Author, satirist, and professional pencil-sharpener David Rees has written a fully-illustrated guest column for Etsy on the topic of How to Sharpen Pencils. It's a brilliantly dry taste of his upcoming book (which, full disclosure, I blurbed*), How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical & Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening for Writers, Artists, Contractors, Flange Turners, Anglesmiths, & Civil Servants. Before you ask, yes, it's real. It's as real as a pencil-point to the throat.... READ ON

Do you want to make a website, but don't know how to do all the techie stuff...or know just enough to make a super-crappy site? If that's you, check out Don't Fear the Internet, a video series that teaches you basic HTML and CSS, using a Wordpress blog as the basis for your new website. (HTML and CSS are two of those mildly techie things you'll learn. It won't be hard. Heck, I'm typing HTML in Wordpress right now!) Here's the trailer to give you a sense for how low-key this thing is (the "girl and... READ ON

Col. Konrad Most, one of the pioneers of modern animal training, began training service dogs while serving in the Royal Prussian Police in 1906. His book on the subject, Training Dogs, described many of the basic elements of operant conditioning—including reinforcement, extinction, and shaping—that American behaviorist B.F. Skinner would later popularize. If Most were alive today, he’d probably get a kick out of the Canis Film Festival, which features videos of owners using operant conditioning to... READ ON

If you're like me, you probably take postage stamps for granted. I'll slap one on an outgoing bill or letter, but I don't usually give them much thought. However, there's a rigorous process that one has to go through to get his mug on a stamp, so we thought we might answer some questions for any aspiring postage subjects. I want to be on a postage stamp! What do I have to do? If it's a United States Postal Service stamp you're gunning for, we've got... READ ON