Links

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENWVRcMGDoU This is by far one of my favorite ted talks of all time. A crazy thing about this, is this is a talk 11+yrs ago, a decade before “AI” stuff become common, and so it’s so much more common today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8txvk5m6VM This is an awesome video showing a super super small steam engine and how it was made. Always awesome to see small things like this made by hand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0-6g6NJMmE Another cool metal video is this one talking about the process of parkerizing.
https://youtu.be/zDnhcsxwNAo?si=JugwBo87Is7A4FOZ This is a really well done series(still on going) of a practical electronics class taught for the University of Colorado. The first video(the one linked above) is more of just a general overview but the following videos start going into depth on practical electronics and do a great job explaining various aspects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuWQM7B8AIc Clickspring is youtube gold for high precision manual machining. This video highlights this as he uses jewels for the movement of a sundial calendar he’s creating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWNAKPDI1rU This is a cool project that feels much like one of the stuff made here projects of sports equipment automation, pretty neat to see his whole process.
https://newatlas.com/marine/how-to-stretch-cruise-ship/ At first you’d not expect a company to take one of their perfectly good working massive cruise ships, take it out of the water and cut it in half just to add a bit more length to it, but that’s exactly what’s been going on.
https://youtu.be/jLX1-tNnvEo?si=1m8FPVrJyl11gIfR Amorphous alloys are super interesting, a few years ago Chase and I saw them out in one of the Nasa labs and got to see this bouncing surface demonstrated in person and it’s a wild thing, very need to see the process of making one of these alloys.
https://www.decarpentier.nl/carpentopod This is an awesome take on the Strandbeest style mechanical mechanisms, this is a coffee table that walks like something you’d see in a sifi movie, very cool process to design mechanisms that function like this.
https://tinytoolk.it/ This is a neat site overviewing some small tool kits folks have come up with, the website layout isn’t the best but you can find links in blue at the top of the page.

Book of the month

The Foxfire series(there are 12 books) is an amazing collection of knowledge, it is literally a collection of books that cover the gambit of how one would rebuild a civilization from nothing. No doubt for us in a world of Instagram and Instacart the value of this series is at least somewhat lost, but should you come across these books I would highly recommend you pick them up.

Once again this goes back to one of my favorite quotes/phrases which is we are “Standing on the shoulders of giants” It’s easy to get this idea in our heads as we carry devices in our pockets that can communicate around the world that somehow we’re so much better than those before us, but the reality is there were many folks far smarter than us who died far before our grandparents and so we should not be quick to dismiss knowledge passed down from those who’ve gone before us.

Cool historical fact

https://www.theverge.com/23810061/zenith-space-command-remote-control-button-of-the-month Before the common infrared remote control we’re used to or the even new Bluetooth/wireless ones of today, there were ultrasonic remote controls. You pushed down a button that released a spring loaded hammer into a tuned bar that vibrated in the ultrasonic frequency range, and the tv would hear that noise and depending on the frequency it would preform the associated action. Pretty awesome to consider this is a truly 100% analog design, no electronics or batteries in the remote what so ever.