tool use

Kirsten Dirksen visits retired mailman Russ Finch in Alliance, Nebraska, who grows oranges, figs and pomegranates in a backyard greenhouse without paying for heat. The greenhouse uses the stable temperature of the earth, with underground earth tubes, to heat and cool itself.

A short BBC clip narrated by David Attenborough showing crows in Japan using city traffic to crack nuts, dropping them at intersections and retrieving them when the light changes.

Kirsten Dirksen tours the underground ferro-cement dome home of Paula and Bill Lishman, the family behind the geese-led flight story. The skylit earth-sheltered house stays warm below the frost line.

Short BBC Earth clip from Life of Mammals in which David Attenborough shows orangutans imitating human behaviors like washing clothes with soap and using tools.

The Tokyo Llama channel details how the creators found and bought an abandoned akiya minka house in Japan. It covers process, costs, taxes, financing and risks of renovation.

A long video essay on MyHouse.wad, a Doom II mod uploaded by an anonymous user that hides unsettling secrets in its walls. It tells the story of the map, its mystery and its liminal horror.

Veritasium visits the Micromouse competition, where small autonomous robots race to solve mazes at extreme speed. It covers the competition's technical history, including fans and ground effect enabling very high-g turns.

Tantacrul walks through how the MuseScore 4 team was built and how design decisions were made for the overhaul of a huge legacy notation app. It covers playback and engraving quality improvements.

The final chapter of Rich Rebuilds' saga about buying a used Tesla Model X that went missing, with cameo appearances and the end of the dispute. It is part of a longer series on the problems he had with Tesla.

Part 1 of an episode of the British educational TV series The Secret Life of Machines, about how vacuum cleaners work and their history. It mixes humor with explanation of household technology.

Builders Matt Risinger and Jordan Smith visit a Swiss cross-laminated timber factory that makes thick all-wood walls with no traditional insulation and wooden nails instead of glue or chemicals. The video is sponsored by Siga.

Kirsten Dirksen visits the Providence Arcade, the oldest US indoor mall, which was converted into 225-square-foot micro-lofts classified as a rooming house.

A 1982 AT&T Bell Labs film for students about the Unix system and how it can be used practically. It includes Lorinda Cherry building a talking calculator by piping together Unix commands, and a spell checker made from Unix utilities.

Official trailer for Eugene Jarecki's 2012 documentary The House I Live In, an investigative look at America's war on drugs and its effect on the criminal justice system. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

Destin Sandlin tours a progressive metal stamping factory, showing machines that stamp millions of metal parts and the tooling behind them.

A man spends six months and $1500 making a chicken sandwich entirely from scratch: growing vegetables, making salt from seawater, milking a cow for cheese, grinding wheat, collecting honey and killing a chicken.

A condensed film of Dick Proenneke's footage of building a cabin and living alone in the Alaskan wilderness, using hand tools and local materials. It draws on the 8mm films he shot himself.

Fools & Dreamers is a 30-minute documentary about Hinewai Nature Reserve in New Zealand, where botanist Hugh Wilson let gorse grow as a nurse canopy to regenerate native forest. It shows the results after 30 years and the local skepticism he faced.

Tim Hunkin's 1987 TV series episode on how vacuum cleaners and related household machines work, remastered and upscaled in 2021. It is part of the six-episode 'Secret Life of Machines' series with hands-on demonstrations of everyday technology.

Machine Thinking argues the 1751 machine, a metal-cutting lathe associated with Vaucanson, triggered the biggest explosion of wealth in history by enabling precise manufacturing of other machines.

Part one of Sandia National Labs' first-person documentary on the use control, detonation safety and survivability of US nuclear weapons. It covers nuclear sharing in NATO and how control of use was separated from possession, leading to the always/never problem.

Atrocity Guide covers the 1965 dolphin experiments of Dr. John C. Lilly and Margaret Howe, who tried to teach dolphins English. It traces the bizarre methods and Lilly's later drug-fueled beliefs.

Reason TV profiles Elvis Summers, a Los Angeles musician who crowdfunded dozens of tiny homes for homeless people. City officials moved to remove them while pushing a multibillion-dollar housing plan.

A Chinese state-TV-produced documentary segment, with English subtitles, about virus sample collection in the field, including scientists collecting live bats. It was published in December 2019.

A VICE documentary that visits Agafia Lykova, last surviving member of the Lykov family of Old Believers who fled into the Siberian taiga in 1936. It shows how she lives in remote isolation and the outside world encroaching on it.

Kirsten Dirksen tours new Earthships, homes built from tires, bottles and cans that generate their own energy, collect water and grow food. The video covers the newer, cheaper Encounter model and its passive systems.

Kirsten Dirksen visits architect Gary Chang's 32 square meter Hong Kong apartment, which he has redesigned over decades. Sliding walls and transformable furniture turn it into 24 different room configurations.

Kirsten Dirksen profiles Steve Rees, who buried two shipping containers to build an earth-cooled, off-grid 640 sq ft home in Northern California for about $30,000, solar included.

A tour of Christian Schallert's 24 square meter apartment in Barcelona, designed so that it looks like an empty cube until he builds the furniture he needs. Kirsten Dirksen shows how the space is transformed for cooking, sleeping and dressing.

Josef Holzer walks through his family's Krameterhof, one of Europe's oldest permaculture farms in the Austrian mountains, with fish ponds, terraces, fruit trees and grazing animals. It showcases water management and microclimates.

A short film about the Dervaes family, who grow over 6,000 pounds of food a year on a tenth of an acre near downtown Los Angeles. They grow more than 400 plant species, keep chickens and ducks, and get most of their food from the plot.

The Computer History Museum's 25th anniversary celebration of the Commodore 64, recorded in December 2007, with a panel including Jack Tramiel and Steve Wozniak. It recounts the machine's launch and history.

A three-minute Computer History Museum clip showing Ernst Dickmanns' VaMoRs Mercedes van and later VaMP sedan, early self-driving vehicles tested from 1986 to 2003.

Dominion is a two-hour documentary using drones and hidden cameras to expose conditions in animal agriculture, including food, clothing, entertainment and research. It questions humanity's dominion over animals.

Tantacrul's 76-minute deep dive into the history of western music notation and the many proposed replacements, such as piano rolls, colored notes and the jubilate. He explains why none have displaced the current system.

A 105-minute film of a West African smith family in Burkina Faso smelting iron from ore, from making charcoal and building the kiln to forging tools. It is a cultural recreation filmed for the camera, not current practice.

A documentary from Swan Bitcoin exploring Bitcoin's relationship with energy, featuring Lyn Alden and others, and arguing that mining is a net positive for the environment and not wasteful.

A Business Insider investigation into the US boom in AI data centers, mapping where they are, who owns them, and how much power and water they consume. It looks at the costs borne by communities, with a focus on Virginia.

CBC Marketplace investigates locksmith scams in the Greater Toronto Area. It exposes networks of fake Google Maps listings and fake reviews, and uses hidden cameras to show how low quotes turn into overcharges.

The first part of Adam Curtis' documentary series on Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays, who invented public relations. It shows how Bernays used Freud's ideas to link mass-produced goods to unconscious desires and create modern consumer persuasion.