What have you found, or learnt, or watched, or heard? What are you building or breaking or repairing or investigating?
Let’s hear about your technical or educational adventures, however large or small.
Previously: Monthly thread - what’s new with you? (April edition)
I take my baseball cap off (I sleep in it) for these incredible women. How many times have I bought plums that looked great, but tasted like pants…
Just into May, on Monday the 1st, I had a mini-meetup with a couple of retrocomputing friends from Bristol. Three people, five laptops, several Raspberry Pi and two little Agon Z80 computers. Here’s the classic early computer graphics artefact, the Utah teapot output by a Basic program:
Here’s a nice mathematical kind of puzzle thing, not unlike the Soma Cube but predating it - Tom O’Beirne’s Cube from 1961. See this PDF, or this video:
Finally, we come to what is probably O’Beirne’s finest invention, a cube which splits into components in numerous ways and then reassembled into other cuboids. Apparently, it was invented while considering the best design for standard boxes to fit optimally in a delivery lorry…
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There are six pieces, each piece consisting of one long and two short (half-length) pieces stuck together. So there is a nice question about the particular pieces, followed by the task of fitting them together to make a cube.
I am also making a teapot. Initially a jug though as it is simpler. Making a 3D printed mold onto which a sheet of clay can be draped and squeezed on. A friend will soon have a kiln installed in their pottery studio.
Just for interest: a Czech company, long time experts in Nixie tube clocks, got a request from NASA to make an extremely fast clock to check high speed cameras.
I’ve been noodling around with absurb calculations on RPN calculator emulators - I suspect this is something of a niche interest. But, anyone who knows a few digits of pi might be interested to calculate p+sin(p) to get more digits. Something you can do again and again… (Free42 is the bees knees of RPN calculator apps.)
In other news, I came across a few educational sites from Google which might be of interest:
