- “Do we want to get to the moon or not?” John C. Houbolt was responsible for the Lunar-Orbit Rendezvous plan
- A video comparison of different laser marking compounds for use with CO2 lasers
- Figures in the Sky: How cultures across the World have seen their myths and legends in the stars
- A wonderful little <$10 video game: A Short Hike
- Papercraft models of classic computers
- John Pound, the creator of Garbage Pail Kids is also a generative artist (via)
- Springer has made a set of books and articles available at no cost to help those affected by coronavirus lockdowns
- A clever linkage for a mechanical elbow (via Matt Siegel)
Category Archives: Everything Else
Linkdump: March 2020
- Dial Indicator Clock
- Anatomy of a rental phishing scam
- The Best Crispy Roast Potatoes Ever Recipe
- Fixie Clock with OLED based “fake NIXIE” tubes
- The placebo effect and veterinary care
- Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s
- A list of projects that took an exceptionally long time
- Trash Amps: Nifty DIY speaker and guitar amp kits
- How 3M rapidly scaled mask production
- US National Institutes of Health 3D print exchange
- Projected hospital resource use in COVID-19
- Meet the doctor who ordered the Bay Area’s coronavirus lockdown, the first in the U.S.
Linkdump: January 2020
- Open source SVG emoji from Twitter
- 2-Bit Mario: A physical Mario Brothers game
- The most important device in the universe, built by prop designer John Zabrucky
- Video made from photos of Comet 67p taken by Rosetta
- A Conversation on Microbiomes mostly focused on the Sourdough Project
- Cat Coat Genetics 101: A Tweetorial
- Thermochromic 7-segment display
- Formlabs Form 3 Teardown by Bunnie Huang
- Life Under the Ice is Ariel Waldman‘s site documenting microscopic life in Antarctica
- A nicely done website of paper sizes
- Nikon Small World 2019 Photomicrography Competition Winners
- Patterned plywood speakers
- Plotting perlin spirals
- Pre-GPS automobile navigation system
- XYZen Garden Kit
- Inside the digital clock from a Soyuz spacecraft with Ken Shirriff
- The Newport Transporter Bridge (YouTube)
- Interesting dataset: Flagged and rejected vanity license plate applications from the California DMV
- Dark Horse Discord: a gaming chat platform and the future of work
- Machining a bamboo-styled pencil barrel on a lathe, from Lindsay Wilson
- Mapping cases of COVID-19
Windell and Lenore on the Embedded.fm podcast
Elecia and Chris of Embedded.fm invited us to come back on the show for episode 317: WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY DISINTEGRATED?. We also had the added enticement of a low tide adventure after recording.
Lenore had been on the show back in 2014 for episode 40: MWAHAHA SESSION, and Windell was on the following year when The Annotated Build It Yourself Science Laboratory was published for episode 124: PLEASE DON’T LIGHT YOURSELF ON FIRE.
We enjoyed the conversation immensely. We wandered from talking about our kits, to plotter art, to PCB art, even to seaweed. The tide pooling afterwards was wonderful as well!
Linkdump: December 2019
- An interactive history of the subway map @ NYTimes
- Audubon weighs in on memes: When Is a Bird a ‘Birb’? An Extremely Important Guide
- Wired profiles Cliff Stoll
- Lego Axle Sorter
- RasterCarve: A free software package for CNC carving images
- Touchscreen interfaces and the USS John S. McCain
- Waiting For An Earthquake is a demo of the title track on Doc Pop‘s new chiptunes album which was created on a old school Game Boy.
Four Favorite Tools
The kind folks at Cool Tools sent us a copy of Four Favorite Tools, which is a compilation of recommendations from the Cool Tools Podcast, including from the episodes we were on. I’ve had it sitting on my desk since it arrived, and I’ve been flipping through it pretty regularly. It’s been fun to look up the people I know and see what they recommended. It’s also fun to learn about people I don’t know from their browsing their recommendations.
All of the information in the book is also included in each person’s podcast episode on the Cool Tool’s site (here are ours: Lenore and Windell), but I’m much more likely to flip through the book and happen upon something new than I am to go explore online. This book would be a great gift for the tool-users in your life.
Thank you Kevin, Claudia & Mark!
Linkdump: November 2019
- You can now buy a 50 mm LED
- On the effect of wake in wind farms
- Summary article on original research to develop a map of the US food supply chain
- What’s All This Pease Prototype Stuff, Anyhow?
- Does a scale measure mass or weight?
- Poisonous books: analyses of four sixteenth and seventeenth century book bindings covered with arsenic rich green paint
- Riches from Rags a profile of the rag industry, including videos of rag cutting and processing
- Lovely CNC carved wooden topographic maps
- A thoughtful review of the new video game “Garfield Kart Furious Racing”
- How Luxury Units Turn Into Affordable Housing
- Visible Enigma Machine Simulator
- Mech Ball, a rolling ball kinetic sculpture by Steve Sherwin
Linkdump: October 2019
This is a demo board I made for some #flexures, some of which I have used for projects, others I just think are so cool. #lasercut #delrin pic.twitter.com/5Hdkc5TYJO
— Amy Qian (@amy_makes_stuff) October 28, 2019
- Expert teardown of the Logitech MX Master 3 mouse
- Saturn has 20 newly found moons and you can help name them
- Ken Thompson’s Unix password
- The Rise And Fall Of ‘Pinky And The Brain’
- Evolution of the scroll bar
- A circuit to let you plug in a battery either way
- BrachioGraph – an updated take on the TRS Drawbot
- Laser cut Delrin flexure demos
Linkdump: September 2019
- Pricing Niche Products
- An illustrated guide to San Francisco’s hidden restaurants
- Area woman heads to town and impulse-buys entire bookstore.
- Sea urchins have teeth that sharpen themselves
- Prop designers wax nostalgic on the hardest props of their careers
- We could send a tiny spacecraft to visit Interstellar Comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov), but it isn’t easy
- An incredible Shirt-Pocket Sound Movie Camera prototype from 1976
- How one town’s restauranteros built an empire
- Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death
Linkdump: August 2019
- Casting Glass from 3D Printed Molds
- Documentation on data storage and file formats
- Cats with Cameras
- Svg2Shenzhen: An Inkscape extension for exporting artwork as PCB graphics
- The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers.
- Sparktrola Tesla Coil Plasma Speaker
- Thermochromic temperature and humidity display
- Make your own GENIAC replica
- Carvone: One Molecule, Two Different Scents And Flavors
- hmm, a heightmap to 3D mesh utility.
- All about SpaceX’s Raptor engine by EveryDay Astronaut (YouTube)
- Keep your Tabagotchi happy by keeping fewer browser tabs open
- Why put googly eyes on robots?