the wire

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.

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.

A short walkthrough of a hack that tricks a Brother laser printer into accepting third-party toner by working around its genuine-toner check. It notes this may void the warranty.

Jim Pavloff rebuilds the Prodigy track Smack My Bitch Up in Ableton, identifying the samples used and recreating the track by hand.

Bisqwit writes a raytracer from scratch in C++ for DOS, rendering in the 16-color VGA palette at 640x480. The video also covers color quantization and ordered dithering.

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.

The Thought Emporium shows how to receive clear images directly from GOES-15, 16 and 17 and Himawari 8 geostationary weather satellites with software-defined radio. It covers the extra effort needed to receive GOES data.

The first part of a ShaderToy live-coding series that lays the groundwork for The Drive Home, a rainy night-traffic shader. It covers basic setup and builds toward rain and bokeh effects.

Mark Bittman and baker Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery demonstrate the no-knead bread recipe, where a long, slow rise does the work instead of kneading. It is a short New York Times recipe video.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jon Gjengset's long live-coding stream explains Rust's Pin and Unpin types: why they exist, how they work, and how they connect to futures and async/await. It also covers moving from pre-pinning code to the new model.

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.

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.

The first part of a series on programming in Jai, Jonathan Blow's in-development language. It covers compiling, writing hello world and using code from other files.

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.

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.

Big Clive shows how to pick up discarded disposable vape devices from the roadside and extract the rechargeable lithium cells inside. He explains why these devices contain the same circuitry as rechargeable ones and how to reuse the cells.

Kenneth Finnegan shows how USB-C Power Delivery trigger boards like the ZY12PDN negotiate 5V to 20V so you can power projects from a USB-C charger, including the color coding for each voltage.

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 2018 vlog showing how to use the windshield wipers on a Tesla Model 3, including auto mode, manual settings and voice commands. It is labeled outdated.

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.

The first video in Photon of Scoopex's Amiga hardware programming series. It shows how to set up an assembler and write a minimal 68000 program that waits for a left mouse click.

David Beazley's PyCon 2019 tutorial derives the lambda calculus from the ground up in Python, using only single-argument functions. He builds booleans, numerals and more with no other language features.

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.

A motorcycle safety video on the SMIDSY (sorry mate, I didn't see you) accident, explaining the perception and optical illusion that makes drivers fail to see riders, and how riders can spot the signs and avoid it.

The first episode of Clickspring's series building a John Wilding skeleton clock from raw stock in a home machine shop. It covers making the frames along with the tools needed for the job.

Day 1 of Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero, a live-coded game built from scratch in C on Windows. It reviews C on Windows, sets up a minimal build system and WinMain entry point, and shows a first MessageBox.

A short, nearly wordless demonstration of making sourdough pizza at home using a cast iron pan and the oven. It shows a Neapolitan-style result without a pizza steel or stone.

A 12-minute beginner lesson from Nick Milo's Linking Your Thinking series introducing the Obsidian note-taking app and the first steps to start using it.

James Hoffmann demonstrates his AeroPress technique with a short recipe: 11g of coffee, 200g of just-boiled water, a 2-minute immersion, then a press. He explains why he skips rinsing, preheating and inverting.

Andrej Karpathy builds a bigram character-level language model from scratch, introducing torch.Tensor and the framework of training, sampling and loss evaluation. It is the first step toward a GPT-style Transformer in his makemore series.

Mathologer shows a simple idea, the commutator, that lets anyone who can solve the first layer design their own full Rubik's cube solution. The same idea carries over to other symmetric twisty puzzles such as the Megaminx.

The first episode of Mike Zamansky's Using Emacs series, covering setting up the package manager for new Emacs users as a start toward customization and efficient editing.

The trailer for Tim Hunkin's series The Secret Life of Components, eight guides to mechanical and electromechanical parts for designers and makers.

A short video advising how to handle a police stop by politely refusing searches and not answering questions, citing Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights.

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.