A quick update from our Permi8 gathering at Michelle & Dan's on Tuesday (6 July).

We'd decided that a winter get-together lent itself to catching up on offerings from the web and the discussions they may lead to.

It ended up being quite technology focussed, with some other permi-related clips interspersed. For those who want to know more, or see what they missed, I've posted the links.

I've also tried to capture some of the other discussions we had and give you some links so you can find out more, if you wish.

Links we looked at & discussed:

Commoncraft's In Plain English technology guides. These are a great introduction and run for about 3 minutes each. Thanks Sue, for the heads up about them. We watched

• Blogs In Plain English
• RSS In Plain English
• Podcasting In Plain English

We took a look at what Transition TV have done with this technology - we watched just bits from one episode that includes interviews, event coverage and upcoming events in Bega.
We reckon there might be some keen Permi8 (or local Seed Savers or Transition Towns) people who could have a go at some things like this!

If you want a practical application, why not see how RSS works by choosing an aggregator or viewer and subscribing to this blog!? I've added some info about it here on our site and if there's an influx of subscribers (and un-subscribers - I don't mind if you want to play around with it) to our blog over the next week or so, I'll know you're having a go.

For general inspiration and its wow-factor we watched two clips about Happy Earth (which is possibly my favorite blog/site of all - a very big call!):

• Green renovations in the suburbs (3:53)
• Food forest garden timelapse (1:04)

Those who hadn't seen it before were duly impressed. It also stimulated quite a discussion about the climatic (particularly rainfall) differences between Wollongong and here.

 

But wait, there's more ...

Of course there were also other general discussions in amongst all this. (Which explains why many of us were there until after 10:30pm!)
Some topics included:

• discouraging white cabbage moth
• how to mature fresh manure before use (and for how long)
• foods that are tricky to fit into local, seasonal eating (bananas seemed to top the list!)
• wicking beds (a good list of useful links on these is here and Costa recently had them on his show here)
• cheese and yogurt making (future practical session?)
• solar space heating (M & D are working on an aluminium can one)
• clear comfort secondary glazing for windows (complete with example)
• Jacky's plans for a PET plastic bottle greenhouse (like this and for other examples and links see here) at the school kitchen garden

And they were just the ones I heard and can readily recall - lots more went on too*.

* My memory may be slightly hampered by the fact that after leaving Michelle's I worked for a few hours, watched the Tour de France for several hours, cat-napped on the couch for a couple of hours and then, from 4:30am, did my bit to cheer for the Dutch and see them win their semi-final match against Uruguay in the World Cup.