Edit: ah the page is from 2012-03-19, from the <meta property="article:published_time"> tag
My blog suffered the same, and going through loads of old pages to check and fix them just isn't worth the effort.
I have no idea why but my brain immediately interpreted this as a Scottish accent, like ‘shouldnae’. Weird.
I spend untold hours failing to build a cable tramway between my mother's dresser and bed.
But at least now I'm an expert at pylon design!
I wish Meccano would get its shit together. I can’t see anything I want on their limited site and there is so much cool stuff that could be made.
I run workshops about the use of modular systems in facilitating non-expert participation in architecture. One I did (at the CAAD Futures Conference in 2023) was with Zometool. It was a blast and really successful.
In preparation I also got to interview the late great Steve Baer, inventor of the Zome (among many other things - seriously look him up, he's one of the most brilliant people of the past 100 years imo). It was a huge honor.
The book chapter the organizers were supposed to do about the conference workshops never materialized (hrmph), but I've done other little collaborative build projects since, so one day I'll document them all together.
I hope that Lego (not lawyers ofc) would appreciate such creativity approach and hire creators. (E.g. similar to acquihire of OpenClaw creator by OpenAI.)
How many of us do think this way?
I am always jealous (in good way) when I see similar projects.
Idk how I’d feel if they got me this.
Bought an almost equivalent set from Lego (stab-free!) for 9 euro. How does that pricing make sense haha
Not so universal as I'd hoped, but I love the concept and the organization behind it, Free Art and Technology Lab.
Whenever I see someone in a current British television show use "inches" or "feet," I'm reminded of the HN metric mafia that insists that the United States is the only place in the world that uses imperial units.
Even Wikipedia will tell you that's false.
There’s no other place on earth I can invite 100,000 people to disagree with me. Exception is maybe a public office. (Which the vast majority of people shy away from, for just this reason)
Now, i speak larger measurements in metric if i think the person i am talking to understands or doesn't care; but short measurements i still use "quarter inch" or "teenth" or "thou" pronounced like "wow", from the beginning of "thousandth".
I know km, liters - i drink at least 3 liters of liquid a day, if not 4, but i drink it 1 quart beverage receptacle at a time, odd how that fits!
is it really so hard to have a ruler with both measurements? I have a ruler that lets you convert from font point to two other measurement units to inches, for page layout.
I'm american, from the '80s, and we never used metric day-to-day.
the US will be US customary units basically forever. because we're an absolutely massive geography, and there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of mile markers, speed limit signs, "distance to" signs, speed warning signs, gas stations, etc.
So 2026 is the year where i finally say: Please, please, shut up about this. No one cares.
The problem with the imperial unit system rather is that it does not form something "to build more complicated units out of".
For example: if you want inch (in) as a unit, why not have "in^2" as a corresponding small area unit and "in^3" as corresponding volume unit?
Additionally, there should be constant/regular conversion factors between the various subunits of a measure, i.e.
10^-3 km = 1 m = 10 dm = 100 cm = 1000 mm = 10^6 µm = 10^9 nm = ...
vs 1 lea = 3 mi = 24 fur = 240 ch = 5280 yd = 15840 ft = ...