Software algorithms as Ikea instruction manuals.
iamcal.com Since May 2000
Idea Instructions
Aluminium Knife Forging
Turning a roll of aluminium foil into a knife, without any special tools
Watching the full 11 minutes is time well spent
Jan 31st: If you use Sublime text for coding or taking notes, then turning on autosave might be super useful. This ensures that my files get saved and synced to dropbox without me having to do anything, so I can always pick up where I left off on a different machine.
Seed Ship
If you liked paperclips, a dark room, etc but you only want to spend 10-15m playing then, Seedship is definitely worth checking out. More games like this please!
Dec 18th: As a general fan of text encodings, this short article on weird encodings seems like it was written specifically for me. Learn more about EBCDIC, KOI-8 and Punycode.
Wifi Tracking on the Tube
Long time readers will be familiar with my obsession with public transport, specifically the London Underground.
Gizmodo's analysis of Tube wifi tracking data is fascinating - including some of the truly insane paths people have taken between between King's Cross and Waterloo
Dec 11th: For next time I'm putting a UI on top of a personal project, feather looks like a pretty viable alternative to font awesome.
Dec 11th: Way back in July, I was inspired by Tripelbyte's language identification quiz, so I made my own version for esoteric languages. Never got around to sharing it outside of Slack, but here it is.
Dec 11th: Next time I pick up some of my long-languishing game projects, Voxatron looks like it's worth checking out: a voxel engine with integrated design tools.
Fly Janet
Jalopnik's in depth look at Janet airplanes, the secret airline that flies between Las Vegas and secret government facilities is crazy interesting.
There are a ton of links off to a mix of conspiracy theories and stuff that really happened, including the scary-looking X-37B robotic space plane.
Some holes to fall down:
• The rumored Aurora reconnaissance aircraft
• Rat 55, the stealth 737
About
This is the personal site of Cal Henderson, Slack co-founder & CTO, ex Glitch engineer, ex Flickr architect, programmer, author and chronic complainer.
I give occasional talks, write code and sometimes articles. I also blog at World of Theorycraft and those links show up here too.
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