27 min read
You have a basement. Concrete, dry, under the whole house. Reading the news, you have probably thought more than once that if it came to it, the whole family would go down there. That’s a good instinct, because concrete and earth overhead really do their job. But what will you all breathe down there for… Read More »
18 min read
Picture this. You are walking through a forest that was supposed to be a short cut to the trail. The path gets narrower and narrower, then disappears, and mist starts creeping up from the valley. Your phone shows 4% battery and is about to die. You know from the map that the trail is roughly… Read More »
39 min read
A rocket stove is a wood-burning firebox shaped like the letter J or L. You push sticks into a short feed opening, the fire burns in a horizontal channel, and the hot gases escape upwards through an insulated vertical channel. Its proper name is the heat riser, and in this article I simply call it… Read More »
29 min read
If you’re wondering which trekking boots to take on the trail, you’ve come to the right place. In this article you’ll find out what to look for when buying them, which types of footwear work best in which weather, which models are versatile, and which do better in winter or in summer. Let’s get to… Read More »
48 min read
[UPDATE 2026] I wrote the first version of this article at the beginning of 2022, and the introduction below dates from that time. Since then, a blackout has stopped being something out of a film: on 28 April 2025 the power went out across the whole of mainland Spain and Portugal, and on 4 July… Read More »
