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ripping dvds to your computer/ipod

DISCLAIMER: Ripping copyrighted DVDs is illegal and should only be done with the express consent from the copyright owner.

Okay, I'm sick of looking for a decent step-by-step tutorial on how to do this (to refer my friends to) so I'm just going to write one myself. If someone has a better one, please point me to it.

Many people are in the dark about how to copy a DVD to their computer and/or ipod. On Windows, you need two things: DVD43 and HandBrake. The good news is that they're both free.

First, download DVD43 and install it. I can't link to the download directly for legal reasons. Go to the DVD43 website and then click on one of the download links.

After installing that you'll probably need to reboot. Then download the Windows version of HandBrake. Install handbrake (it's just a zip with some files, so extract them to your Desktop).

Then insert a DVD, hit Start->Run. In the dialog box that pops up type "cmd" and hit enter. This gives you a "DOS Prompt." At the DOS prompt type "cd Desktop" and hit enter.

Then type: HBTest.exe -i 'D:\' -o "output.mp4"
and hit Enter. Then wait forever.

It takes a long time to rip a full length movie. After a couple minutes you'll notice a percent complete that tells you how far along the encoding process is. Once handbrake is done it will tell you Rip Done! (it's actually and encoding not a rip, but whatever). Then look at your desktop and you'll notice a new file called output.mp4. In the above command you can change "output.mp4" to anything, so long as it ends in .mp4.

That's it. You can then put this mp4 on your ipod, watch it in quicktime, etc. Nifty.

A couple book reviews

Okay...I know I promised pictures and an update a few days ago, but work got crazy and here I am a few days later. I'll try to be dilligent about my posts.

So I STILL don't have pictures for you yet, but soon, probably tomorrow. I'll tell you what I've done so far though: I got a half whiskey barrel which fit surprisingly well into my VW Beetle with the back seat down. It was a bit dirty, but all-in-all sturdy and just the right size. It only cost about $25 and I got it from Lowe's of all places. I put some "grower's mix" in it (I didn't have time to hunt for organic compost and what not. Eventually I'll start doing my own composting, but right now I don't have any place for a heap.

I planted a tomato seed (Brandywine, OTV from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, more about them later) in the center of the barrel and marigolds around the perimeter. I saw the first marigold sprouting yesterday (about 5 days after I planted it). The tomato I haven't seen yet. It's late in the season, obviously...but I am in San Diego afterall and we don't exactly have seasons here, so I think I'll be okay. I planted the seeds at night and watered them with about a 1/4 gallon of water. I've been reading about how to water tomato plants and most people seem to recommend a night of heavy water and then night to dry and repeating like that.

I also got the two books that I ordered from Amazon: "A Guide To Digging Your Own Well" and "All New Squsre Foot Gardening." As I search for the answers to all of my "how the heck am I going to do that" questions about living off-grid, building, gardening, etc. I'll be reading a bunch of books and I'll try to give you all a summary of them and whether they're worth buying. I've already bought and skimmed through two other books. I'll review those in a later post.

Book #1: "A Guide To Digging Your Own Well"
Amazon link

This book is a mere 63 pages but $12 at Amazon. I've read about halfway through the book and I can definitely say that it won't do me much good. It's great if you live on flood plains or other low-lying land where you don't need to dig more than say 35 feet to get to the bottom of your water table (the water table is the place where wells magically get water from). If you do live in such a spot, this book makes child's play out of the task of drilling a well, casing it and sanitizing it. It has great pictures in all the places where you're having a little trouble visualizing a tool the author is describing or a technique he's trying to explain.

Unfortunately for me, I'm at about 3000 ft. above sea level, halfway up Mt. Spokane. I got a bid from a local well drilling company and they quotes me about $12k for the drilling and $5k for the pump and installation. All-in-all, that's not bad considering they estimate (and quote) that the well will need to be a whopping 258 feet! Nevertheless I was hoping this was another thing I could do myself and not have the expense of enormous hydraulic drilling rigs do it for me. I do have a nice little stream running through the property, but I have no idea how reliable that is...nor do I know what would be needed to make the water fit for human consumption. One idea that I've been toying with was to have two cisterns: one for shower/gardening/dishwashing water and one for drinking water. I'd even be okay with filling up several 5-gallon tanks of water at a grocery store just to be used for drinking water if I had to. The bulk of our water consumption will not need to be fit for drinking.

Book #2: "All New Square Foot Gardening"
Amazon link

SFG = Square Foot Gardening

I am in love with this book. I've read a lot about it and now I see why. First, it's only $13.59 from Amazon (it's about $18 from the author's site - http://squarefootgardening.com - but all the profits go to the non-profit group dedicated to spreading the SFG concept...for what that's worth). It's 223 pages (before the appendices) of really beautifully formatted and published work. As the name suggests, this is an update to a previous book called Square Foot Gardening. The former was released in 1981 and apparently made a huge splash in the US and then spread to many other countries. The non-profit org around the concept is founded and run by the author of the book and they focus a lot on training humanitarian groups on the SFG method so that they can then go to third-world countries to teach them how to grow more crops with less resources.

There's so much good in this book/concept that it's hard to know where to start or how to sum it all up. I've only read the first 2 chapters and I'm already excited about the method. Basically it evaluates all the inefficeincies of standard row-gardening and fixes nearly all of them. It makes a great point about how standard row gardening requires 3-ft wide paths between all the rows and how the entire garden bed is watered and tilled and fertilized but only 20% of the bed (the rows) is used for growing crops. The other 80% (the 3-ft-wide walking paths) make great growing spaces, but mostly are reserved for weeds. Why spend 80% of your time/energy/money on making a place for weeds (that you'll have to hoe up) to grow?

The concept is similar to intensive gardening, and I don't think that this concept is so new, but rather a rediscovering of the original/simple way gardens were meant to be grown. I'd have to do my homework, but I bet that in Mideavil European times, gardens (not farms, but gardens) were grown with much narrower spacing. It just makes sense. The standard row gardening (as the SFG author, Mel suggests) is just a hand-me-down from large-scale farming. Rows make sense for farming where you want a neat order to your crops that will allow you to easily harvest your crops in bulk via machinery or what have you. However, in our garden, we're going to be picking things by hand, so we can discard the need for that much order.

The first chapter dives right in to describe the fundamentals of what makes SFG superior to row gardening. Even though it's entitled "Introduction," it really throws you into the mix, which I love. Too many of these books to take too many words to hype up all the great stuff you're about to read. This one has a little of that, but it's tolerable. What I could have done without was the mini-autobiography about the rise in popularity of SFG that took 6 full pages. It came across a bit arrogant at times. If there's anything to dislike about this book, it's the author's arrogance. He comes across as the self-professed savior of gardening, enlightening the masses about the inefficeincies of row gardening. He even describes the mixture of soil he suggests using as "Mel's Mix." There's even a part of the SFG website titled Mel's Humor, that has this intro:

"Whenever I see a picture of a famous person, I have fun imagining what they might be saying if they were talking about Square Foot Gardening."

...wow. Anyway, his book is amazing, but I could have done without some of the ego. I haven't gotten far into the book yet, but by the first chapter, he really should have made reference to Alan Chadwick which popularized the French Intensive Gardening method. He should have atleast mentioned that SFG is a type of Intensive Gardening.

But the book is so great, that I will look past the ego and the sporadic condescention to the guts of the book and his method. There's plenty of guts to be enjoyed.

One thing I'm surprised that he didn't explore (and maybe he will later in the book) is the fact that all plants grow roughly in a circle...not a square. As he was reorganizing the layout of the garden from scratch, to follow a more natural pattern of plant growth, I would have thought that he would have incorporated the concept of a circle. I'm not just saying this because I'm big on geodesic domes either ;^) But circles are rather well fit for plants. Mel suggest having a 4' by 4' box that you divide up into 4 rows and columns to make a lovely little grid. 4' max because you have to reach the center of the box...without falling over (stepping in the box is a big no-no as it will compact the dirt). Each 1' by 1' plot is supposed to contain a different plant. The type and number of each plant is based on standard spacing rules (so as not to crowd the root structure) and companion planting. However, rather than have a grid, I would have liked to see a system of concentric circles to pay homage to the fact that plants grow in circles. Sure, the math gets slightly more complicated, but it could be worth it. I'll be exploring this possible configuration myself if Mel doesn't cover it later in the book.

Okay, that was a pretty wordy "summary" of the book so far, but this is a pretty profound book so I think it merits the verbosity of this review ;^)

That's all for now. Next post, hopefully pictures of my planter and the marigold sprouts, and my hopes of putting a SFG in the front of our condo.

Dad's dreams, matching morals and intense independence

So why leave the convenience of modern day living in sunny San Diego? Three reasons (and not necessarily in any order):

* Dad always wanted to do it and I guess I inherited some of that gene.
* I'd like to make my lifestyle match my ideals
* I want to be truly financially independent

My father died July of 2004. He was only 57 years old and he worked hard all his life. When I was born, my parents were living on a small farm in rural Michigan. Dad worked a day job and farmed what he could. He never spelled it out to me, but I know that he was trying to get to the point where he didn't have to work outside of the farm anymore. Michigan, however, had awful unemployment at the time (this is the early 1980s) and Dad was forced to sell the farm and move to another city to support the family. I always thought he wanted to get back to that dream of self-sufficeincy. He had plenty of "green" books. Now I wouldn't just follow the dreams of my Father for no reason. A thread of him is definitely in me though. I've always had a love for the country, fields of crops, the "old school" way.

Something I found on my own, but that I also have in common with my Father, is a love of nature in general. I've never understood litterbugs and I think recycling is neat (at first just because I could make a couple dollars collecting bottles and cans, yay for Michigan's 10-cent refund). About 5 or 6 years ago, I started getting into alternative housing structures: straw bale, geodesic and monolithic domes, earthships, cob, etc. I got into electric cars and other alternative fuels (biodiesel) around the same time. I thought about building my own house here in San Diego, but land is pretty much unavailable anywhere West of the desert. When I found my soul mate and made her my wife, it just made sense to take the first steps to making our green dreams a reality. She and I are very passionate about preserving the Earth, and so having a house of our own (and yes it consumes a bit of wood, but it will probably be the last house we live in) that is as green as we can make it, just matches our beliefs. It becomes a model that others can look at, if they have similar such dreams.

I've always been pretty thrifty with my money, but I've always been a bit paranoid about larger economic forces beyond my control. Inflation, wars, and a plethora of other factors could wipe-out even the biggest of nest eggs. I decided that in order to be truly financially independent, I needed to be free of money, completely. Of course the irony is that I have to have a fair amount of money to make that reality. I need to build a dwelling that will last. I need to have enough gardening equipment, seeds, etc. to grow enough food to feed my wife and I (thankfully we won't have kids to worry about, so less food needs). But once I'm set up, I shouldn't need to rely on anyone else for anything, and thus, I'll truly be independent. I won't need money to go to the store for anything. That being said, I still plan on having a nest egg that will slowly grow just in case of emergencies. The biggest thing I haven't figured out is health care. I think herbal medicines are great and all, but if Kyla needs a surgery, we'll still be in trouble. I'm going to look at eliibility for indigent care (free health care for the poor) and other "need based" free/cheap health care. I'll have a couple other utilities, namely internet connection, but that's fairly affordable.

That's a good-length post for tonite. Tomorrow, I'll take a few pictures of the planter I've started and a reflector that I made from cardboard and CDs.

The siren call of simplicity

To anyone who cares,

I'm starting this blog with every intention of journaling my transformation from web geek into old-school, self-sufficeint provider/farmer/homemaker. That's a rather grandiose introduction, so let me explain:

Right now, I'm a 27-year-old male who gets paid very well for working on a video website (http://vmix.com/). Although I consider myself lucky to have such a great job and to be paid well for doing something that I consider fun, my life is not complete. All too often I hear of people in technology professions retiring to a few acres, building their own home and living out the rest of their days in self-sufficeint, hippi-esque bliss. This siren call of simplicity has captured yet another restless soul: me.

I'm not sure when I'll be able to "retire" to work full time on building my house. Hopefully it'll be in the next few years. I do have one thing already done: I've bought the land. I own 20 acres of mountain-side property in lovely Spokane, WA (which for some reason everyone has a low opinion of, but I can't for the life of me understand why). The land is about halfway up Mt. Spokane.

I have a TON of challenges ahead of me, all of which I'll be spelling out in subsequent posts. Some of the things I'll be covering: why I'm doing this, how I plan to solve each of these challeneges, and where I fail and succeed. Hopefully someone else trying to achieve similar goals as mine will glean some useful info from this blog.

Just a rough outline of some of the things I HOPE to accomplish

• growing 90% of my own organic food through french intensive gardening
  
• building a geodesic dome from a kit
  
• building an attached geodesic dome greenhouse (also from a kit)
  
• installing radiant floor heating
  
• crafting a greywater recycling system
  
• installing a wind turbine for electric power generation
  
• possibly installing supplemental solar power
  
• raising a goat or two and making handcrafted cheeses from the milk
  
• making pasta sauces and/or salsas from garden vegetables and selling them at farmers markets
  
• maintain the wife's happiness factor
  

That's enough for now. In the next post I'll try to explain why I'm doing all this and a few of the things I'm doing to prepare for the big shift.