As an old house lover and a high technology fanboy, I have to balance two competing aesthetics. On the one hand, I love old lamps and light fixtures. On the other, I control them with blue-backlit home automation wall controllers. Years ago, I bought into X10 home automation -- an older technology that uses your home's household wiring to send signals from controllers (typically a switch) to receivers (a ...

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Growing up in New England, I generally associated "drought" with distant, exotic places. Places like Ethiopia. The Australian Outback. California. In fact, the closest brush with drought I had as a kid was during my junior year of high school, when an historically dry winter had followed an historically dry summer and fall, and concerned local officials were on the verge of instituting water-use restrictions. Then it rained for about a month straight, ...

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This week’s post is a song of praise to my favorite wood finish: Orange Shellac.   Riveting, huh?  Bear with me…   We all have certain things that we lay claim to being a connoisseur of, be they wines, audio equipment, or Star Trek episodes, and for me, it’s wood finishes.  Having spent my adult life staring at and trying to successfully apply all of them, from beeswax to water-based urethanes, I’ve found ...

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