Nuclear Monster

  • The tenth episode of Tim Hunkin’s The Secret Life of Components is up. Linkages & Mechanisms does what it says on the tin as Tim Hunkin shares his knowledge and experience with us about the parts that amplify forces and make his machines move.

    This is honestly my favorite video so far, we get to see Hunkin’s joyful perspective on watching a digging crane at a local scrapyard pick up, move, and destroy rubbish. The crane picks things up using linkages and Hunkin’s happy to just watch them in motion and share that with us which is a little unusual but much appreciated.

  • Returning as a mostly online-only event, Apple’s WWDC is coming back on June 6th to 10th. At the pre-recorded developer-focused infomercial on the 6th we should find out about new operating system features that will come out in the Fall and potentially new hardware as well.

    Notably, the logo for this year’s event almost looks like an application icon for the Apple’s Swift programming language. Could be something to do with improvements in developing in Swift on the iPad. Could be something else.

    Either way, I plan to write about the infomercial on the 6th. You can find out more about the development focused activities for students and others at WWDC 2022 here.

  • There’s a lot to love about the custom mechanical keyboard community, especially when there are major innovations in the underlying technology. One of the most innovative mechanical keyboards is the Emugotchi macropad. It is shaped a little bit like an egg or Tamagotchi, and uses a M5Stack Core2 ESP32 microcontroller that appears to be more like a complete mini computer with a screen, SD card slot, wireless communications and more built-in. The major downside to the Emugotchi is that it is only available in Japan, and all of the instructions and software appear to be in Japanese.

    I’ve ordered one despite the language barrier, the Yushakobo shop will ship the Emugotchi outside of Japan. If you are in Japan there are more Emugotchi options available from the Booth shop of the Emugotchi’s designer, including silly easter bunny ears. The Emugotchi was about $60 shipped from Yushakobo and the M5Stack Core2 was about $50. You’d still need keycaps and switches to complete the build.

    The designer also has a small ortholinear mechanical keyboard called the AZ-M5ortho with the same M5Stack Core2 microcontroller.

  • 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.