Notes from low orbit · London, Ontario
Useful things found
in strange places.
A field notebook about technology, accessibility, design, making things and the occasional inexplicable object.
42.9849° N
81.2453° W
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Current transmission
Chat, am I cooked?
Introducing Claude Design by Anthropic Labs We’ll see how this plays out. It looks great and sounds great but some of the early feedback is that the number of tokens required to create something usable far outweighs the…
Recent Recoveries
Filed in reverse chronological order
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Meta Glasses for Accessibility
Surveillance capitalism’s accidental accessibility assist: An unintended use for Meta smart glasses that actually brings a net positive to the world. Used…
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Garage Engineering: Mars Rover
Donald Bickler, the engineer who invented the Mars rover’s rocker-bogie suspension, iterated across all rover generations beginning with Sojourner, often prototyping at…
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Accessibility Advances for EPUB in InDesign
Accessibility updates to InDesign version 20.4: Improvements for EPUB files, including MathML. The Accessible EPUB Expert Group is making a difference.
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Hiné Mizushima’s Sea Creature Dioramas
These Fibre Art dioramas and sculptures by Vancouver artist Hiné Mizushima are vibrant, fun, and crafted using a blend of techniques to…
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“It’s a gut punch. It’s a kind of dying.”
A mathematician employs a brilliant metaphor to describe his existential crisis upon learning of Chat GPT’s success at a math competition.
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New Rabbit Hole: Interactive Explainer for Watch Mechanisms
Simple explanations accompany interactive 3D illustrations in Bartosz Ciechanowski’s Mechanical Watch explainer.
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Explainer video as an irresistible force of forward momentum
synthet presents fun tutorials for digital audio workstation (DAW) FL Studio, but what got me was this vocoder explainer video. It’s its…
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Illustrator Takashi Mifune’s drawings may look familiar
Takashi Mifune’s illustrations are free to use, and used freely, throughout Japan. Often seen on signage and advertisements, in educational materials, on…
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Shazam Surveillance: Bop Spotter
A solar-charging phone, on a pole, in an urban area, listening for music and quietly cataloguing what it finds.
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Hydrogels can learn to play Pong | Ars Technica
“The findings provided some evidence that neural networks formed from actual neurons spontaneously develop the ability to learn. And that could explain…
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Biophilic Farmhouse, Wrapped Around a Small Mango Grove
This place gives me Studio Ghibli Museum vibes.
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What Could Explain the Gallium Anomaly? | Quanta Magazine
I love these photos. I want to spend a lot of time in both of these places. Physicists have ruled out a…
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‘What goes up, must come down:’ Junk satellites are a looming hazard | Popular Science
What happens when thousands of old satellites are out of order? Source: ‘What goes up, must come down:’ Junk satellites are a…
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Manifest sticky notes in a browser tab
Manifest is a grid-based pinboard for note taking. Kind of like in-browser sticky notes app. It feels like the kind of thing…
