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Treasure trove of mechanical animations (2015)
Whenever I watch videos of how things are made, I marvel at the cleverness of the manufacturing machines. Retired engineer Duc Thang Nguyen has created over 170
Jason Kottke
Jason Kottke's daily links and commentary on art, science, technology, design, film, and culture since 1998.
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- 72
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- 17,232
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- #35 personal
Visit kottke.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jan 2009 – Nov 2026
Society, Policy & Culture 42History & Retro Computing 24Science & Space 21Life, Learning & Writing 21Tech Industry & Business 8Math & Algorithms 7
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Websites people say have changed their lives
I asked Kottke.org readers if they had ever seen, heard, or read something on the web that literally changed their lives. Fourteen people said no. Sixteen said
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Temperature chart for the last 11,000 years
For the first time, researchers have put together all the climate data they have (from ice cores, coral, sediment drilling) into one chart that shows the “globa
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Seth Rogen Speaks Truth to Billionaires, Gets Censored for It
For the past 11 years, the Breakthrough Prize awards have “celebrated outstanding scientific achievements, honoring scientists driving remarkable discoveries in
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I made a floppy disk from scratch
Polymatt decided he was going to make a 3.5” floppy disk from scratch — and actually did. I’m not sure how many of you have actually cracked one of these things
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How Japanese Dried Bonito Is Made
This workshop founded in 1882 still makes dried bonito like they did back in the Edo period. How katsuobushi — Japanese dried bonito, said to be the world’s har
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How the Great Pyramid at Giza Looked in 2560 BCE
The current outer surface of the Great Pyramid at Giza is made of rough limestone blocks, colored a dark sandy brown from hundreds of years of pollution and wea
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Our Dazzling Night Sky When the Milky Way Collides with Andromeda in 4B Years
This is what our night sky is going to look like in 3.9 billion years: Wow! So what’s going on here? Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers at
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How to beat Apple
In the near term, companies making iPhone and iPad competitors are never going to beat Apple at their own game. Apple has supply chain advantages, a massive num
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"My Bike Is Everything to Me"
Former NBA player and TV sportscaster Bill Walton died on Monday at the age of 71. He was a quirky dude and as someone who’s been known to veer off onto seeming
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A small 2009 car demolishes a 1959 Chevy in a crash test [video]
In 2009, The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety conducted a crash test between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 2009 Chevy Malibu. The video plainly shows how
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Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic
In a letter recently published in a new book, A Reluctant Icon: Letters to Neil Armstrong, a teacher wrote a letter to the first human to set foot on the Moon a
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AI that mistook a bald head for a soccer ball
Second-tier Scottish football club Inverness Caledonian Thistle doesn’t have a camera operator for matches at their stadium so the club uses an AI-controlled ca
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For the Colonel, It Was Finger-Lickin’ Bad (1976)
Here’s a gem from the archive of the NY Times. One day in September 1976, NY Times food critic Mimi Sheraton and Colonel Harland Sanders stopped into a Manhatta
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Flyover video of Jupiter’s Europa
NASA engineer Kevin Gill stitched together images from two 1998 observations of Europa by the Galileo spacecraft to create this super smooth flyover video of th
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Waffle House's Magic Marker System
I thought for sure that I’d previously written about the secret jelly packet & pickle-based system that chefs at the Waffle House use to “store” all of the orde
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Kottke.org is 20 years old today
kottke.org is 20 years old today. Holy shit! On March 14, 1998, I launched a new episode of 0sil8 called “Notes”. 0sil8 was a previous website of mine, started
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Telescope Ranchers
Rockwood, Texas is home to a unique business, Starfront Observatories. Owner/operator Bray Falls hosts hundreds of other people’s telescopes in perfect conditio
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Michael Lewis and the parable of the lucky man taking the extra cookie (2017)
In 2012, Michael Lewis gave a commencement speech at Princeton University, his alma mater. In the speech, Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and The
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AI vending machine was tricked into giving away everything
Anthropic installed an AI-powered vending machine in the WSJ office. The LLM, named Claudius, was responsible for autonomously purchasing inventory from wholesa
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Image of our satellite-choked night skies
To create this composite image, photographer Brendan Larsen captured almost 600 photographs over a two-hour period and then manually stitched them together. Thi
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How the Great Green Wall is holding back the Sahara desert
The Great Green Wall being built in Africa to halt the southern progress of the Sahara Desert is a favorite public works project of mine — it’s massive, ambitio
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Cistercian Numerals
Cistercian numerals were invented by the Cistercian order of monks in the 13th century. Giuseppe Frisella explains how the notation system works: A vertical str
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A game of tag that’s been going for 20+ years
A group of high school friends has been playing an elaborate game of tag since reconnecting at a reunion almost 30 years ago. A few years ago, one of the player
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Vintage-Style Map of the Mandelbrot Set
Bill Tavis designed this lovely vintage-style map of the familiar fractal shape, the Mandelbrot set. He is selling a poster version of the map, starting at the
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Hi, hello, I’m back at it
*peeks hesitantly around the corner* Hey everyone. Tomorrow, after almost 7 months of a sabbatical break, I’m resuming regular publication of kottke.org. (Actua
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How blind people use Instagram [video]
Tommy Edison shows how he uses Instagram on the iPhone. So we’ll just take a picture of the crew. Why I’m holding the thing up to my face like I can look throug
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Abacus use can boost math skills
The abacus counting device dates back thousands of years but has, in the past century, been replaced by calculators and computers. But studies show that abacus
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The World’s Loudest Sound (2014)
The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and wa
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Using GameStop as a bank
An anonymous user of 4chan has come up with a brilliantly harebrained scheme for their personal banking. They use video game retailer GameStop as a bank. Here’s