Related? Blondihacks [1] has been working through machining a live-steam powered scale locomotive.

Has it been three years now? She easily has another year of work ahead of her before she has live, rolling stock. Wild dedication to a project that could perhaps consume half a decade of your life.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@Blondihacks

Me too, brother.

Outerzone is a great site for (mostly vintage) model aircraft plans.

Cut my fingers up many times as a kid trying to start Cox model airplane engines…

"I made a camera from an optical mouse. 30x30 pixels in 64 glorious shades of gray!"

I wonder why so many shades of grey? Fancy!

(Yeah, the U.K. spelling of "grey" looks more "gray" to these American eyes.)

Hilarious too that this article is on Petapixel. (Centipixel?)

If someone wants "film school" you can do a lot worse than ticking off the film from the "1001 Movies to See Before You Die" [1].

It may take you the next decade to complete. There are some real oddballs in there that lean toward "art film" (but what do you expect from Andy Warhol). A lot of "foreign" films (foreign for this U.S. viewer). In short a lot of surprises.

Definitely feel like a student of film now (for whatever that's worth).

[1] https://1001films.fandom.com/wiki/The_List

Neutral here: I subscribe to neither.

I found out that there's a backlog of content going back over 100 years (a lot of it at the public library) and have been happily consuming that for about 6 or 7 years now.

(I still have about 4 decades to go to catch up with today—which will probably take me another 3 years or so).

And no OS. That certainly helped Apple.

Yeah, Arduino, Teensy, ESP32… I prefer these options when you don't in fact need an OS.

Less OS means less to go wrong. (Just waiting for a Pi to boot vs. a Teensy is reason enough to go with the more stripped-down hardware.)

I agree, it definitely felt a bit spoiled using a full computer for a toy like this, but the main goal for me was learning something new.

No, that's cool. I didn't mean to come across as critical.

> maybe it's a good time to dig into that pile of old projects you never finished instead of buying something new this year.

Always good advice.

Hosted some Japanese study-abroad students over Thanksgiving (they often have no where to go over break). A few times when I suggested an activity they asked if it was "safe". Like taking an Amtrak train. Seeing the "Walk of Stars" in Los Angeles.

It was sad to realize that they viewed the U.S. as so dangerous. But I can say for certain that I feel I could walk around Tokyo at night and not have a worry in the world. From time to time I am embarrassed by the U.S.

FWIW, this isn't new. I was an exchange student in Osaka in the early 90's and a girl in my class got picked for an exchange program in Canada and she said she was relieved she didn't have to worry about being shot.

My stepmother taught in eastern Africa at the beginning of the 1960s. When she was getting ready to return to the US, her students collectively expressed their concern at her returning to such a dangerous place.