Gastro Obscura introduces us to a particularly Czech way of pouring beer. Mlíko, which means "milk", is usually served as a pilsner, but the type of beer is less important than the way in which it is poured.
Pouring a beer from a tap is more than just flipping the toggle from off to on. It's an art form and the Czechs have mastered it. The mlíko is poured by opening the tap slightly and letting the beer foam into the mug.
When done properly, it tastes like a creamy "cloud of beer" rather than just airy foam. It's essential to drink this cloudy substance quickly before it settles, so it's not for slow, casual drinking while chatting.
A road trip is always made more enjoyable when you get off the beaten path (meaning the endless and monotonous interstate highway) and see the quirkier sites along the way. The online app Make My Drive Fun is a map that doesn't give you specific directions or driving time, but it can make getting there quite a bit more interesting. Just enter the starting and arriving point of a trip you plan to take, and the map will point out a bunch of intriguing but underpublicized places near your route. That's how I learned about Dr. Ted's Musical Marvels in Dale, Indiana, just off I-64, and Old Car City in White, Georgia, just off I-75. Even a short trip may reveal interesting stops you never knew about before! The stops on the map have no links, so you'll have to go to Google search, but most of the attractions have either a website or a review online somewhere. Wherever you are going anyway, you may as well take a break and see something that will make going to great aunt Susie's house worth the drive. -via Nag on the Lake
Drive up, place your order, drive further and pay, then drive some more and get a bag of dinner. Fast food has come a long way in the past 70 years or so, since the time you'd walk into a McDonald's and they slipped however many hamburgers you wanted into a bag from their pile of ready-made burgers. As you can see from this charted data from the top ten fast food chains, Taco Bell is the overall fastest, with KFC not far behind. That makes sense when you think about it.
Have you ever walked into a Taco Bell and had to wait for them to notice you while they concentrate on drive-through orders? There's your chance to watch what they do. They have an extensive menu, but those items are made from the same ten ingredients, just combined in different ways. There are small ovens designed to quickly heat food and melt cheese for specific food items, and each dish has a simple process for quick assembly. KFC is fast because they only serve one kind of main dish, and they make plenty of it in huge batches. I'm sure there are other factors involved in each chain's speed, too.
The chart above is from rosetechnology at the subreddit Data is Beautiful, using 2020 data from Seelevel and 2021 data from QSR. -via Digg
In World War II, the Indian battalion known as the Fifth Gorkha Rifles fought for the British in Burma. One of the brave riflemen who went missing in Burma was named Chinta Bahadur. The battalion searched for him for days, and never found a trace of him. But a sheep found the Gorkha Rifles and followed them. The soldiers got used to the sheep and adopted him, naming him Chinta Bahadur, as if he were an incarnation of their lost colleague. They even made him a member of the battalion!
And the sheep Chinta Bahadur (Chintey for short) serves with the Fifth Gorkha Rifles to this day. Chintey wears a "uniform" of horns painted in the unit's colors, and his attendance is marked at all activities, although he is not judged by his performance. He gets promotions, too, and often outranks the soldiers that accompany him. A sheep will live around eight to ten years, and when Chinta Bahadur dies, he will be replaced by a lamb with the same name, but he must work his way up the ranks again. All the members of the unit have the utmost respect for Chintey, a living memorial to a fallen soldier. Read about Chinta Bahadur at Indian Express. -via Strange Company
You can study the causes of World War I for years, because there are a lot of them. The effect of quinine is not that direct; it's more like a butterfly effect. However, quinine enabled the Scramble for Africa, when European nations competed to colonize the continent. I hope that didn't give too much away, as it's a really interesting story, told in the first half of this video. The second half is chemistry, because there have been some new discoveries about how quinine works to fight malaria. Then the story picks back up at the ten-minute mark. I have to admit I learned a few things today, mostly from this video. -via Geeks Are Sexy
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A Master Class in Prototype Making
In response to John Baglio’s search for a series of prototyping videos he’d run across, Talon Chandler immediately responded with:
“He’s probably talking aboutDan Gelbart. Dan is a local legend among engineers in Vancouver, BC. He founded Creo, a printing technology company that sold to Kodak circa 2005, and several other companies including Kardium, a growing healthcare company. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Dan once (I interned at Kardium close to 10 years ago), although I haven’t had the pleasure of visiting his extraordinary shop.”
Others also messaged me and told stories about the impact of Dan’s videos on them. They are amazing. I haven’t found a treasure trove like this since discovering TubalCain/MrPete222 some 15 years ago. Anyone interested in precision machining, prototyping, water jet cutting, and a wealth of general machine shop wisdom should check out this channel.
Expanding the Usefulness of 1-2-3 Blocks with a Hardware Kit
I’ve long been a fan of 1-2-3 blocks and always have them handy when doing a host of different projects. They’re great for quick measuring, aligning, holding parts together for gluing/ fastening, as shop weights, and countless other applications. One of the features that few people outside of machining use are the holes drilled into the blocks. These are not just there to keep the overall weight down. They are threaded and non-threaded holes designed for attaching the blocks in various configurations (such as for making right-angle or T-shaped jigs).
In this Stumpy Nubs video, James introduces a clever little hardware kit for easily attaching blocks – and attaching them with nothing proud of the surfaces. As he points out, you can source these screws and through-hole fasteners yourself, but why not support the guy who came up with the idea for this kit? That guy, Mike Taylor, sells a kit of 6 hex-head screws, sized for 1″, 2″, and 3″ attachment, 4 threaded through-hole dowels, a hex key, and a slotted driver head – all housed in a handy little plastic box. I immediately bought a kit (only $10) and I love it. Mike also makes really high-quality blocks at an affordable price ($20/pair). I snagged a pair of those, too. It always feels good to support a maker small business.
Using Finger Pressure to Match Hex Head to Wrench
On the Twitter account of software engineer Roach, he posted this clever way of matching a hex head to a hex wrench. Pressing your finger into the head will leave a dimple that you can use to size the appropriate wrench.
A Prompt Book for Better AI Art Generation
If you’ve spent any time on social media lately, you’ve likely seen some of your acquaintances go down the rabbit hole of artificial intelligence image generators like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Google’s Imagen. These programs take descriptions that you feed them and return AI- generated art interpretations of that input. It’s very addictive and fun and has huge disruptive potential. My wife Angela and I were joking a few weeks ago that in the future, art will be nothing more than the ability to input the most fulsome description of what you want. And then, just a few days later, Recomendo shared a link to The Prompt Book, a free PDF of instructions, examples, and tips for refining your input commands. It’s directed at the DALL-E program, but its ideas can be applied to any of these art generators. In the future, art will be incantation.
Making a Shop Paper Roll Dispenser
Poking around on the ‘Tubes, I came across a series of DIY videos, called Try, that Kevin Kelly did on Cool Tools in 2020-21. How did I miss these? Here’s one on building a kraft paper roll cutter for your shop and a really charming one about the sign that he made for the Kelly compound in Pacifica, CA.I hope he gets inspired to do more of these.
Maker Slang
Jargon, slang, and tech terms from the many realms of making.
FEP – (Fluorinated Ethylene Propylene) A tough, no-stick plastic material commonly found in the bottoms of resin vat 3D printers. Its translucence allows the light source beneath it to shine through the vat, curing the resin onto the build plate.
Holidays – A term used by professional painters and gilders/gold leafers to refer to gaps in coverage. It derives from the joke that a painter must have taken some time off, a little holiday, by not covering an area they should have. [Hat tip to gilder Michael Kramer]
Minimal viable product – A phrase used by Italian maker and product developer, Giaco Whatever. In creating a product, you want to pare your idea down to its minimum possible components. See also: KISS (keep it simple, stupid)
Real job – A project that’s a series of tasks and challenges that imply significant time and effort – as opposed to a task which can be quickly accomplished. “That’s a real job. I need to set aside an afternoon for that.”
Resilient idiot – A self-deprecating admission that sometimes knowledge and skills seemingly won’t stick, not matter how hard you try and learn them. Coined by Donald Bell. Not to be confused with Andy Birkey’s similar: actual moron.
“This is a very common tool for locksmiths when dealing with vehicle lockouts. The inflatable pry bar can generally create enough space for the locksmith to drop a loop down to grab the lock pin from the interior of the door frame and gain entry without having to damage or possibly ruin the actual lockset on the car door. But don’t underestimate their power. I used one on an old car when I locked my keys in and it bent the door to the point that it never fully aligned to the door frame gasket again.”
The earliest written documentation on "portable soup" goes back to the late 1500s. It's described as somewhat akin to a bouillon cube, with more gelatin. In a 12-hour process, meat and bones were boiled, the solids picked out, and the liquid was boiled further to reduce it to the smallest size possible and the texture of a dried gummi. The result is mostly protein and flavor, perfect for travelers. Ships that explored new continents took portable soup with them. It could be reconstituted with boiling water as a soup base, or added to oats or other available grains. It could also be chewed by itself. Lewis and Clark took 193 pounds of portable soup with them on their exploration of the American West, and instructions for making it appeared in cookbooks up until the 19th century. Other methods of preserving food eventually made portable soup unnecessary, but Britain’s National Maritime Museum has a cake of portable soup from the 1700s. It doesn't look much different than it would have back then, but no one has tried eating it. Read about portable soup at Atlas Obscura.
Many upstart brands claim to have dreamt up the latest breakthrough. Thanks to one transformative ingredient, Montreal's Norda may have actually done it.
"There's some romanticism about writing your own adventure and having a watch that personifies that spirit of freedom. I'm very humbled to be the face of that."
Sometimes, cooking is more “Can I do this thing?” than “Should I do this thing?” You get an idea in your head, and the combinations of flavors and methods spiral down into new realms of possibility. This is how we wind up with deep-fried sushi rolls, or peanut butter on cheeseburgers. Or, in my case, stew made from…
Almost every major camera manufacturer has either openly discontinued its point-and-shoot line of cameras or has not produced a new one in many years, according to a new report. In short, smartphones have all but totally replaced compact cameras.
A standard part of travel kit for the 2020s is now a battery pack — a hefty lithium-ion cell with onboard electronics for USB charging, that ensures all of our devices stay topped up while we’re out of range of a socket. But what happens when there is no handy mains supply to recharge it from? Step in [Chleba], with a hand cranked generator.
There are plenty of hand cranked generators to be found online, from tiny devices intended to top up a single phone to sturdy metal boxes intended for battery charging. This one differs from those in that most use a brushed DC motor as a cheap generator, while here that function comes from a stepper motor feeding a rectifier pack and thence a DC-to-DC converter. A step-up gearbox provides the necessary shaft speed, and a neat 3D-printed case rounds everything off.
The result is about as neat a generator as you could imagine, and would certainly be of use shoved into any off-grid backpack. Meanwhile it’s not the first we’ve shown you, we’ve even see one that could start a car.
Paul Saffo is a technology forecaster based in Silicon Valley. An Adjunct Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, Saffo teaches courses on the future of engineering and the impact of technological change on the future.
Twenty-two-year old Grammy-nominated artist, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, known as the defining blues voice of his generation, is on a roll and coming out with his own Fender signature guitar.
Sometimes it feels like Trader Joe’s knows you better than you know yourself. The beloved grocery chain has an uncanny knack for discovering flavor combos that its devout customers never even realized they craved.
A custom Omega Seamaster worn on screen by Daniel Craig in No Time To Die is coming up for auction.
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