In this TronicsFix video, Steve buys 7 broken NES game cartridges, priced from $5 – $30, to see how hard it is to fix them. Most of the repairs come down to cleaning the “golden finger” contacts on the edge of the circuit boards and Steve finds that a combo of pink eraser, IPA on a Q-tip, and a metal polishing cloth does the trick. One game had badly corroded pins on a chip and was therefore DOA, another had a short in one of the chips (same), a few required jumping wires to repair broken copper traces. But, in the end, only a couple of the games were beyond basic repairs.
Awesome Woodworking Tips from Lloyd Khan
When I was a teen, I was obsessed with the Whole Earth Catalogs and completely enamored with the work of often-featured designer-builders like Jay Baldwin, Greg Baer, Malcolm Wells, and Lloyd Khan. Khan was responsible for the very WEC-like outsized Shelter publications, featuring crazy, cool, and arty owner-built dwellings. Lloyd is still around, still doing his thing. His Instagram is worth a follow. This particular post is loaded with a number of high-quality construction tips.
Getting to Know the 555 Timer Chip
In this DroneBot Workshop they provide a clear and concise 42-minute introduction to the ubiquitous and versatile 555 timer chip. They discuss how the 555 works, its various modes, and some of the basic projects you can use it in.
A Chemist Explains How Super Glue Works
Brent, of the excellent game crafting and miniature painting channel, Goobertown Hobbies, also has a Ph.D. in chemistry. In this video on his channel, he explains the chemistry behind cyanoacrylate (aka Super Glue) and how the glue actually works.
Electroplating 3D Prints
Via Donald Bell’sMaker Update comes a recommendation for this article on Makezine about how to create faux chrome finishes on 3D prints. The process involves lots of sanding and smoothing of the print, a spray with a copper conductive paint, then an electroplating bath. The results are pretty spectacular.
Testing and Ranking Heavy-Duty Staplers
In this Project Farm video, Todd tests out 14 different brands of heavy-duty staplers. He looks at units from Makita, Milwaukee, Ryobi, Arrow, DeWalt, WorkPro, Bauer, Neu Master, Ework, Bielmeier, Stanley, and Citadel. The staplers were compared for resistance to jams, stapling speed, capability to drive staples into spruce, oak, and composite decking. Bottom line? The Ryobi performed very well and offers the best value, at $84 (at time of testing). The stapler that tested best overall was the Makita, at a whopping $210 at time of testing.
Shop Talk
Newsletter reader Paul Cryan asks:“How do you know if a tip you’ve come across is original enough to report?”Good question, Paul. A lot of it comes down to experience and intuition. I’ve been writing in the DIY space for over 30 years, so I have some sense of the saturation of tips and techniques that are shared. But ultimately, I don’t sweat “originality” as much as I do practicality. If it’s a great tip, even if it’s been around for a while, even a very long while, it’s worth sharing with those for whom it’s new and as a reminder to those who may already know it. I see tips all the time that serve as a reminder for me to finally break down and try it out (or bring it back into my work flow).
***
I got a lot of responses to my “Shop Talk” post about areas of DIY where you say “Hell, no, get me a pro.” Everyone seemed to be on the same page. Reader Craig best summarized the responses I received:“My dad did almost no home or auto repairs. Not because he didn’t know how, but because he freakin’ hated doing them. Mom, however, might have been able to build a house with a pocketknife and a pair of vise grips. She just had skills…lots of them.”I have done a wide spectrum of things but as I’ve gotten older, I triage everything:If I want to try something, I do.If I don’t want to, I don’t.If it absolutely must be done and I don’t want to do it, I hire it out.No guilt, just a depleted treasury.”
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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."
