Be it a movie, book, or blog, EMPs are nightmare fuel. Any talk of them brings shivers down our electrically dependent spines. Grid failed. Tools fried. Lives lost. It’s everything a night terror is made of. The mystery of an EMP makes this worse. Will all electronic devices get smoked, or will it be little more than a blip? The closest thing we have to hard proof of the potential damage we can experience are a 150-year-old CME and 60-year-old nuclear experiment. In the first case our infrastructure was at its infancy, in the second the closest populated area was 900 miles away. What we know is that to minimize personal damage, you need to secure your electronics. But what do...
Why do we keep woodworking? Well, there are probably as many answers to that question as there are woodworkers making sawdust, week in and week out, for their lifetimes. Here’s one of the reasons why woodworking just never loses its allure for me: the chance to try a new species. I have that very opportunity on a project I’m building for our June issue, and this time the species is wenge. Rob tells me this central African hardwood can be splintery, and it glues up well. I’ve seen its almost black, coarse-grained goodness on the rack at my favorite lumberyard. I’m positive I’ve even pushed a few of these boards around on their stack, just to take a closer look...
Sure, everybody dreams of a kitchen that makes your food solely by itself. Well, maybe with the help of some innovative, high-tech kitchen gadgets, but definitely without your own manual labor. Knowing this, kitchen appliance makers sure do try their best to make our kitchens more autonomic and to make the drudgery of cooking less time-consuming. And some of the new gadgets they come up with are just awesome! Take, for instance, the frother - how did we ever survive without frothing our powdered shakes or morning lattes before it? Or, think about the omnipotent air fryer - this baby sure makes our lives easier. But it doesn’t stop at the kitchen, either! Smart home appliances like Roombas and window-cleaning...
Most home sellers face the common conundrum of trying to sell their home while still living in it. A quick search of online listings will reveal the range of those showcasing uninhabited houses, obviously staged ones, and then even more obviously lived-in homes. The goal for selling a house you’re still living in, is to stage it so that it appears that you’ve already moved out and the cleaning fairies have moved in. Unfortunately, according to transaction reports from the National Association of Realtors®, 38% of repeat buyers use the proceeds from the sale of their primary residence in order to purchase their next home. So living in your house until you sell it is a very common scenario for...
When most of us see a blank wall, our urge is to cover it—with photos, posters, art, or color. But in the inviting home of Maria and Paul Le Mesurier, the founders of UK furniture company WoodEdit (see our story about it here), there is not a hint of wall art to be found, nor is there much color. “I can never see the point of using lots of different shades of paint,” Maria, who acts as the brand’s creative director, tells us. “Every hour of every day of every season, the light changes all the time, so the white walls do, too—which, for me, gives so much variation in itself.” In spite of the couple’s minimalist tendencies, there’s plenty...
