base rate

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science explains how electrophoretic e-paper displays work and how he modified the driver firmware and waveform lookup tables of a 4.2-inch panel to reach roughly 3Hz partial refresh. It covers the tweakable constants in the refresh process and touches on colored e-ink microcapsules.

Chess player John Bartholomew plays opponents rated below 1000 on Chess.com and comments on optimal strategy and typical mistakes at that level. It is part of his Climbing the Rating Ladder series.

Harry Schwartz gives a roughly hour-long tour of Emacs Org mode as an outliner, task manager, markup language and agenda tool. He demonstrates how he uses it for documents, presentations and todo lists.

A three-hour PyCon 2016 tutorial by Christophe Pettus that orients Python developers to PostgreSQL. It covers installation, administration, and use, including vacuuming, MVCC, replication and backups.

Russ Cox gives a 23-minute tour of the Acme text editor from Plan 9, showing its mouse-driven interface, executing commands from text, and its filesystem-based interface to other programs.

Bisqwit writes a NES emulator in C++ in about 15 minutes of tool-assisted, sped-up coding, narrated with captions. It shows an accurate emulator built with a compile-time generated 6502 instruction table. Part 2 covers compiling and running it.

The first part of Robert Baruch's series on building a 6800 CPU on an FPGA with nMigen, a Python-based hardware description language. It introduces the HDL while implementing a simpler 6800 core.

Anders Brownworth gives a basic visual introduction to blockchain using an interactive web demo, covering SHA256 hashes, blocks, chains, distribution, tokens and coinbase transactions.

Jacques Pepin demonstrates deboning a whole chicken, quickly and with complete control. It is a short, wordless-feeling technique demo that shows a skill most cooks never learn.

George Brocklehurst of thoughtbot demonstrates Vim's built-in completion mechanisms, from word, line and block completion to ctags. The aim is to type less and make fewer typos.

James Hoffmann demonstrates his technique for a clean, sludge-free cup from a French press: stir, break the crust, wait, and carefully pour. It is a four-minute guide.

James Hoffmann demonstrates his recommended technique for brewing coffee with a Hario V60 or other cone-shaped dripper, with notes on water and filter papers.

Marco Baringer's tutorial video on SLIME, the Emacs mode for developing Common Lisp. It demonstrates the interactive workflow of working against a live Lisp image.

Matt Risinger demonstrates a blower door test on a house, using a fan to measure air leakage and find where air gets in and out. It shows how the test reveals the quality of the build.

A screencast tutorial on Specter, a Clojure library for navigating and transforming nested data structures declaratively, demonstrated in a REPL.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science shows how to make and test YBCO high-temperature superconductor with a kiln and eBay chemicals. He demonstrates flux pinning and shows a close-up of the crystal structure.

Jeri Ellsworth shows early steps of making microchips at home: cleaving wafers, removing native oxide, testing dopant type with a hot probe, and loading the furnace.