I was just talking yesterday about how I wanted to wreck my finances and buy a Big Green Egg. The ceramic of the egg holds the heat very efficiently, giving you temperatures upwards of 800* allowing you to grill, smoke, and even cook pizzas. Unfortunately, the Big Green Egg costs >$1k generally.

I’m pretty pleased to have found instructions on building a DIY alternative to the Big Green Egg, the Little Blue Egg. Seems like you can build this thing for under $200 in about 10 hours give or take. Not bad at all.

The folks over at digitalmisery.com have given a good report on their efforts to build an adult sized slip n’ slide.

They pulled the idea from the book Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share and added a few tweaks of their own.

Here’s the materials list:

* Roll of heavy-duty plastic (we used an 8′ wide 6-mil roll) ~ $35
* Foam pool noodles (number determines length of slide) ~ $2 each
* Optional – large pool noodle for end ~ $5 each
* Self-sticking Velcro strips (enough for two pieces per noodle) ~ $0.50/noodle
* Sprinkler hose or lawn sprinkler ~ $6 per 50′ hose or ~$5 for a simple sprinkler
* Stakes (I had some so don’t have a price)
* Patience, an hour or so, a nice warm day, and a steady supply of water

You can see that for the price of a pre-fabbed slip n’ slide you can build one substantially longer and wider and, well, more fun.

Now, go get to hurting yourselves!

It’s 70* and sunny right now in Chicago which means, among other wonderful things, it is officially time to melt your face on some fires. Too bad some fucking scrapper hopped our fence and stole the copper bowl from our fire pit last summer. Thanks dick.

Fortunately though, Instructables has published a nice piece on building your own backyard fire pit. I suppose I should get busy on this thing ASAP as that late night conviviality, with all it entails, just isn’t the same with the proper light from an open, crackling fire.

This is a great survey done by Popular Mechanics on different beer brewing set-ups. #4 is pretty slick, me thinks.