Links

https://makeityourself.org/ This is a cool website/PDF that has 1000 projects that are DIY if you’re so interested in making them all condensed down to one spot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTNXXiMO3e8 This is an interesting video about Electrets, which is something I’d never heard of before but they are actually pretty awesome.
https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/a-15-minute-intro-to-involute-gears This is a neat short read that goes into some of the design details of gears and why they are shaped as they are.
https://youtu.be/cbm03jtWWL0?si=S8ELlehXT0MHSD7Q This is a bit of a longer watch, but an interesting video of the teardown of one of formlabs new 3D printers, with a lot of discussion about product design and the reason they made it the way they did as well as the challenges of making unique hardware.
https://benwang.dev/2023/02/26/Phased-Array-Microphone.html This is a cool project that basically makes a 3D camera to detect sound and where it’s coming from using 192 separate microphones.
https://www.livescience.com/space/space-exploration/students-homemade-rocket-soars-faster-and-farther-into-space-than-any-other-amateur-spacecraft-smashing-20-year-records This is a neat article, some USC students rocket launch made it to 470,000ft, which is nearly 100,000ft higher than the previous record set back in 2004.
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-worlds-rarest-mineral-is-so-rare-its-only-ever-been-found-once We often think of rare minerals such as gold or diamonds, but turns out those are plentiful compared to Kyawthuite.
https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2024/11/the-capacitor-that-apple-soldered-incorrectly-at-the-factory/ Finally often we see big products by big companies that sell successfully and assume they don’t have flaws, but that isn’t the case. Here is a computer sold by Apple in the early 90’s which had a mistake in the design it wasn’t big enough an error to break things back 30yrs ago, but just goes to show how small errors can slip though even for large companies such as Apple.

Book of the month

https://a.co/d/44StV6b This is an amazing book that was first published in 1988 but has been revised/updated/republished last year. This is one of the books I remember from growing up and is a fantastic book for kids/adults alike it goes over a wide range of day to day things and the mechanics/process of how they work, it has enough depth to give you a good baseline of understanding the principles behind how things work without getting too deep into the weeds. I would highly recommend this as a gift for curious minds.

Cool historical fact

https://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/11/setelinleikkaus-when-finns-snipped.html Hyper inflation is always an interesting thing to see in retrospect, such as when the German mark became so useless in the 1920’s that people used the currency to wallpaper rooms, or when Zimbabwe printed a 50 Trillion dollar bill. In the 1940’s when facing rapid inflation the Finn’s solution to their currency being devalued they took a unique approach which involved litterally cutting their currency in half.