locks

A short Vox video on Barcelona's superblocks, an urban design approach that closes interior streets to through traffic to return space to pedestrians.

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.

David Tong, a Cambridge theoretical physicist, explains at the Royal Institution that the fundamental building blocks of nature are quantum fields rather than particles. He covers what we know about these fields and how they fit into the Standard Model.

The first episode of Clickspring's series on reproducing the Antikythera Mechanism by hand, laying out the plan and the history. The series follows a machinist building the ancient Greek device with traditional tools and methods.

A scene from The Big Short in which Jared Vennett pitches credit default swaps on mortgage bonds to a hedge fund team, using a Jenga tower to illustrate collateralized debt obligations.

Locksport historian Schuyler Towne's RVASec 2012 talk on why people lock their doors, tracing the history of locks and the assumptions about security behind them.

Lock-picking YouTuber Bill Johnson (BosnianBill) explains how to choose a high-security lock and why, showing examples and comparing designs. It covers what makes some padlocks more pick-resistant than others.

A HOPE conference talk by Howard Payne and Deviant Ollam on common keys, such as elevator and fire service keys, that open many buildings. It covers physical security weaknesses from shared key standards.

Deviant Ollam's DEF CON 17 talk explains how legally checking a firearm in luggage can be the most secure way to fly with valuable tech. It covers firearm transport rules and luggage locks.

A 2017 video arguing that banks and Blockstream steered Bitcoin toward the Lightning Network. It is partisan commentary from the Bitcoin Cash side of the scaling dispute.

ITS Tactical demonstrates how a ballpoint pen can open a zippered suitcase without leaving a trace, bypassing its lock, and suggests countermeasures.

Casey Neistat's social experiment in New York City where he tries to 'steal' his own bike with various tools, showing how little stops passers-by from helping.

LockPickingLawyer cuts through a LiteLok flexible bike lock with cable cutters in about 16 seconds, one of several videos defeating the product.

A LockPickingLawyer video showing that a padlock sold as an Amazon's Choice high-security product can be opened trivially, with no picking needed.

Howard Abrams demonstrates, in an EmacsConf 2015 talk, how he uses org-mode's Babel and Tramp to configure and operate remote servers from a single document. Code blocks, their results and the explanatory text all live together.

Alan Kay's 2015 talk on the power of simplicity, arguing that systems become simpler by building on more sophisticated fundamental building blocks and that big research horizons drove invention at Xerox PARC. It ranges across computing, tools and scaling software.

A short How to ADHD explainer, featuring Brendan Mahan, on why simple tasks can feel impossible for people with ADHD. It introduces the 'wall of awful', a pile of past failures, shame and anxiety that builds up in front of a task and blocks starting it.

Deviant Ollam, head of a physical penetration testing team, presents tactics for getting into buildings, from bypassing door levers with a wire to defeating bank doors. He argues that physical security is often surprisingly weak.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2017 keynote on concurrency in Python. It covers threads, processes, asyncio, locks and the GIL, with live shell-based examples.

A demo of writing technical documents in Emacs Org mode using org-babel, so that code blocks and generated content stay consistent when things change. The author shares the demo files and his dotfiles.

A five-minute CGP Grey explainer arguing that a phone is effectively an extension of your mind, and that any backdoor or master key into encrypted devices will inevitably be abused or leaked. It frames the encryption debate as locks that are either unbreakable or absent.

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

Noel Rappin's MountainWest RubyConf talk introduces Smalltalk to Ruby programmers. He compares the two languages' object models, blocks, 1-based arrays, simple syntax and live programming environment, and walks through sample code.

Peter Rizun and Andrew Stone present results of tests running 1 GB blocks on a Bitcoin test network at Scaling Bitcoin Stanford. The talk argues for big-block scaling and discusses its consequences.

Economist Martin Jacques offers three building blocks for understanding China's rise, including seeing China as a civilization-state rather than a nation-state. He also covers how Chinese people view the state.

A Motherboard documentary episode from Nebraska about farmers and mechanics fighting manufacturers like John Deere over access to the diagnostic software needed to repair modern tractors. It shows how software locks have taken away farmers' traditional self-reliance.

An MTA video on communications-based train control, the system meant to replace the New York City subway's century-old signaling. It also shows the mechanical interlocks and signals in use today.

Andrei Alexandrescu's CppCon 2015 talk on handling exceptional control flow declaratively in C++. It uses scope guards with success and failure variants, built on std::uncaught_exceptions, to replace ad hoc RAII classes and rethrowing try/catch blocks.

A woodworker shows how his table saw accident happened, why it happened and how to avoid a similar one. He describes severe hand lacerations from a blade contact.

An AWS re:Invent 2014 talk on the core distributed systems primitives behind AWS and Amazon.com, such as consensus, key-value stores and transactional logging. It describes how AWS builds large services from a few common building blocks.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 session diving into the Nitro system, a set of hardware offload and security building blocks behind next-generation EC2 instances. It covers the design and architecture and how Nitro enables new instance types.

A Thunderf00t video debunking Energy Vault, a gravity-based energy storage scheme that stacks concrete blocks with cranes. He argues it is impractical and compares it to pseudoscience.