The Free Universal Construction Kit
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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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120319180000/https://fffff.at/...
The website itself has been closed since 2015 according to the front page.
Which also suffers from encoding problems making weird characters show up.
But which was showing the characters the way it should on August 1st 2015 when the site was closing down.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150801234212/http://fffff.at/
Who wants to bet that at some point after the closing of the site, they switched over from a live CMS to a static copy of the site and in the process of doing so things got a little screwed up when exporting data from a MySQL database with the different encoding weirdnesses that can sometimes occur with MySQL and how the db schema was set there.
I've run into similar problems when moving old content between systems, especially with MySQL and mixed encodings. It can get messy surprisingly quickly.
I have no idea why but my brain immediately interpreted this as a Scottish accent, like ‘shouldnae’. Weird.
https://www.fischertechnik.de/en/industry-and-universities -- Factorio on a shelf would be neat (but "request quote" tends to suggest its out of my price range https://www.studica.com/fischertechnik/fischertechnik-factor... )
https://www.fischertechnik.de/en/maker
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I first saw fischertechnik at an engineering expo at the local university in the 80s. There was a terminal and you'd enter the type of candy you wanted, and it had a robotic system that got it from the shelving... which was neat. The backside of it had another robotic system that got a piece of candy from a conveyer belt (of many different ones), identified it, and put it in the now empty spot.
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'm not sure that's enough: most kids wouldn't be able to tell a genuine Lego brick from a knock-off.
(Lego famously has insane quality control on their tolerances. But I haven't had any trouble with knock-off bricks so far either.)
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
In fact I play cornhole competitively, and last year I picked up a set of Steamboat Willie themed bags:
https://www.logiccornhole.com/products/steamboat-willie-colo...
I remember thinking this was pretty subversive and cool back then. My own experience in 3D printing since that time has taught me that there is no way that these parts can ever be printed accurately enough to actually work. It didn't get much traction on the Thingiverse files either.
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 = ...
1 lea = 3 mi = 24 fur = 240 ch = 5280 yd = 15840 ft = ...Read that last part again, because they use GPS to determine if the marker has moved, and that takes X minutes to quiesce. you can't take X*Y minutes to check each chain mark and angle.. not all land is rectilinear. we have a bit less than ten million km^2 of land in this country.
I'd reckon that maybe 1% of Americans know what a league is, as in the definition. Less for "furlong", less for "chain".
This is how these conversations go, usually. It's completely pointless, most of the people here will never interface with something where this matters. I'm a few decades old - 2.25 score years old, to be accurate. My wife knows what a score is, and how many feet in a mile, which i can never remember; by the by, it's about 5300 feet.
like Celsius, the metric measurements don't "mean" anything directly to a human. a meter is how fast light travels in 1/speedoflightinmeterspersecond. water boils at 100 and freezes at 0. compare to ~100F "roughly median body temperature", "roughly the length of an adult foot", and "roughly the length of the middle bone in your thumb".
yes, for "science" using units that convert is great, one of my favorite things to read is the Frink language unit file for that reason. Metric is cute and ostensibly "well-defined". great, use it.
you're not getting ~400,000,000 people to switch, potentially ever. The sheer cost is astronomical. a speed limit sign, just the sign is ~$22. The total cost of install could be from $500 to $3000. Per speed limit sign. There's at least 10,000 speed limit signs on interstates alone. [nearly] Every single mile of every single highway and interstate in the US has a reflective sign stating what mile it is - except for mile 420, i'm not sure why, that'll be missing but there will be a 419.7 mile marker. weird.
> In 2002, a contractor installed just over 50 miles’ worth of markers on I-78 and Routes 22 and 33 at a cost of $230,000, or about $4,500 per mile. Today, [...] $6,500 per mile, said PennDOT spokesman Ron Young.
and
> As of 2022, [...] the Interstate Highway System, which has a total length of 48,890 miles (78,680 km)
and that's just interstates. We have expressways, freeways, spurs, feeders, highways, state roads that use mile markers. Speed limit signs vary in distance, but figure 2 miles per (raelly 1 per mile since they're on both directions of travel, and usually there's 2 per direction, one on either shoulder) on nearly every commute surface. we have ~2,600,000 miles of paved roads, and a bit over 4,000,000 miles of roads, total, in the US - that's 6.437376e+6 kilometers, or 21 lightseconds in a vacuum, or 32 lightseconds in fiber optic cable. 32000ms ping, awesome.
Every house in the US is built with 16" on-center framing for the walls. we're not going to switch to "406.4mm on center", because our sheetrock, plywood, etc are all 48"x96".
every other country that switched did it 70+ years ago, has less people, or is drastically smaller.
like i said, rudely, but now politely, give it up, we're staying with our US customary units.
The same holds for more obscure unit prefixes in the SI system like dam (decameter) or hm (hectometer) in the SI unit system (as far as I am aware, the only common usage of the "deca" prefix is in Austria for "decagram" (dag)).
Nevertheless, even these obscure units fit the regular pattern perfectly:
1 km = 10 hm = 100 dam = 1000 m
- and this was my point.
But all that aside, and with apologies to mods and you for sneering; i wanted to say this in my prior reply but when reading it aloud to my wife i took it out:
Americans can, in general, divide and multiply by numbers other than 10.
yes, we use acres and hectares, too! it sounds better to say i live on 6.5 acres to an American neighbor who asks, than 0.02630457km^2...
Doesn't mean the USA has to switch for common use.
A stick of butter is a quarter pound. it doesn't matter though, because the butter is marked in "recipe increments". if you melt it, you can use "tablespoons" to measure it, literally.
eta: i haven't even used measuring cups or spoons for anything in like a decade, unless i am making bread or bread-like things.