cornsnakecaretiptip

They're just 3 meters (9.8 feet) by 3 meters and just about as high. They'd make great tiny homes, but these portable cube prefabs- they can be moved on a flatbed (in 2 parts) and dropped anywhere with a forklift- are being used across France as rural hotels.

Carré d'étoiles translates to "box of stars" and this vacation prefab was designed for stargazing, with a large domed skylight just feet above the lofted bed.

It's less than 100 square feet, but it sleeps four (platform and sofa beds) and includes a kitchen with stove, sink and refridgerator, sitting area, a bathroom, a shower, plus storage and shelving.

They're not cheap, but the 30,900 euro (~$40,000) price tag, includes all transport to the site and marketing (since it's assumed they'll be used as vacation rentals).

In this video, Caroline of the Carrés d'étoiles de la Paleine, France shows us the three cubes she has installed on the premises of her home/chateau/hotel in the medieval village of Puy-Notre-Dame (in the Loire-Anjou-Touraine regional park).

Original story here: http://www.faircompanies.com/videos/v...

Since the 1830s shotgun houses (AKA shotgun shacks, shotgun cottages, shotgun huts, “long houses”) have been popular in New Orleans. Usually no more than 12 feet wide, these “long houses” are long and skinny with rooms lined up in a straight line such that if you fired a shot through the front wall it could exit the back door without touching a wall.

In 19th century New Orleans, shotgun cottages were a common home for century immigrant workers. They could be easily and cheaply constructed by inexperienced builders since their simple roofs don’t require gables. They are also ideal for hot climates; by opening the back and front doors, a breeze will flow through the home unobstructed.

We visited Lillian and her 400-square-feet in the Irish Channel neighborhood of New Orleans (home to many 19th century Irish, Italian and German immigrants). She gives us a tour and talks about the possible West African origins of the architectural style ( http://www.datacenterresearch.org/pre...) and the different variations of shotgun home: “double-barrel” (two shotguns with a shared wall) and “camelback” (a shotgun with a second floor at the rear).

Original video: big-easys-shotgun-cross-ventilated-narrow-houses-stay-cool

Derek "Deek" Diedricksen's backyard is filled with what to the untrained eye might appear children's forts, but these tiny dwellings are actually how he makes his living (mostly).

Ask him his job title and he'll reply, "I call myself a tinkerer or I've come up with bizarre-chitect or lark-chitect being kind of a fake architect."

Diedricksen's obsession with tiny architecture began unsurprisingly, with the backyard forts of his youth. But he wasn't your average construction-minded kid.

At age ten he built his first cabin, complete with electricity, insulation, heat and a platform bunk. When he was 14 he read Lester Walker's book Tiny Houses and discovered there were others out there like him.

By the time he stumbled upon the Small House Movement a decade or two later, he had already built dozens of tiny structures.

Today, his backyard is filled with tiny cabins, forts, retreats, shelters, shacks and no two are alike. Most of his dwellings are multi-purpose: there's the 20-square-foot travel trailer/emergency homeless shelter (Gottagiddaway), the roughly 6 square foot treehouse/chicken coop (the Wedgie) and the 11-square-foot kiosk/single-sleeper (the Gypsy Junker).

He builds small and he works with a micro-budget. His Gottagiddaway AKA "$100 homeless hut" was built for about that (or perhaps as high as $110). His 32-square-foot micro-office (where he filmed his interview) was built for $80 from barn sale/ barn demo materials.

His materials are salvaged from old buildings, lumber mills, recycyling and the dump. His windows are made from old office water coolers, soda bottles, pickle jars and even a washing machine window (a side from the same machine has become one if his drop-down tables).

One discarded cedar lounge chair inspired an entire cabin. The Hickshaw- a "rickshaw for hicks"- has the same dimensions as the chair (2 1/2 feet wide by 6 1/2 feet deep) and can be rolled by one person.

None of Diedricksen's backyard creations are lived in full-time though he has camped in at least a few of them, uses them for a bit of shedworking for writing his blog and reserves the right to send unwanted guests in that direction.

Building tiny is also a way to rebel a bit. "There's almost this whole outlaw aspect of it. I've kind of been a little anti-authoritarian most of my life playing in punk bands and what-not and a lot of the housing codes and rules to me, while some of them make good sense, a lot of them are just ridiculous and very antiquated."

In 2009 he self-published (from his basement) his own hand-illustrated ode to tiny dwellings: Humble Homes, Simple Shacks, Cozy Cottages, Ramshackle Retreats, Funky Forts. He's sold 3,000 copies to date and is releasing the second edition early next year.

His mini-dwellings are mostly just prototypes for "larger" 100- or 200-square-foot homes, but through his miniature bungalows, he hopes to show the world that living small is normal.

Deek's blog & book: http://relaxshacks.blogspot.com/
Music: Bill Bracken (acoustic guitar) http://www.myspace.com/billbracken
Photo credit: Bruce Bettis http://brucebettis.com/

Original story here: http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/...

Motorcycles and scooters are about twice as fuel efficient as cars, but the price for low fuel consumption: they are about 10 times more polluting per mile than a car. So to improve air quality in a city like Barcelona- which often exceeds EU limits for air pollution- its 280,000 motorbikes are a good place to start.

The entrepreneurs behind Mobecpoint have already begun to lead the electric moto revolution. They've begun installing charging stations (using only renewable energy) throughout the city, not just simple sockets, but a unique charging system that is both modular-- charging stations can host from 6 to 25 EVs (both motorbikes and cars)-- as well as, smart. System software helps electric motorcycle and scooter owners locate the nearest plug-in spot via smartphone, reserve a spot and once their EV is charged up, it even notifies them with a message to their phone.

Original story here: http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/...

It used to be the way we made or preserved much of our food- cheese, wine, yogurt, sourdough bread, soda and pickled vegetables.

For Alex Hozven food is either living or dead. At her Cultured Pickle Shop in Berkeley, California, she tends 20,000 pounds of vegetables that "breathe" carbon dioxide.

She's simply pickling vegetables, but to most of us used to "dead food", it's a foreign concept.

For four millenia, fermented foods were part of every culture's diet- e.g. sauerkraut, kimchi, pickled herring, giardiniera, miso, kombucha, kefir-, but today with our modern industrial food system, even our "pickles" aren't usually pickled, but are simply cucumbers soaked in vinegar and heat-treated to kill any pathogens. Even our sauerkraut is pasteurized.

Instead of using the modern shortcut (vinegar and pasteurization), Hozven pickles her vegetables (cabbages, carrots, radish, beets, etc) relying on the slower method of fermentation.

Pickled vegetables may pack more vitamins than the plant pre-fermentation (Korean research points to high doses of vitamin B). The probiotics in fermented foods have been credited with being antioxidants, immunity-boosters and anti-inflammatories.

While Hozven warns against treating these foods as medicine, she says there's no doubt they're good for your gut.

Perhaps the most fun part of fermentation are cultured soft drinks. The earliest sodas used fermented vegetables for the fizz. Even as recently as a century or two, it wasn't so uncommon to drink a "root beer" or a "ginger ale" truly cultured from roots.

Hozven also makes a Kombucha. She describes the culture (a colony of bacteria and yeast) as a jellyfish-type blob that eats tea and sugar that some people think originated in China.

Cultured Pickle's products aren't cheap, but that's the price of living food. All of this fermenting takes time. Some of the pickles take up to a year to mature.

Hozven spends an hour and a half every morning just monitoring her pickling vats. She works six days a week culturing only local vegetables and only when they're in season. She has trouble taking a vacation.

In this video, we visit Hozven at her Berkeley store where she and her associate were busy making a few of the 10 different varieties of sauerkraut. She shows us how they pickle: first the vegetables are salted and given a deep tissue massage to create a brine and then they enter "the cave" (a climate-controlled room) where they ferment for 2 weeks to a year.

Original story here: http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/...

Music credit for first track: "Divertissement" by Kevin MacLeod ( http://incompetech.com)

Danny Kim has started his own car company, though, except for the old Land Rover he converted to run on biodiesel, his "cars" all have two wheels. He's patented a couple of electric cargo scooters, one of which folds up entirely to fit in elevators, pickup trucks... your apartment.

The vehicle that could put Lit Motors on the map is his C1. Part motorcycle, part car, he calls it a cyclecar. It's two-wheeled and tilts and leans like a motorycle, but it's fully enclosed and steers like a car. And best of all, thanks to gyroscopes, it doesn't fall down.

The Lit Motors design house in San Franciso's SOMA is layered with his designs. Kim takes us for a tour of the old warehouse where he parks his biodiesel Land Rover, his patented EV cargo scooters and his cyclecar prototype-in-progress.

Original story: http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/...

Music credit: Music credit: "Danse Macabre - No Violin" by Kevin MacLeod ( http://incompetech.com)

"I don't know if I could have a car without a bed in it." San Francisco Jay Nelson has put beds into nearly every vehicle he's ever owned, including a semi-totalled Honda Civic (bought for $200) and a tiny rowboat (found on craigslist).

He's even made a moped into a camper, but his most impressive podmobile is the electric camper bike he built from scratch using parts "you can find at a hardware store".

He bought the PVC pipe chassis online, along with an electric motor (he discarded his initial pedal-powered design because of the San Francisco hills) and began to build the vehicle in his driveway.

He calls his tiny mobile home the Golden Gate and with an electric motor range of 10 miles, it can go basically anywhere within San Francisco (7 x 7 square miles) at a top speed of 20mph.

Original story: http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/...
Music credit: Dave Warstler http://www.davewarstler.com/
Photo credit: Jack Halloway
Jay's website: jaynelsonart.com