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Which Ratcheting Screwdriver is Best?
There are few hand tools that people seem to have more opinions about than ratcheting screwdrivers. And, now we have some decent testing of this everyday tool by Todd at Project Farm. Todd tests 14 different brands for efficiency, precision, and durability. Tests included working arc swing, ratchet back drag, magnet strength, bit retention strength, build quality (shaft wobble), shaft rotation in the locked position, bit failure load, and screwdriver failure load. Bottom line? The PB Swiss screwdriver, at a whopping $144 (at time of testing, now $178!), performed the best. This was followed by the $70 Linus Tech Tips driver. The Megapro and Williams also performed well, at $34 and $36, respectively. I have the Williams driver and have no complaints.
Tips on Quickly Learning a New Skill
In this video, engineer Jeremy Fielding drops a ton of wisdom via 26 strategies for learning a new skill, fast. Many of these might seem obvious (you must be motivated, mistakes will happen), but it’s in the unpacking of these ideas and the case examples he uses that make this video most valuable. And, there are a number of tips that one might overlook or not consider, like asking family and friends if they have resources related to the skill you wish to learn, not being afraid to ask someone to teach you what they know, and the idea that you only need to learn the essentials first, then you can dive in and learn by doing.
Making Clay Out of Common Soil
As my Southern mamma used to say: “Put a new wrinkle on your brain every day.” Here’s today’s wrinkle: I had no idea that you could derive clay, suitable for making pottery, from common soil. I thought you had to find a vein of red clay and harvest that. Sure, such clay is obviously preferred, but you can also render out clay using reddish soil (which has high clay content) or really any type of soil. All you need to do is suspend the soil in water and filter out the heavy materials. After straining through a cloth, you are left with clay.
Maker Slang
Jargon, slang, and tech terms from the diverse worlds of DIY.
Hero prop – In movie-making, a detailed prop designed for close-up shots and closer scrutiny from the audience. In contrast, action props are used where the audience will not see the prop in close-up.
Scumbling – In painting, to soften (the color or tone of a painted area) by overlaying opaque or semi-opaque color applied thinly and lightly with an almost dry brush. I learned this one from my artist wife, Angela White.
Weeding – In vinyl cutting, the act of removing all of the unwanted vinyl around your cut design.
TOYS! Better Sink Strainer
I watched a video a few weeks ago on Cool Tools where Donald Bell extolled the virtues of this OXO sink strainer. Like him, I hate the design of most metal-basket strainers. I ordered one of these and was so impressed with it that I wrote a Boing Boing post about it. Hundreds of BB readers followed suit and many of them are as happy with theirs as I am with mine, so I thought I’d share it here, too.
I made two racks for my Stanley and Harbor Freight sorting boxes. One I welded and later decided it was way overbuilt. Too heavy especially once loaded with full trays of screws, etc. The second one I built a simple frame from 2 x 4s, then slid small shelves out of thin material like Masonite across both sides. It may not be as easy as baker racks, but I’m pretty sure it’s the cheapest way to build a rack in terms of materials. Plywood would be nicer all around, but 2x4s are cheap new, and almost free used.
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Reader Jim Landis wrote:First, thanks for all the fascinating information you keep publishing. I’m a big fan. I’m sure others have discovered this, but some readers might find it useful. When I’m knocking together a quick model out of soda straws and paper clips, etc to get a feel for a project, 1 centimeter to 2 inches is a very convenient scale to use.
1. It’s easy to double or halve numbers without too much mental effort.
2. There’s always a ruler nearby with both inches and centimeters marked in parallel.
3. It’s very close to a 1:5 scale, so models are a nice size for desktops. For context, the original GI Joe dolls, -ahem- action figures, were 1:6 scale.
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A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. All reviews on this site are written by readers who have actually used the tool and others like it. Items can be either old or new as long as they are wonderful. We post things we like and ignore the rest. Suggestions for tools much better than what is recommended here are always wanted.
Imagine a patient in a vegetative state who can actually feel everything happening to them but can't communicate it. Picture an octopus being boiled alive, experiencing every second of agony. Consider an AI system that might be developing genuine feelings while we treat it as just another tool. These are the ethical questions that keep Jonathan Birch up at night.
As a philosopher and ethicist at the London School of Economics, Birch has spent years grappling with one of science's most perplexing questions: how do we know if another being is conscious and capable of suffering? His book, The Edge of Sentience, argues that we've been asking the wrong question all along. Instead of demanding absolute proof of consciousness — which may be impossible to obtain — we should focus on identifying "sentience candidates" and taking practical steps to protect them from harm.
This isn't just academic theory. Birch's work has already influenced real-world policy — he led the team whose research convinced the UK government to legally recognize lobsters and octopuses as sentient beings. Now he's turning his attention to an even broader range of cases, from human patients with brain injuries to the possibility of conscious AI.
Here are four key insights from the book:
"Assume Sentient" When Lives Are at Stake
"A patient [with a prolonged disorder of consciousness] should not be assumed incapable of experience when an important clinical decision is made. All clinical decisions should consider the patient's best interests as comprehensively as possible, working on the precautionary assumption that there is a realistic possibility of valenced experience and a continuing interest in avoiding suffering and in achieving a state of well-being, but without taking this assumption to have implications regarding prognosis."
Look Beyond Brain Size and Intelligence
“Sentience is neither intelligence nor brain size. We should be aware of the possibility of decouplings between intelligence, brain size, and sentience in the animal kingdom. Precautions to safeguard animal welfare should be driven by markers of sentience, not by markers of intelligence or by brain size.”
On the Hidden Nature of Experience
“At least in principle, there can be phenomenal consciousness without valence: experiences that feel like something but feel neither bad nor good. It is not clear that humans can have such experiences (our overall conscious state arguably always contains an element of mood). But we can conceive of a being that has a subjective point of view on the world in which non-valenced states feature (it consciously experiences shapes, colours, sounds, odours, etc.) but in which everything is evaluatively neutral. Such a being would be technically non-sentient according to the definition we have been using, though it would be sentient in a broader sense. Would such a being have the same moral standing as a being with valenced experiences?”
On Future AI Risk
"As these models get larger and larger, we have no sense of the upper limit on the sophistication of the algorithms they could implicitly learn... The point at which this judgement shifts from correct to dangerously incorrect will be very hard for us to see. There is a real risk that we will continue to regard these systems as our tools and playthings long after they become sentient."
