Dash cams are huge in Russia, where insurance fraud is rampant and terrible drivers are common. I’m driving through the west side of Baltimore every day, which resembles Russia in many respects. This gets filed under “Nice to have when we have some more money: dashcamtalk.com reviews and compares most of the major models out there right now.
From Ars Technica: How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life.
Each F-1 engine was uniquely built by hand, and each has its own undocumented quirks. In addition, the design process used in the 1960s was necessarily iterative: engineers would design a component, fabricate it, test it, and see how it performed. Then they would modify the design, build the new version, and test it again. This would continue until the design was “good enough.”
Lord, be still my beating heart: Vintage Step Vans.
This looks like a fantastic movie: Sign Painters explores the craft of hand-painting advertising signs and its recent resurgence.
This is an interesting little find. The Helsinki Bus Station Theory, boiled down to its essence: Stay on the bus.
Dusting around my collection of tube radios on Saturday, I got to thinking about why I haven’t added an iPod connector to my large floor set (considering it’s not pulling in stations anymore and chances it’ll ever get fixed are slim). Instructables has a great Vintage Tube Radio & MP3 Upgrade article which has lots of good information beyond just the upgrade– links to parts, schematics, and other good resources.
RIP, Roger Ebert. Jezebel sums up his Twenty Best Reviews, and it’s a fair measure of the man. Godspeed.
I think I know what my April beer budget will be going towards: The Dark Star Burner.
This has been making the rounds, but it’s definitely worth a link: a transcript of the Raiders of the Lost Ark story conference. Lucas, Spielberg, and Kasdan at their finest.
This group of images scratches so many historical itches, I can’t stand it: photos of Paris from the early 1900s overlaid with shots from this year.