Live Lean

Your next home may come out of a 3-D printer and cost about 1/3 of what you’d pay today.

By Brad Beckstrom

By now you’ve probably read all the buzz surrounding 3-D printing. Designers and engineers are creating 3-D printed inventions like body parts, prosthetics, and custom surgical kits adapted to the patient.

I toured the factory of a potential client who makes kits used by surgeons for spinal surgery. They showed me prototypes for surgical kits that sell for five figures each. In the near future, these will be custom designed and printed for the patient and the type of surgery.

I knew 3D printing had arrived even before I stumbled into a 3-D print shop at the mall. If you read this blog you know malls give me hives, so it’s very rare I step into one. But there I was, on my way to a restaurant, when I saw shop windows full of 3-D printers in action. Printing out all kinds of prototypes for new products and dreams which users had paid hundreds of dollars to rent the machine to print out their invention.

So I’d seen my share of small 3-D printers printing small things but then I stumbled upon the 3-D printed house. There is a lot of innovation going on in jumbo scale 3-D printing. This factory in China can print out 10 houses a day out of poured concrete mortar.

Winsun 3-D Printed Home $5000

The finished product is the bit rough around the edges, literally. It’s a bit like that old concrete block garage out behind your grandfather’s house. When you have housing demands like China does, this may be a solid, affordable solution at about $5000 US .

The next generation of these is already in the works. Students at the University of South Carolina are working on a portable jobsite printer capable of creating buildings on site. Because the buildings are 3-D printed, the insides of the concrete walls can be hollow or custom configured with spaces for windows, electrical, and plumbing.

University of South Carolina contour printer.

I think it safe to say that this is still a few years off and the early job site versions of it will most likely be expensive.

3D Houses Here and Now [Read more…] about Your next home may come out of a 3-D printer and cost about 1/3 of what you’d pay today.

The Voice in My Head is an Asshole.

01/15 by The Frug 1 Comment

Exploring the convenient connection between mindfulness and sleep.

By Brad Beckstrom

“The Voice in My Head is an Asshole.” I laughed out loud when I read this line on the first page of a new book by Dan Harris called 10% Happier. I got a few funny looks on the airplane with the laugh. It was the day before Christmas Eve and the overbooked flight was delayed. There weren’t a lot of happy people on this plane.

I was happy. My family was on the plane and, even though our flight was delayed in Houston, our final destination was Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. I had a decent seat, a cup of coffee, and was on page 1 of what looked to be an interesting book.

Dan Harris’s book is all about silencing the voices in our head and reducing stress. Even before I bought the book, I knew where it was going — mindfulness, meditation, breathing exercises, assorted gurus, granola, and yoga instructors.

I’d read about meditation before. I understood the benefits. I’d learned how everyone from Silicon Valley CEOs, soldiers dealing with posttraumatic stress disorder, athletes and coaches, Nobel prize winners, all reduce stress and up their performance with daily meditation. Phil Jackson a winning coach with 11 NBA titles. He got entire NBA teams to sit entirely still and focus on building mental toughness through meditation. That cannot be easy.

In fact, meditation is not easy. I had tried it, I approached it as mindfulness, doing breathing exercises to clear the mind, simply by focusing on breathing. In and out, in and out. It didn’t work for me. I’d find myself thinking about everything, and basically unable to sit still for more than two minutes.

I believe this is where most people struggle. They get all set up, turn on the timer, start their breathing exercises, try to clear their head. That’s when the voices start reminding you of all of the other things you have going on, are worried about, or should be doing.

Turning off the Monkey Mind

The $300 Vacation Home

12/14 by The Frug Leave a Comment

Shack Builder Is Part of a Movement.

By Brad Beckstrom

Derek Diedricksen, or “Deek” for short, doesn’t fit the mold of someone who would be sought out to lecture at MIT. He’s not a famous physicist or a Nobel Laureate.

He builds tiny houses which he likes to call “relax shacks.” His yard is filled with these shacks in various stages of development. He also collects all types of salvage, often from the side of the road and trash dumps, to give his his small structures a one-of-a-kind appearance.

Looking at his backyard you might think, ”I’m glad this guy’s not my neighbor.” As a turns out, the neighbors love what he does and even let him build some structures on their land as well. In fact, people come from all over to purchase these shacks as fast as he can build them.

Shelter as Art

The Lunar Lander

If you look closely, you’ll see that each one of these shacks is really a piece of art. A piece of art you can sleep in. Deek spends a lot of time creating these structures in wild pen and ink drawings and then brings them to life using innovative, low-cost building techniques.

The results of his efforts become summer cabins, artist studios, home offices, lakeside retreats. Deek has years worth of designs he hasn’t built yet. He’s been doing some very cool hands-on, relax-shacks workshops up and down the East Coast. At this workshop, a small group (limited to 20 attendees) can actually bring one of his designs to life. He teaches people how to use hand tools, framing techniques, window repair, and salvage construction.

Burning Man or MIT

The Snack Artist.

11/14 by The Frug Leave a Comment

A Minimalist approach to snacking.

With football season in full swing and the holidays on the way, this would be a good time to go deep on snacking.

When I used to work in an office, one of my coworkers would regularly bring in a large jar of dry roasted peanuts. He used to leave the dry roasted peanuts in a few different spots around the office.

Several times a day he would walk by and grab a handful of peanuts from the jar. He would also gesture at people, with the jar and say “nuts” ? I would usually answer yep, then, keep on walking. Other times, I would grab a handful en-route to a meeting.

I always wondered why he didn’t just leave the nuts in his office. Later, I realized my coworker had a snacking strategy. By leaving snacks in a location outside of his office, he had established a routine whereby he needed to get up and walk to get to the snack. [Read more…] about The Snack Artist.

How to take a hatchet to your spending with a hit list.

11/14 by The Frug Leave a Comment

Stop budgeting and start using a hit list.

I hate budgets.They are a pain in the ass to put together and, once you do, they just sort of sit there. They’re like a line in the dirt you just can’t cross, but often do. It feels like you’re trapped between the lines. It may remind you of work since it involves spreadsheets! That’s probably the reason most people don’t put together a personal budget and hold themselves to it.

I’ve experimented with different budgeting tools like Quicken, Mint, and various sad spreadsheets, created with good intentions and never updated or opened again. I tend to do much better with actuals. As in, what did I actually spend and what can I do about it. I’m calling this “action-based budgeting.”

I want it to be simple, something that can be done in an hour on a piece of paper and pay benefits all year. Less = More.

What is a hit list?

Why you’ll soon be paying zero dollars per month for high tech home security.

11/14 by The Frug Leave a Comment

Home Alarm Disruption — Scary Times for Established Players with Fees

By Brad Beckstrom

What is disruption? It’s when an established industry like eyeglasses, taxicabs, music is completely turned on its head by a new technology or a new way of doing things.

Usually this is very good for Frugs. Eyeglasses and prescription sunglasses drop from hundreds of dollars down to $75. A taxicab ride into town drops from $20 to $10 and comes with a tidy receipt, including a map of your journey sent to your phone from UberX. Music sounds better and, is unlimited, for a fraction of what we used to pay.

Whenever I see an industry about to be disrupted, I see opportunity to flex some frug muscles and get the word out. The next industry being disrupted…..

Home security.

The home security business is a 5+ billion dollar industry. The industry includes established players like ADT, FrontPoint, Brinks. Also, other major communications players have jumped into the game including Google, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and others.

The monthly monitoring fees are the bread-and-butter profits for these companies. Much like the cable or mobile phone industry, they are willing to install a high-tech home system, for a low price, but you’ll be on the hook paying anywhere from $30 to $200 a month or more, depending on the number of entries, windows, sensors, and keypads etc. in your home.

Cable companies and mobile carriers are jumping into this market because it’s a perfect fit for their model. They are very good at setting contracts up, raising prices while charging early termination fees for those who want out after their monthly monitoring gets too pricey.

Live Lean

University of South Carolina contour printer.

Exploring the convenient connection between mindfulness and sleep.

A Minimalist approach to snacking.

Stop budgeting and start using a hit list.

What is a hit list?

Home security.

The good news is this industry is about to be completely disrupted.