneath; an antique star-mullioned window to suggest a sunset; a Velux roof window for emergency egress; low-temperature LED light fixtures; a verdant-brand thermostat with an occupancy sensor, controlling a “hydronic” baseboard heater; and a tent-sized nap bay.

More pics on flickr.

Resources used by housing and transportation dwarf those associated by other parts of our “lifestyle.” (Click here for geeky background data.) If you want to be green in deed as well as attitude, you’ve got to take on the way you get around, and the energy used by your house.

In the house, technology can obviate the impulse to nobly suffer to save energy (remember President Carter in his sweater?). Probably the first thing I installed in my family’s house when I moved in was a programmable thermostat.  It saves energy by lowering the thermostat when I’m not likely to be home or wanting heat, and raise it when I know I want it to come on. No more running across a freezing floor at 5:30 AM to turn the heat on.

Now comes a thermostat that takes this idea one step further …more

Updated, expanded room in this post.

I’ve never been one to agree that thrift — as in trying to live “simpler” and “cheaper” on a purely personal basis — is much of a solution to global environmental challenges.*** Still, nothing motivates me to get thrifty more than planned obsolescence.

It just offends my cheapo scion-of-a-depression-era-farmgirl-and-WASP-engineer sensibilities when perfectly good, or even quite nice, product designs are made of crappy materials and/or nonrepairable parts.  Many products seem designed to fail precisely 1 day after the warranty expires — take the nonreplaceable Apple iPod battery as the most famous example.

My LCD HDTV seemed to be on a similar plan — failing for an obvious reason, just a few weeks after the warrranty expired.  Damned if I was going to be a victim and go out and buy another one.  Here’s how I fixed it. …more

There’s been a little trend brewing in the world of kids’ bikes: skipping the training wheels and getting the kid to ride a “balance bike” or “runbike” instead.  It’s a pedal- and chain-free kids bike with a low seat so the feet can comfortably touch the ground.  Here are pictures of two: a fancy one for $315, and a functionally similar one I made recently for $5.

Here’s why I made the second balance bike, and how: …more