James Alun

That looks remarkably efficient.

No cardboard boxes, no heavy lifting, no external energy and in less than 2 hours.

NBC cover of the story

All you need is one vaguely competent person at the start to send them out in the right order and one at the receiving end and you don't even need to sort it afterwards.

Great way to build community!

Another few days of meetings, another few socks darned. I need to get better at preventative darning.

You want individual books? Umm Anne McCaffrey's Pern series has been a big influence.

Probably the biggest change has come from DARK GREEN MOUNTAIN SURVIVAL RESEARCH CENTRE by Ross Raven. Not really a book but as a collection of writings, he's been hugely influential in how I see the world.

Aside from that, all of these have influenced my thinking in some way. Although Goodkind may be leaving those shelves.

I was brought up to mechanically clean drains. If the sink gets clogged, get into the cupboard and take the u bend off. This may be more difficult with a garbage disposal, I don't know as I've never played with one.

Part of this may have had to do with how we did the washing up. Fats were allowed to cool and scraped into the food waste bin and we never used so much oil that we would pour it down the sink, it got dissolved into the washing up liquid. We did not ever push solid food down the sink!

This may not have been particularly permie, was the washing up liquid a detergent? But the general principle of 'if you don't want to clean it, don't make it dirty' might reduce how often it needs to be pulled apart to be cleaned.

Going pooless/ reducing how often you wash your hair may help with reducing clogging. As well as strainer baskets on the sink drains.

PS: bottle traps are wonderful.

Could you go for gravel around the tree?

That would be permeable, fairly hard wearing and not involve cement.

Possibly higher maintenance?

Possibly one of the bigger success stories on this would be stopping the use of chlorofluorocarbons with the ozone layer.

It isn't a complete success as not everyone signed up to the Montreal protocol. But a lot of countries did and that was costly for them, most of the replacements are less efficient.

Thanks Bernadette!

For personal use, I only use my 2 ipads. So safari for general browsing, firefox for stuff where I don't trust safari's sandboxing (whatsapp, work gmail) and brave for youtube.

Brave is great at filtering the ads but the performance is terrible.

I run an encrypted vpn on all my devices.



Personally I wouldn't put Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox in the same grouping.

Chrome is a bit of a vacuum cleaner for personal data and edge IS chrome with that data routed to microsoft.
Apple has a much better reputation for protecting privacy and so does Mozilla.

When I was working in a microsoft/exchange/365/teams environment I used Edge because that already had access to all of that data and Edge has decent performance and features.

Now I'm working in a google environment I'm using chrome as again, they already have access to all of that data and Chrome has decent performance and features.

I give this book 7.5 out of 10 acorns.

Ben gives a great overview of living with and caring for a local woodland.

As a beginner, this is a book to read alongside other books. For example, you're going to want to either have a good grounding in recognising tree species or to have a book describing those species.

It's fairly high level with a few dives into specifics, I'd love to see more on the dealing with squirrels strategies that get mentioned but not explained. It's very much written for someone to be immersed in the woodland. This isn't a book for someone who wants to dabble in their back garden. That being said, a lot of the techniques described will be helpful for people just starting to play around with grafting and the like.

Unfortunately the last chapter, which was very specific to the UK, about the legal structures of woodland management is now quite out of date. Organisations and schemes that are talked about no longer exist.