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Equipment

The Best Books of 2018

The Best Books of 2018
— Read on kottke.org/18/12/the-best-books-of-2018

Digging into this today. I’ve been on an audiobook kick this year mainly due to my awesome AirPods. They are so comfortable to wear while I walk the dogs and workout.

A few I enjoyed this year:

  • Sapiens
  • How to change your mind
  • Why Buddhism is true
  • The wizard and the prophet
  • Ecopraxia

I’ve mostly been on the non-fiction kick except for my hard science fiction guy Peter Wells. His stuff is so smart it makes me feel like a little kid trying to read Brave New World again. I know I don’t know most of the stuff he is talking about but I do know it’ll be helpful to know about in the future.

What are you reading?

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Equipment

Airstream’s Nest is a cozy, futuristic trailer

Starting at $45,900, the 16-foot, seven-inch rolling home breaks the mold and goes for a minimalist design.
— Read on www.engadget.com/2018/11/24/hands-on-airstream-nest/

For the price of one of these cool trailers you could buy four of the trailers we have lived in for over 4 years. Oh and you could have put our solar system setup on one of them. Each trailer would be more than twice the size of this Airstream.

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Equipment Social

WordPress: New and Improved iOS Sharing Extensions

New and Improved iOS Sharing Extensions

New and Improved iOS Sharing Extensions
— Read on en.blog.wordpress.com/2018/03/28/new-and-improved-ios-sharing-extensions/

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Equipment Social Travel

WordPress Resource: Your Website Engineer with Dustin Hartzler

In today’s episode we talk about getting your site prepared for the new Gutenberg Editor which comes with WordPress 5.0 in just a few weeks.
— Read on yourwebsiteengineer.com/413-testing-all-things-gutenberg/

Gutenberg is coming. Have you tried writing with it? I think that from a purely writing perspective the G is a nicer experience than the classic editor. It is a cleaner interface that is focused on the text. There are no boxes separating your text from the rest of the screen. When you hit enter it creates a new paragraph block. If you want to shift blocks around it is as easy as dragging them around. You can also convert the block to another block type.

The biggest catch so far is adding in-line images. At this point the workflow in the classic editor definitely makes it easier to add an image and align it to left or right and have text flow around it. In the G this process takes a few more actions that aren’t super intuitive to accomplish.

All that said I think the important part for bloggers is that we get back to focusing on the content. That’s what our users are here for.

What do you think? Is the G great or is it the first of the four horsemen of the WordPress apocalypse?

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Equipment

It’s curtains for you! – Trailer Mod

After moving into our trailer over two years ago we have strived to make it feel more like home. The first step was replacing pretty much all the furniture with IKEA stuff, yes even the mattress. Then we had a friend redo our valances. We ripped up the carpet and put in vinyl flooring last year.

If you have ever been in a trailer you have seen the accordion/privacy blinds that work on string tension. Besides our’s looking like paper plates folded up they can get dirty and then the strings start to suck. Once the strings go you pretty much have a window with a permanent blind. In the case of our back window the accordion never worked well and the best we could do was get it about halfway up. We knew that we wanted to replace the blinds with regular curtains but didn’t have a sewing machine.

In September we stopped by Kate’s parents home to do some dry docking. Besides installing electric fan roof vents Roger also made custom curtains. Kate’s dad, Bill, is a good handyman and taught Roger how to use the sewing machine.

Technically he re-taught me how to use a sewing machine. In 5th grade home-economics class I made a killer football pillow.
-Roger

We bought cloth at Jo-Anne’s and curtain rods from Lowe’s. Roger watched the following video for the pattern:

Roger went with the beer pattern cause he’s so classy. This is next to where he sits during work hours. He got some leeway with the mancave-ness with all the sewing n stuff. Since the material was so thin we also put a pair of blackout curtains behind the beer ones. We used a double curtain rod setup inside of the valence. This blocks the sun during workdays and improves the insulation of the window a lot.

Trailer beer curtains - Rolling with Grass
Rear window beer curtains with blackout behind.

Kate took over in the “pattern selection” department for the rest of the windows. She spends most of her day working in the slide, as you can see with her computer screen in the photo below. To offset the tacky-ness of Roger’s beer curtains she went classy and subdued.
Slide Curtains Rolling with Grass
Slide Curtains

The two bedroom windows got a single curtain each since they are narrower. Since the valances have a different look here we went with a different fabric. These are about 85% blackout and make sleeping to 8am pleasant.
Bedroom Curtains Rolling with Grass
Bedroom Curtains

The effect that changing these windows has on the feel of the trailer is pretty remarkable. They look great but just as important they work better than the blinds that came with the trailer.