2017-08-21

Notes.
I'm taking next weekend off! And passing the mic over to Lisa Neigut. I first met Lisa when she cold emailed to tell me the text on my website was too small, and since then I've grown to *very* much appreciate her (often sardonic and always sharp) perspectives on twitter and elsewhere. Enjoy :)

Also - Andrew has a 1995 Haas VF2 in NYC and is looking to sublet or share some workspace. If you've got room, give me a holler and I'll connect you!

Planning & Strategy.

• Shapeways' Peter Weijmarshausen is stepping down as CEO.
• "Even a shared failure represents an important contribution to the eventual success of the awesome invention."
• Bezos owns a non-controlling stake in Basecamp, which gives him a share of their annual profits. I love it :)
• Spin, a dockless bike share company, received a cease and desist from the NYC DOT and postponed their pop-up debut.

Making & Manufacturing.

• Assembly Magazine. Yup.
• On the DFM constraints specific to woodworking.
• A good project recap: Making microfluidic chips using SLA.

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• The NYTimes on how old North Sea oil & gas rigs (topsides!) are slowly being retired and dismantled for scrap. Excellent photos.
• On the woefully ill equipped reverse supply chain for lithium-ion batteries. Luckily, EU regulations require battery manufacturers to finance the costs of recycling.

Distribution & Logistics.

• A pretty awesome way to add propulsion to CubeSats using water vapor. Surface tension keeps liquid water from flowing through the 10 micron orifices, but by vaporizing the water near the orifice a little jet is created. Anything that helps avoid the Kessler Syndrome is A-OK in my book, but it's also cute that the prototype includes a bunch of (made in NYC!) Adafruit modules :)
• A tour of a transoceanic fiber optic cable laying ship, complete with a thorough description of how fiber is spliced & repaired.
• A good overview of how wifi units are procured & installed on airplanes.
• An MIT project called Caroake is pinging EZPass transponders to get vehicle position/speed data for smart cities applications. Their method results in higher resolution (and presumably less noisy) data than cameras give - pretty clever.
• United Airlines will start offering flights out of Everett Field, which is better known for housing Boeing's 747, 777, and 787 production lines. Notes from my 2014 tour of Boeing's Everett factory here.

Inspection & Testing.

• A good teardown of the Amazon Echo Dot.

Tangents.

• Brendan on his coworking community. As someone who spent most of the 5 years immediately following college working alone, this resonates.
• A/D/O is giving away a 4 month, 2 desk membership to a hardware product company in NYC.
• A short doc on Jeff Koons. I'm on a mission to find a teardown (or, preferably, to take part in one IRL) of one of his sculptures - which are works of manufacturing mastery. Holler.

Alexander Graham Bell's tetrahedral kites.