Links

https://hforsten.com/homemade-polarimetric-synthetic-aperture-radar-drone.html Normally cheap and radar are not used in the same sentence, however in this case for under $1k Henrik was able to build a drone with radar that can capture good images of surroundings at a mile away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7TsET-OX7k This is a cool project that makes something much like an oscilloscope but instead of displaying voltage over time it displays movement over time.
https://youtu.be/Kk3gc-3JLSQ?si=MQQqBujOQ75vt1ZT This is an interesting video showing how for FDM printing there can be little added value to additional infill past 10% until you jump all the way to a solid part at 100%.
https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-and-learning This is an interesting take on the cost of the easy at which AI tools can help with writing code. I’ve had this conversation with several and pretty much everyone I talk with comes away with the same conclusion.
https://www.shapr3d.com/blog/history-of-cad This is a very long series of articles, but it does a great job explaining the evolution of CAD applications, talks about specific ones in great detail some of which I’d never heard of before. Also interesting read about Intergraph which was a big name in Huntsville for quite a while.
https://jasonfantl.com/posts/Space-of-3D-Rotations/ I’ve talked about Quaternions before on this site, but wanted to share this new post demonstrating some of the ways 3D angles can be represented and some of pros/cons of these different methods.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/02/why-are-qr-codes-with-capital-letters-smaller-than-qr-codes-with-lower-case-letters/ Turns out if you yell your URL you need less data to get it across in a QR code, this is an explanation as to why sometimes using upper case characters will use less data than lower case ones.

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.

Cool historical fact

https://nmspacemuseum.org/inductee/john-p-stapp/ John Stapp was an Air Force officer that participated in sled tests, in which at times he experienced 46.2 Gs, for reference the most Gs you can experience on any roller coaster in the world is 5.5Gs. He was sitting on a rocket that went from a stand still to 632 mph in 5seconds. And he didn’t do this type of thing once, but numerous times while he was pioneering research in safety equipment and the effects of such high forces on a person.