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New Electronics Series from Becky Stern
My old Make: colleague, Becky Stern, has a new video series that she’s doing for the electronics component company, Digi-Key. Becky has always done an impressive job of explaining what can be intimidating technical information in an entertaining and digestible way. If this first installment, an introduction to LEDs, is any indication, this series looks to deliver more of her welcome brand of accessible tech education.
How to Get Clearer and Stronger Transparent FDM Prints
In this CNC Kitchen video, Stefan shows the special settings you can use to create superior-looking clear prints using an FDM (Fused deposition modeling)printer and clear filament. He also looks at how these parameters make your parts super strong.
Making Your Own Vinyl Stickers
If you’ve been attracted to the idea of creating your own custom vinyl stickers, this video shows you how. All you basically need is a crafting vinyl cutter (a few hundred dollars) and some sheets or rolls of vinyl material.
CA Glue Accelerator from Baking Soda and Water
One of the best takeaways from this Bill Making Stuff video (where he celebrates his 50th episode) is his tip for creating your own accelerator for CA glue. As you likely know, there are commercial accelerators, but they smell funny, have nasty stuff in them, and are combustible. You’re even supposed to wear eye protection when using them, though nobody does. You may also know about using baking soda as an accelerator. It works great, but it leaves a dusty powder on everything that you have to clean off. Bill mixes his baking soda with water in a spray bottle and has found that it works great and creates less mess. I will definitely be trying this.
How a Gas Pump Knows When to Turn Itself Off
If you’ve ever wondered how a gas pump nozzle knows when to shut off when your tank is full, this video reveals the clever design. Venturi tubes, Bernoulli principle, negative pressure — it turns out the design is far more complicated that you might expect. I always assumed it was some sort of an electronic sensor, but it’s purely mechanical.
“I was surprised to see a recommendation for the OXO sink strainer. I love OXO products, but that strainer is a disappointment to me. I do like the inversion feature, but stuff still gets stuck in and around the holes. The silicone gets slimy. I have black slime after a week in my kitchen drain, probably from teensy bits of lettuce and herbs and salad dressing. UGH. (Cleaning out the bowl with a paper towel before washing it seems to help.) I don’t know that a standard issue strainer would make me any happier (though I’d love to quit using so many paper towels). I’m glad yours pleases you; my experience is just different.”
This is a great example of that adage made popular by early hacker culture: “Your mileage may vary” (YMMV). When I posted my review of the strainer on Boing Boing, the first few responses were similar to Candy’s and I got nervous, thinking I had prematurely decided a tool was a winner without giving it an honest testing myself. But then the positive reviews came and they were the overwhelming sentiment. And on Amazon, it has 17.5K reviews at 4.7 stars. After a month, we are more than happy with ours, but, as in all things, YMMV. Thanks for sharing your experience, Candy!
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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.
If ever there was a book I wished was around when I was little, it’s The Gutsy Girl. But I’m just as glad to have it in the world now. While I would have read it to pieces as a kid, it also gave grown-up me a powerful reminder: bravery and resilience are skills. Anyone can develop them.
The Gutsy Girl comprises author Caroline Paul’s stories of her own (mis)adventures, accompanied by short bios and quotes from other inspiring ladies, and helpful how-tos (make a compass outside, find the North Star, recognize animal tracks, etc.). All together, the book is everything it promises to be: escapades for your life of epic adventures.
Throughout the book, Paul models adventure through her own life, from racing a boat she made of milk cartons down a river as a young girl, to white-water rafting and working as a firefighter as an adult. And she shares what she’s learned along the way. While the lessons — about planning, communication, teamwork, knowing your limits and when to push them – and when not to — are valuable, I think the bigger idea is that all of her failures and triumphs are part of a learning process. With each new experience, Paul tests, hones, and ultimately grows her own bravery and resilience.
This idea is also sweetly captured by the book’s illustrator Wendy MacNaughton in a drawing titled “The Gutsy-O-Meter.” Readers are asked to rate themselves on a meter that swings from low guts (watching TV and sleeping) to high guts (sleeping to scaling ice cliffs.) If you’re at six (sleeping outside), the book encourages you to try seven (navigating through woods by compass). If you’re already a 10 — watch out world! – Sara Distin at Tiny Bop
SHOT IN THE ‘70S, NORTH AFRICAN VILLAGES SHOWS MEDIEVAL VILLAGES UNCHANGED BY MODERNITY
North African Villages: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia by Norman F. Carver Documan Pr Ltd 1989, 200 pages, 9 x 10.5 x 0.5 inches (softcover)
In the 1970s an architectural student drove a VW van around Italy, the Iberian peninsula, and northern Africa, recording the intact medieval villages still operating in their mountain areas. The hill towns at that time in Italy, Spain, Morocco and Tunisia kept a traditional way of building without architects, using indigenous materials, without straight streets, producing towns of uncommon attractiveness. The architect, Norman Carver, later self published a series of photo books documenting these remote villages which had not yet been interrupted with modernity. They looked, for most purposes, like they looked 1,000 years ago. All of Carter’s books are worthwhile, but my favorite is North African Villages. Here you get a portrait of not just the timeless architecture, but also a small glimpse of the lives that yielded that harmony of the built upon the born. It’s an ideal of organic design, that is, design that is accumulated over time. – Kevin Kelly
