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A variety of maps, writings, and photos on a various topics that can’t easily be categorized into a county or place.

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Adapting to Less Daylight in Alaska | Our Lighting Solutions

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With the strange winter season we've been having here, we talk about keeping chickens, our solar system issue, what lights we have found to be tried-and-true, and how we have acclimated to less sun during the shortest days of the year.

I guess if you live off-grid in Alaska during the winter, you really want to have a lot of good flashlights and back-up sources of lighting, especially if your inverter fails.

The Standells – Dirty Water

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Seemed like a good song to be playing on the Boston Tea Party day. That said, the water quality is a lot better in Boston thanks to them building the deep-water sewage pipe, which spreads the nutrients from the sewers farther out in the sea, and I doubt the curfew the song was written back about in the mid-1960s is still around.

The dark side of electronic waste recycling

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Jim Puckett got the messages from his “little lie detectors.” They were small devices, not much bigger than a deck of cards. Being GPS trackers, they also didn’t look much like actual lie detectors. For years, as the head of the Basel Action Network, Puckett and his team have been throwing them in the trash.

Electronics can be hazardous when disposed of improperly, and the Basel Action Network, or BAN, investigates the underground world of the e-waste trade. The nonprofit group secretly embeds trackers in discarded devices, then hands them to recyclers to see where they end up, exposing bad practices in the process. After dropping bugged LCD monitors in Oregon, they followed along as the trackers traced a circuitous route through the summer of 2015 and into the fall.

Read more on the The Dark Side of Electronic Waste Recycling on the Verge.