Nuclear Monster

  • Tim Hunkin helped us peek into The Secret Life of Machines on TV three decades ago with his colleague Rex Garrod. In the meantime Hunkin had also made custom, extremely silly, arcade machines and other inventions. Last year Hunkin was inspired by other creators and returned to video with a new series of eight episodes called The Secret Life of Components. I think the building community is very fortunate to have him back again for a new series of five episodes starting with Sensors. In each episode, Hunkin demonstrates his knowledge of the topic and shows us practical skills in implementing the components Hunkin uses to build his machines. 

    In The Secret Life of Components: Sensors Hunkin goes over the different types of sensors he uses for his inventions and shows us how practical (or not) each one ends up being.

    Yet to be aired in this new series of five videos are: Linkages and Mechanisms, Motors, Screw Threads, and Prototype.

  • There have been a variety of third-party command-line package management utilities for Mac computers that all really make the Mac’s terminal a good place to get things done with modern packages since Apple doesn’t provide a package management system for the command line like other Unixes do. MacPorts, Fink, and the newest and I think likely to be the most popular is HomeBrew. There are plenty more out there, but those are the ones I’ve used in the past. Some of these package managers can even run on top of other operating systems, HomeBrew can run inside of Windows 10 (and 11’s) Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

    Max Howell was the original creator of HomeBrew and has now started a similar new project called Tea, announced with a blog post, Max calls Tea “brew2” and points out the obvious problem of open source software projects not paying bills despite enormous companies relying on open source software and then turns that to Web3 (crypto currency grafting the web with the blockchain grift) as the solution:

    While learning about web3 I bought and sold a few NFTs. The process was mostly uninteresting except for when I sold one and saw the automated, unavoidable 10% royalty enforced by a digital contract (with no need for a legal structure) that compensated the original creator for secondary sales. I felt the sting of inspiration.

    web3 enables indirect compensation.

    I wondered if we could apply this concept to helping distribute value to open source.

    The Tea homepage claims that:

    Like its predecessor, brew, tea is the base of the developer stack—seated beneath the tools that build the Internet.

    This is a terrible mistake. Crypto currency grifters would no doubt love to turn desperate people like open source software developers into suckers to buy in so the grifters at the top of the pyramid can cash out. Fortunately, at least one member of the Homebrew team has indicated that Homebrew has no connection to this pyramid scheme. Hopefully Tea will fail to gain any traction after this initial round of 8 million dollars in the pump phase of the scam. The dump phase could be even sadder than open source developers getting screwed over by the companies that exploit their labor.

    Note: All links in this post lead to archive.org so as not to encourage anyone to join the pyramid scheme that is Web3, NFTs, and cryptocurrencies. 

  • Early in January Google started telling users of the free tier of Google Workspace (previously G Suite and Google Apps for Work) that they had until July 1st of 2022 to pay up or the service would shut off. I’ve been a user of that service for years, and the various projects I work on used it too. Google Workspace was almost perfect for a free email service that worked with custom domains, but I always kept a regular gmail account in my back pocket to use for Google’s services because I thought this day might come.

    The one good thing about Google deciding that one of the richest companies in the world can’t afford to give email services to small open source projects, small businesses, and individuals, is that it was the impetus to finally switch all of those projects away from Google’s services and support smaller businesses that don’t make the majority of their money from being a slimy advertising middleman.

    So, off to Fastmail it was, signing up, importing mail from Google, and updating the MX records was easy enough after I realized I had forgotten a period at the end of one entry but there was still one large problem with Google’s services: Even after a week of changed records, long enough to bypass the time-to-live many times over, some automated corporate e-mail was still being delivered to a Google account that had no MX records pointing to it.

    Turns out, that unless you go into the Google Workspace administration panel and specifically shut off the GMail service for all users, Google continues to receive some mail despite the MX records being set to go to Fastmail. It is truly bizarre that either Google or some automated senders ignore the MX records and I’m still not sure if it was only for mail delivered using Google’s services or what, but that was the final trick to getting all mail delivery go to the new service provider instead of the old one.

  • Densha de GO! is a series of train simulator games from Taito that require so much from their players, even honking at the right time for virtual rail fans in the game. Alex from The Yamanote channel on YouTube and Twitch plays PlayStation 4 Densha de GO!! Hashirou Yamanote Sen in the video above with the PlayStation VR and a special train controller from Zuiki. The Zuiki controller can be used with an adapter called the Titan Two.

  • The itch.io Bundle for Ukraine ended yesterday with over six million dollars split between two charities for the people of Ukraine. Humble Bundle now has a similar bundle called Stand With Ukraine going on with a $40 minimum for 123 different items like the recently released co-op Back 4 Blood and Satisfactory.

    The Humble Stand with Ukraine bundle has already raised over three million dollars for four charities benefitting the Ukrainian people and it ends in about 6 days.  Check it out at this link.