SHARE FAIR AT KING'S BAY LIBRARY

Back in January 2020, my local Buy Nothing's co-administrator came up with the idea of asking the local library to host a swap meet, except everything is free because, Buy Nothing...  The librarian approved the request and the rest was history.  Well, sort of.  Recall that by March 2020, the whole world shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic.  No library, no swap meet.  Eventually things got back to normal, hard to believe but it happened.  We continued to have monthly event, lots of stuff changed hands, all free, the leftover went to a nearby soup kitchen the next morning.  The event got so popular that these days we need two cars to take the stuff to the soup kitchen.  With the more recent events, I had to drop some stuff by the side of my house and advertise them as Curb Alert.  I live near a train station so there is much traffic, sometimes everything would be gone by the next morning.

Today, I attended a similar event, organized by the Buy Nothing group in the King's Bay area.  The local library is on Nostrand Avenue, between Avenue X and Avenue W.  It was nice to look at the stuff without worrying about people grabbing too many or helping others separate the donations.  I was just an attendee, not running the show.  I did chat a bit with the organizer.  I only visited King's Bay Library once before and didn't know that it has a sort of an art gallery just to the left of the lobby as you enter the building.  It is a spacious room.  The stuff was spread out on tables and clothes racks along the walls of the room and there was a little island in the middle with shelves and more tables.  They plan to drop off the leftover at the Salvation Army on the same block, near the corner of Avenue W and Nostrand Avenue.  I told myself not to take anything but in the end I took a music CD and two books, the books are for my own faux Little Free Library.  It's good to see the Buy Nothing movement going strong and build the community through events like this Share Fair.  Photos in the following Google Album:

Share Fair 2025 March 22 at King's Bay Library

iOS TEXT REPLACEMENT

I regularly offer to my Buy Nothing group free items or stuff to borrow. I would end the post with the phrase “Pickup near the 25th Avenue station of the D train.” By now, the iPhone is smart enough to start offering the word “near” as soon as I typed “Pickup” and so on. But I can take that further with the Text Replacement function. As illustrated below, through the Settings app, I define the “word” BNpu as “Pickup near the 25th Avenue station of the D train”.

As long as your brain can remember a few “words” that you define, there are great possibilities with Text Replacement in helping you save time and be more accurate with your typing.

I already created the shorthand BNpu so it appears in the list, you would touch the plus sign in the upper right of the screen to create a new shorthand.

Note that the shorthand is not case-sensitive, I had the n in lowercase but iOS still offers me the replacement text.

BUY NOTHING

It's a beautiful night, we're looking for something dumb to do
Hey baby, I think I will Konmari you

Supposedly that's what I said to my attic, but it's a major work in progress.  Marie Kondo is all the rage these days but I haven't read her book or watch the Netflix show.  What I've done over the years is try to give things away via Yahoo! Freecyle and more recently via my local Buy Nothing Facebook group.  "Local" or maybe even "hyper-local" is the key word with Buy Nothing.  There are Buy Nothing groups in many neighborhoods and members can be in only one such group, among a few other restrictions.  The idea is to give very locally and in the process know your neighbors better.  Find your local Buy Nothing group below and give the idea of giving locally a shot:

BUY NOTHING!