Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
Featured
If you want to see the future of clean energy, you have to go to China. They have flying 2-seater taxis, lunch delivery drones, robots that can swap your empty EV battery in 3 minutes, bullet trains, driverless taxis, etc.
“The Global Village Construction Set is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.”
In 2023, seismologists detected a “global hum” originating in Greenland that lasted for 9 days. A rockslide triggered a 200m-high tsunami that sloshed back & forth in a fjord every 90 seconds, slamming into the fjord’s walls “like a beating heart”.
Prepare to lose a few hours to these: Andy Baio’s top 10 free browser games of 2025.
Just dropped: Lane 8’s Winter 2025 Mixtape.
“Docs said I’d never walk, but I ran a marathon.” Logan Knowles was born with cerebral palsy. This fall, he ran & completed the NYC marathon, his body fighting him the whole way. What a story.
A group of journalism students was able to track probable Russian spy drones launched from cargo ships to surveil European military bases. They even flew a drone of their own over one of the cargo ships: “we droned back”.
We’re getting down to the wire for gifts to be shipped in time for Xmas. Take a look at the 2025 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide if you still need to shop for your fam & friends.
“On January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1925.” Includes Betty Boop, Blondie & Dagwood, and works by William Faulkner, Agatha Christie, and the Marx Brothers.
Arthur Ganson is a kinetic sculptor who builds “Rube Goldberg machines with existential themes”. One of his works is called Machine with Concrete, which demonstrates the magic of gear ratios
According to a piece in Make, the input shaft spins at 200 rpm, which is reduced by gearing down to 1 revolution every 2 trillion years by the time you reach the gear on the end…which is so slow that even embedding the final gear in concrete doesn’t make any difference to the machine’s operation. (via interconnected)
[This is a vintage post originally from Feb 2015.]
Tags: art · Arthur Ganson · timeless posts · video
[Trailer] The Muppet Show is returning! It’s a one-time event, hosted by Sabrina Carpenter, to celebrate the show’s 50th anniversary. “It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights…”
Astronomy Picture of the Day for Dec 12: a red fox beneath a swirling aurora. “In a Finnish myth, when an arctic fox runs so fast that its bushy tail brushes the mountains, flaming sparks are cast into the heavens creating the northern lights.”
Matt Webb reports on going to algoraves. “There are special browser-based programming languages like strudel where you type code to define the beats and the sound, like mod synth in code, and it plays in a loop even while you’re coding.”
