pen plotter

A beginner-focused tutorial on freehand knife sharpening with a single stone, aiming for a shaving-sharp edge in about five minutes.

CGP Grey's short animated argument for abolishing the US penny, covering its cost and history.

A short hyperlapse of a 2019 Toyota Corolla using comma.ai's OpenPilot 0.6.3 to drive 100 miles with no intervention except for the windshield wipers.

A short film from the Competitive Enterprise Institute adapting Leonard Read's 1958 essay I, Pencil, showing how no one person knows how to make a pencil and how many people cooperate without central planning.

Sintel is a 15-minute animated fantasy short made by the Blender Foundation to develop and showcase Blender, funded by community donations and released under Creative Commons.

A demo of the 8pen, a gesture-based keyboard replacement for touchscreens that lets users enter text by moving around a circle. It is meant for phones, remotes and game controllers and mimics handwriting.

The official video for Carpenter Brut's Turbo Killer, directed by Seth Ickerman, with psychedelic 1980s-styled visuals set to rock-leaning synthwave.

PBS Space Time explains what happens as you approach and cross a black hole's event horizon, using Penrose diagrams and light cones as the tool for understanding spacetime there.

PBS Space Time explains Roger Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology, in which the far future of our universe becomes the big bang of the next. It explores what could come after the universe ends.

A short explainer from 2swap on the chaotic behavior of double pendulums. It examines how predictable the system is for some starting conditions and whether closed-form solutions exist.

Penn and Teller help Rob Pike and Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs play a prank on Nobel-winning physicist Arno Penzias. The clip shows the gag and its setup.

Project Farm tests six penetrating oils, including WD-40, PB Blaster, Liquid Wrench and an ATF and acetone mix, on rusted bolts. Liquid Wrench placed first and the homemade mix second.

Not Just Bikes explains why the channel exists, through the creator's walk in suburban Houston. It shows how car-dependent design makes cities hostile to pedestrians.

A ten-minute card-magic act by Dani DaOrtiz performed on Penn & Teller: Fool Us in 2022. It is built on timing, misdirection and psychology, and the method defeated the show's hosts.

Magician Kostya Kimlat performs a card trick on Penn & Teller: Fool Us that fooled the duo, using Penn's favorite card trick as a basis.

Louis Rossmann argues that Apple's Independent Repair Program is a PR stunt that misleads the public and burdens independent repair shops. He discusses parts access restrictions and program limits.

A roughly ten-minute scene from the movie The Pentagon Wars showing how the Bradley Fighting Vehicle's requirements ballooned through committee demands into a compromised design. It is a satirical dramatization of military procurement.

Copenhagen's bicycle ambassador Mikael Colville-Andersen argues in a TEDx talk that bicycle helmets threaten bicycle culture. He says they distract from road design and make cycling look dangerous.

Two Minute Papers covers OpenAI's multi-agent hide-and-seek experiment, in which agents learned emergent tool use and found ways to break the game's rules. It summarizes the 'Emergent Tool Use from Multi-Agent Interaction' paper.

Part one of an American Airlines training video presented by Captain Warren VanderBurgh on automation dependency. It grew out of a program on wake turbulence avoidance, and this restored version has the audio cleaned up.

PBS Space Time examines Roger Penrose's idea that consciousness arises from quantum processes in the brain, and reviews new evidence about microtubules. It ends with an estimate of what replicating consciousness would demand.

Tom Scott's video whose title shows its own live view count, and the story of how he made that work. It explains why open APIs were once common and why they largely disappeared.

A roughly 14-minute interview with OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt at ruBSD 2013. He talks about making painful changes, getting real feedback, mitigation techniques compared to other OSs, and virtualization.

Marcin Jakubowski of Open Source Ecology presents his plan to open-source blueprints for 50 cheap, buildable farming tools, a "civilization starter kit". He argues that opening the means of production can enable self-sustaining lives.

CityNerd's Ray Delahanty tallies the personal costs of driving and then the externalities that car dependency imposes on everyone else, with numbers for each. It is an urbanist case that driving is heavily subsidized and costs society far more than drivers pay.

Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk gives a Monki Gras talk arguing that abusive, toxic contributors damage open source projects. He makes the case for removing them from communities.

Tantacrul tells the story of Audacity, the widely used free audio editor, and announces his involvement in the project. It includes an interview with the original developers and a look at the software's usability.

David and Ben Crystal introduce the Original Pronunciation production of Shakespeare and show what it reveals about the history of English, including puns and rhymes lost in modern speech.

Skateboarding pioneer Rodney Mullen talks about how the open skate community and its environments drive the invention of new tricks out of pure passion. He draws parallels to collaboration and open source.

Veritasium visits NIST to explain Standard Reference Materials, the carefully characterized items such as peanut butter used to calibrate instruments and keep measurements consistent. It covers why they exist and why they are expensive.

A PBS Space Time episode asking what black holes really are and whether events can happen inside them. It covers event horizons, time dilation and common misconceptions about black holes.

A CGP Grey video about why pentagons are bad at tiling and why hexagons are so special, in his usual playful style. It touches on honeycombs and tiling in nature.

Kai Lentit's comedy sketch parodying an interview with an FFmpeg enthusiast. It pokes fun at the open source command-line tool experience and video conversion woes.

Red Bull and the Dutch Drone Gods follow Max Verstappen's RB20 F1 car around Silverstone in a single FPV shot using a custom drone that accelerates to 300 km/h in about four seconds. The video also covers the year of development behind the drone.

An Adam Ruins Everything comedy segment on why US hospitals are so expensive, covering opaque price lists, surprise bills and penalties for the uninsured.

Samy Kamkar demonstrates OpenSesame, a device that opens many fixed-code garage doors in seconds by exploiting a newly found attack, built around a Mattel toy. The video explains the attack and which brands are affected.

A Ray Summit 2022 keynote fireside chat between OpenAI's Greg Brockman and Anyscale's Robert Nishihara. They discuss how OpenAI's training infrastructure evolved and its use of Ray.

Louis Rossmann opens a new MacBook Air and reacts to its cooling design, where the fan does not appear to be thermally connected to the CPU heatsink. He calls it placebo cooling.

The opening scene of the 2006 film Idiocracy, which explains in a short montage how average intelligence declines as less intelligent people have more children.

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