Michael Janzen

I spotted this on materialicious just now. It’s a simple grey water system for taking laundry water and using it on your yard. They have also included a detailed drawing that shows exactly how to set this type of system up. Laundry to Landscape Grey Water System

I’m a long time hold-out on GTD and 43Folders. Gene, my day-job boss, is a real advocate for this stuff and I know it works great for him. I’m just not sure I’m disciplined enough to get Getting Things Done done, but I’m going to finally give it a try. I’m starting with the first tool Leo suggests at ZenHabits.

• Tool Recommendations at ZenHabits
• Learn more about GTD
• Learn more at 43Folders

My friend Jared is having an incredible adventure in Japan. He’s an anthropologist that I met him through my day job several years ago. I actually brought him in once to help teach a team of web usability researchers to do field ethnographic studies to make our financial service web applications easier to use.

Luckily for him he’s doing something much more exciting now. You have to take a look:

• Vertical Gardens in Tokyo
• Urban Landscapes in Tokyo

Learn more about Jared. Learn more about Jared’s project, Tokyo Green Space.

Julia and I have been considering building a vertical garden with rain gutters. I spotted these rain gutter links on materialicious this morning.

• guttersupply.com
• bergerbuildingproducts.com
• rutlandguttersupply.com

I’ll try scavenging first and shopping locally second… but it’s nice to fine some cool options online too.

Center for Appropriate Transport is a non-profit organization in Eugene Oregon that’s committed to getting people involved with the manufacture ans use of sustainable modes of transportation, yep peddle power folks!

I actually lived in Eugene for about a year in a tiny studio apartment on top of an old house. Eugene is an amazing bike town. My Civic sat parked for months when I lived there. I really only used it to leave town, all other travel was done by bike.

Human Powered Machines is a very cool bike company in Eugene, Oregon that makes things like heavy duty bike haulers and bike trailers. Logan from RowdyKittens posted a comment on a recent bookmark I posted and pointed me at this great little bike company.

I’m planning on drawing up a design of a bike trailer based tiny house and posting it on Tiny House Design soon. It would need to be ultralight and aerodynamic. But it looks like I could go up to 500 pounds if I had too; I just can’t imagine how tough that would be haul around. Less IS more… (and easier to tow behind a bike!)

Here’s another great post on Frugal Dad called 10 Secrets To Curbing Your Appetite For Stuff. He writes a pretty good blog headline too don’t you think? But I digress… what I like about Frugal Dad is that he comes at the whole downsize/simple living thing from the financial side not just the green side. This opens up learning about the benefits of reducing debt and turning away from consumerism to many more people who still think that green means liberal.

I just took a quick survey on ZenHabits and noticed Leo was using a survey vendor I had not seen before. If you run a WordPress based blog you can also use WP-Polls. I use it on Tiny House Design from time to time and it give me all the functionality I need. If you need more in terms of reporting and analysis here’s a short list of survey free vendors.

• PollDaddy (the survey vendor Leo used)
• SurveyMonkey
• Zoomerang

When you search for suvery tools please be aware that you will also find hundreds of schemes that pay you to take surveys. IMHO… these paid survey sites are total scams and should not be trusted. I avoid survey schemes at all costs.

I’ve gotten several comments on Tiny House Design in response to my nine square foot house design that ask for a house small enough to be pulled by a bicycle. Well I think I just found the perfect bike trailer for that tiny house concept. It’s a little expensive but it can hold 300 pounds and the bed is 64″ by 27.25″.

I’m not planning on making Nine Tiny Feet a bike trailer house but I am thinking that I should design a tiny house that can be pulled by a bike. I’ve already been trying to figure out a way to build a ultra-lightweight tiny house, but the 300-pound limit is going to be a challenge.

Cargo bike trailer

ZenHabits recently posted this great summary of how to make full use of gmail and increase productivity. I thought I had it all figured out but Leo had a long list of good tips. The first I’m adding is tasks from gmail labs.