Links

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz59e1wWyVc This is a really cool display that was made of a cheap bundle of fiber optic wires attached to a jig that held each of them to a single LED, then using software the location of led in the bundled end was recorded allowing for display of text/images.
https://exclusivearchitecture.com/03-technical-articles-CLT-12-autofocus-systems.html This is a cool breakdown of the various types of motors Canon has used in their autofocus lens over the last 30yrs. It’s super interesting to see the wide variety of mechanisms that all serve the same purpose but accomplish that task in different ways.
https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/why-are-sine-waves-so-common Sine waves are something we encounter every day, most of the time you may not recognize them as that but they are out there. This is a good condensed refresher on sine waves and some of their mathematical relations we often see in physics.
https://planetscale.com/blog/io-devices-and-latency This is a cool interactive page with some neat demonstrations showing the different things that go into the saving and recalling of information on different types of storage media.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC-24QeoQu4 This is quite the keyboard builid, in this video Matthew builds a keyboard with an individual button for each of Englishes 1000 most used words. There were a several challenges in building something this size, from how to connect all the buttons back to a computer, to how to label the keycaps.
https://brodzinski.com/2025/03/milk-kanban.html Been reading a good deal about Lean processes recently and saw this short write up about using the Kanban method for tracking consumables and thought it was a cool thing to highlight. Systems like this are neat as they do two things, they ensure things get addressed in time to not become an issue, but they also free up the person addressing the issue to not need to activity track something until it’s time to be addressed.

Book of the month

2 Second Lean by Paul Akers. This book has been very interesting, it’s written about the concept of Lean manufacturing principles but in a way that applies to things far outside just manufacturing. One of my biggest take aways from it was fix what bugs you. Often if you ask someone how they can improve upon their workflow/setup it’s hard to come up with ideas, however it’s easy to identify things in that workflow that are annoyances/bugs so by addressing those friction points the result is an improvement. For the keen viewers…yes this has not changed from last month, life happened and i wasn’t able to move onto a new book yet.

Cool historical fact

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_(railway_signalling) In general most railroads operate similarly to roads with two tracks in parallel allowing for travel in both directions at the same time. However that’s not always the case in fact there are a large number of sections of track that is only one track, and ensuring you don’t end up with trains running head long into each other is an important issue to solve. It was done a variety of ways in different parts of the world and throughout history but most revolved around the conductor of the train on that controlled section having in his possession token showing he was the only one allowed on that section while he had it.