Category Archives: Site of the Week

Site of the Week: Permies

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If sustainable living and environmental consciousness is in your thoughts these days, then you can’t miss the people who’ve been practicing what they’ve preached for ages.

Permies: goofballs that are nuts about permaculture

Permies is a site, a community and blog dedicated to permaculture. That is sustainability in its purest form without anything that will lead to collapse in lifestyle years, decades or even centuries ahead. The premise is to perserve the enviornment in a way that allows reasonable comfort in living without sacrificing the planet even in the short term.

Created by Paul Wheaton, also known as the “Permaculture guy”, Permies describes helpful methods of living off the land in a responsible way including bulding and maintaining a greenhouse, building with recyled materials and experiences of people who’re doing it all.

Site of the Week: BioLite

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Ever think to yourself, “if only I could power my USB device by burning wood”?

BioLite Campstove. Power your devices with fire!

If you need to charge your USB device, but don’t want to rely on nasty nuclear or ugly coal that’s powering your house (if you’re not already on solar), then BioLite has the stove to do it. By burning leaves, twigs or what have you, never run out of power.

At first, I thought this was a joke, but it turns out to be a totally serious product. For $129, you get a stove, according to the product page that is able to :

Charge your gadgets
By converting heat from the fire into usable electricity, our stoves will recharge your phones, lights and other gadgets while you cook dinner. Unlike solar, BioLite CampStove is a true on-demand source.

But the real appeal of this is that it needs :

No fuel to buy or carry
Our stoves cook your meals with nothing but the twigs you collect on your journey, eliminating the need for heavy, expensive, polluting petroleum gas. Quick to light, fast to boil and easy to use.

Of course, there are backpack USB chargers in the market these days, but they don’t work well when it’s cloudy and not at all at night. Presumably, these probably won’t work as well when it’s raining unless you’re in a shelter with plenty of ventilation for the smoke, but you can still charge outside when dry, day or night. I’m not sure how eco-friendly it really is since you’re still burning fuel, but I imagine it’s a lot less than the several tons of CO2 expelled by your local coal power plant.

Check out the product promo :

Site of the Week: Labyrinthos

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Ever been interested in mazes and ancient labyrinths? Think those designs must have an origin somewhere and want to find out more? Labyrinthos is your source.

Labyrinths & Mazes Resource Centre, Photo Library & Archive

I’ve always been fascinated by mazes and puzzles and was looking up Cretan mazes in particular when I came across this site. Definitely the place to go to learn more about them and really, all mazes in general. Very extensive archive and fascinating look at our infatuation with puzzles and mazes.

Site of the Week: Bella De Soto’s Web Site

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This is probably the first entry in the series where I have to include an actual browser warning.

WARNING: There’s a high probability that your browser may blow up.

Bella De Soto is apparently a political activist/political hopeful and clearly a despiser of Bush policy. The site has seemingly been frozen since 2005, though “frozen” is hardly the operative word considering the design is straight from the 1990’s. Which is appropriate since the site itself seems to be on crack.

Bella De Soto

This is the first website I’ve ever seen where this much information has been placed in one page at a time. Imagine every page is a category from your blog and every post in that category appears on that page. The page scrolls on much further to the right and below, but this is all I could capture on even my 1920 x 1080 desktop monitor.

In case you missed the navigation on the front page, it’s here :

I was again going to include a screenshot of the whole screen, but then I thought there's no way anyone would see the red circle.

Among the clutter, I somehow managed to find her resume.

Holding proven & broad experience in the Bookkeeping/General Accounting field, reflecting the bottom line, with essential interpersonal skills such as, attention to detail, organization, diligence, resourceful and communication, that can greatly benefit any progressive firm.

Well, she is certainly detail oriented, that’s for sure.

She may be the most competent bookkeeper in the world, but this is an atrocity. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Ever. I don’t have a lot of time to spare these days, but if Bella is interested, I’m certainly willing to volunteer my consultation services for free so she can get a new design.

Considering the site is from 2005 and this is an archive, she may not be interested, but this abomination doesn’t belong with the name of someone trying to take herself and her message seriously.

Site of the Week: Unibrow Club

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I’m all for social acceptance, especially when the detraction is over something stupid. Imagine my glee when I came across the Unibrow Club.

From their Mission page :

At Unibrow Club we try to answer all those ancient questions such as what is unibrow, what is the difference between unibrow and monobrow, does tripplebrow exists and so on. Get all your unibrow questions answered here.

I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a “tripplebrow”. Suddenly I don’t feel so bad about having South Asian “hair” genes.