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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.”
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Cool tools really work.
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.
This two-sided page contains the wisdom of an entire book on how to write better. Nay, it distills an entire shelf of the world’s greatest writing manuals (and I have them all). After 30 years as both a writer and editor I can’t think of much I would add to these 50 short tips. This PDF is now my favorite guide to writing well. You can print it out for free. If you want its pithy reminders fleshed out with more examples, see the book form, or the website. But the free tip sheet itself — one paper printed both sides — rewards a quick review anytime you get down to serious writing.. – KK
There’s an emerging new media I use more and more: an online summary of a conference. Known as liveblogging, it presents a synopsis of each presentation, talk-by-talk, in nearly real time. This saves you time and money traveling to distant cities, and suffering through introductions and equipment failures. At its best, reading the liveblog can be better than attending the talk. All the chaff has been winnowed, and almost every talk captured. (Most conference attendees don’t even get to every talk.) Video recordings of conferences are becoming more popular, but a good liveblog is much quicker to scan and digest. But at its worse, a liveblog will offer little more than snarky comments about the speaker.
At the creation end, you need some skills to separate the best from the worst. Ethan Zuckerman, of Geek Corp, is one of the best conference bloggers alive. He teamed up with Bruno Giussani, another star liveblogger, to produce this free short 6-page PDF booklet on how to blog a conference with effectiveness. When you blog a conference it forces you to pay attention. My first book Out of Control began as an online blog of every talk at the first Artificial Life Conference (although no one called it blogging in 1987). The requisite focus of summarizing each talk clarified many ideas for me, and the response to the “blog” of the conference encouraged me to write a book. Other livebloggers find the same. They listen harder, and remember more.
Get good at this and you have a free pass to many high-priced conferences. Organizers are increasingly looking for first-rate livebloggers to generate press and future attendees. Or, like Ethan you can generate your own audience who follow you because your liveblogging skills. – KK
It’s relatively easy to blog good and great speakers: They follow a narrative path through their talks and speak at a pace the audience can understand. It’s harder to blog inexperienced speakers(because they may be too technical, confusing, fast, etc.) and multispeaker panels (because the discussion can take many different unstructured turns). But you don’t need to transcribe the whole talk, you need to capture the gist of it. A 20-minutes talk can often be summarized in a 20-lines post.
Always remember that what you’re writing will be read by people who weren’t in the room, so they haven’t seen the slides, the video, or the gesture. Hence, you have to compensate for the lack of context. Don’t be afraid to create a narrative by saying “He shows a slide with data on …” or “She walks on stage carrying a big suitcase” or “He shows a YouTube video” etc. And if the speaker shows a YouTube video, or a picture, remember that you’re online: Open another browser window, go to YouTube, find that video, and link to it; or go to the speaker’s website, find that picture or another similar or related item, and link to it (or republish the picture within your post). Yes, this requires effective multitasking. It’s at the root of conference blogging.
Conferences usually give out a program ahead of time. Use it to prepare for blogging: Do a quick Google search for each speaker, and save (in the same text file) links to their sites, blogs, and the institutions they’re affiliated with; write a one-or-two-sentences “biography” for each; and for the speakers you’ve never heard of, try to get a general sense of who they are and what they do. To write the mini-biography, use also the speaker information distributed by the conference organizers (booklet, website, etc.). For the key speakers, save a picture on your laptop (from their websites) and pre-format it for Web use, in case you will need it. If you prepare sufficiently, you’ve got the first paragraph of each post almost written ahead of time.
This is the best thesaurus there is. It supplies more synonyms, analogs, parallels, equivalents and comparable words in English than any other source, online or off. No other thesaurus comes near to it for completeness or breadth. Compiled in dictionary form, like the one in your word processors, there’s no index or cross-referencing. Just look up a word, any word, and it proceeds to overwhelm you with alternative choices (a total of 1.5 million synonyms are presented in 1,361 pages), including short phrases and only mildly related words. Rather than being a problem of imprecision, the Finder’s broad inclusiveness prods your imagination and prompts your recall.
Its single downside, however, is a major frustration: it is not available digitally, in a form compatible to the way most people write these days. It should live on your computer in a pull-down option, or plug-in for Word or the like. I’m totally baffled why it is not. As it is, it’s a huge fat book — a great book! — sitting within arm’s reach when I write, but not near enough for the power that it offers. – KK
