code as data

Everyday Astronaut's guide to visiting Starbase, Texas to see Starship, covering what and where it is, which areas close during launches, where to watch from, where to fly into and stay, and things to do.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science shows how to make small batches of specialty glass with minimal equipment, including designing and making photochromic glass. He covers ingredients, melting and the challenges involved.

Matt Risinger covers installing a Zehnder ERV fresh-air system in a tight passive house, explaining balanced ventilation, the benefits of heat recovery and the costs involved.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science uses an antique 4x5 view camera to make high-resolution photolithography masks in a home shop. He photographs a poster-sized printout onto litho film to get features around 20 microns.

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 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.

NightHawkInLight shows how to make ultra-white radiative paint that cools surfaces below ambient temperature without electricity. He walks through the research papers and the household-materials process.

The first lesson of MangoJelly's FreeCAD 0.20 beginner course, covering setup, preferences and navigation. The series teaches fundamentals through complete workflows such as sketching, Part Design and STL export.

The first stream in the Emacs From Scratch series, building a custom Emacs configuration from zero while teaching basics. It covers a usable baseline setup and the packages for completion, themes and productivity.

A tutorial in the GAS Therapy series showing how to recreate the Teenage Engineering OP-1 and OP-1 Field with free software. It argues you do not need to buy expensive gear to make music.

A reupload of Joel Spolsky's talk teaching spreadsheet users the Excel features they are probably missing, such as keyboard navigation, named ranges, tables and lookups. The original disappeared and this copy comes from the Wayback Machine.

Ben Eater writes a program in a made-up machine language and walks through the control logic an 8-bit breadboard CPU needs to execute it. It is part of his build-an-8-bit-computer 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.

Alan Becker's short series on the 12 principles of animation, covering squash and stretch, anticipation, staging, timing, arcs, appeal and the rest. Each principle gets a brief animated illustration.

Applied Science builds a replica Apollo DSKY using an electroluminescent driver circuit and screen-printed conductive ink, with source and PCB files published.

Dave Jones of EEVblog and Richard Stephenson tour the 70m DSS43 dish at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex and explain how NASA talks to Voyager 2. It covers the transmitters, receivers and tracking involved.

Tech Ingredients shows how to build cheap, high-performance flat-panel speakers using audio exciters on sheet materials such as foam-core board. It explains how distributed-mode speakers work and walks through experiments to find good designs.

Dan Worrall explains when higher sample rates help in recording and mixing, and when they do not. He goes into oversampling versus higher sample rates, and aliasing in distortion plugins.

Ben Eater explains how the PS/2 keyboard interface works, covering its clocked serial protocol and scancodes. He builds up the hardware-level understanding needed to read keypresses.

A walkthrough of installing Synapse, Riot and Jitsi from scratch on Debian to run your own Matrix communication service. The description warns it is now quite outdated and links to updated material.

Andreas Spiess explains the basic principles of LoRa and LoRaWAN, their pros and cons, link budget and bandwidth. He shows his own gateway and client sending a message to The Things Network.

Ben Eater starts a series building a working computer on breadboards around the 6502 microprocessor. In this first part he gets a 'hello world' running from scratch.

Inigo Quilez live-codes a cartoon character painting entirely from math, using signed distance fields in a Shadertoy shader. He explains each step of building the image from formulas.

Inigo Quilez live-paints a mountain landscape using only math in a shader, building up from a basic polynomial noise surface through fractal terrain, lighting and atmosphere. The code runs in real time on Shadertoy so viewers can edit it as they follow along.

Tech Ingredients shows how to make a homemade radiative cooling paint, with a custom liquid panel that cools below ambient temperature outdoors. The video covers the materials and how to apply the paint.

NightHawkInLight shows how to make radiative sky cooling paint from grocery and hardware store materials, including a novel calcium carbonate microsphere synthesis. The paint can cool a surface below ambient air temperature in direct sunlight without electricity.

James Trunk introduces Clojure syntax and thinking, covering its core data structures, immutability, the thread-last macro and live data analysis in the REPL.

British Museum curator Irving Finkel teaches how to write cuneiform, with a colleague following along. It is a short, lively introduction to the script.

Markus Triska tours Prolog's most distinctive features, including its use as a database and query language, rule processing, constraint solving and compile-time rewriting. It also covers concise meta-interpreters.

Tech Ingredients shows how to build a liquid panel with a specialty paint that, placed outside, cools below ambient air temperature. It demonstrates radiative sky cooling.

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.

Andrew Huang teaches the basics of music theory in about half an hour, covering intervals, chords and patterns. He stresses understanding how music works over memorizing terminology.

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.

Tech Ingredients shows how to build flat panel speakers from exciters and foam board, with construction guidelines, measured SPL comparisons and a complete system playing music.

Inigo Quilez live-codes a painting using only mathematics in a shader, building it up step by step. The linked Shadertoy source shows the result.

Dave Jones of EEVblog shows hand soldering of surface-mount parts, including drag soldering and tack-and-reflow of 0.5mm fine-pitch ICs, with solder paste and hot air.

The Thought Emporium shows how easily bacteria can be genetically modified to produce fluorescent proteins and even bioluminesce, with techniques doable at home. It links to companion videos on incubators, DNA extraction and gels.

Ben Eater explains how VGA signals work and builds a breadboard circuit that produces correct sync timing so a monitor recognizes the signal. He then builds toward displaying an image from simple logic chips.

Dean Friedman's near-hour-long introduction to synthesis, covering the building blocks of sound and the controls on a synthesizer. He slowly adjusts knobs so viewers hear what each parameter does.

Ben Eater explains how a USB keyboard communicates, covering the electrical interface, bit and packet encoding, packet contents, and a comparison with PS/2.