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Railway End Table Powered By Hand Crank

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Most end tables that you might find in a home are relatively static objects. However, [Peter Waldraff] of Tiny World Studios likes to build furniture that’s a little more interesting. Thus came about this beautiful piece with a real working railway built right in. The end table was built from scratch, with [Peter] going through all the woodworking steps required to assemble the piece. The three-legged wooden table is topped with a tiny N-scale model railway layout, and you get to see it put together including the rocks, the grass, and a beautiful epoxy river complete with a bridge. The railway runs a Kato Pocket Line trolley, but the really neat thing is how it’s powered. [Peter] shows us how a small gearmotor generator was paired with a bridge rectifier and a buck converter to fill up a super capacitor that runs the train and lights up the tree on the table. Just 25 seconds of cranking will run the train anywhere from 4 to 10 minutes depending on if the tree is lit as well. To top...
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Keebin’ with Kristina: the One With the Beginner’s Guide to Split Keyboards

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Curious about split keyboards, but overwhelmed by the myriad options for every little thing? You should start with [thehaikuza]’s excellent Beginner’s Guide to Split Keyboards . Image by [thehaikuza] via reddit Your education begins with the why, so you can skip that if you must, but the visuals are a nice refresher on that front. He then gets into the types of keyboards — you got your standard row-staggered rectangles that we all grew up on, column-staggered, and straight-up ortholinear, which no longer enjoy the popularity they once did. At this point, the guide becomes a bit of a Choose Your Own Adventure story. If you want a split but don’t want to learn to change much if at all about your typing style, keep reading, because there are definitely options. But if you’re ready to commit to typing correctly for the sake of ergonomics, you can skip the Alice and other baby ergo choices and get your membership to the light side. First are features — you must decide what you need t...
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Trying a Vibe-Coded Operating System

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If you were to read the README of the Vib-OS project on GitHub , you’d see it advertised as a Unix-like OS that was written from scratch, runs on ARM64 and x86_64, and comes with a full GUI, networking and even full  Doom game support. Unfortunately, what you are seeing there isn’t the beginnings of a new promising OS that might go toe to toe with the likes of Linux or Haiku, but rather a vibe-coded confabulation. Trying to actually use the OS as [tirimid] recently did sends you down a vibe-coded rabbit hole of broken code, more bugs than you can shake a bug zapper at, and most of the promised features being completely absent. [tirimid] is one of those people who have a bit of a problem, in that they like to try out new OSes, just to see what they’re like. The fun starts with simply making the thing run at all in any virtual machine environment, as apparently the author uses MacOS and there it probably ‘runs fine’. After this the graphical desktop does in fact load, some appli...
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Embossing Precision Ball Joints for a Micromanipulator

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[Diffraction Limited] has been working on a largely 3D-printed micropositioner for some time now, and previously reached a resolution of about 50 nanometers. There was still room for improvement, though, and his latest iteration improves the linkage arms by embossing tiny ball joints into them. The micro-manipulator, which we’ve covered before , uses three sets of parallel rod linkages to move a platform. Each end of each rod rotates on a ball joint. In the previous iteration, the parallel rods were made out of hollow brass tubing with internal chamfers on the ends. The small area of contact between the ball and socket created unnecessary friction, and being hollow made the rods less stiff. [Diffraction Limited] wanted to create spherical ball joints, which could retain more lubricant and distribute force more evenly. The first step was to cut six lengths of solid two-millimeter brass rod and sand them to equal lengths, then chamfer them with a 3D-printed jig and a utility knife bl...
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Vape-powered Car Isn’t Just Blowing Smoke

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Disposable vapes aren’t quite the problem/resource stream they once were, with many jurisdictions moving to ban the absurdly wasteful little devices, but there are still a lot of slightly-smelly lithium batteries in the wild. You might be forgiven for thinking that most of them seem to be in [Chris Doel]’s UK workshop, given that he’s now cruising around what has to be the world’s only vape-powered car. Technically, anyway; some motorheads might object to calling donor vehicle [Chris] starts with a car, but the venerable G-Wiz has four wheels, four seats, lights and a windscreen, so what more do you want? Horsepower in excess of 17 ponies (12.6 kW)? Top speeds in excess of 50 Mph (80 km/h)? Something other than the dead weight of 20-year-old lead-acid batteries? Well, [Chris] at least fixes that last part. The conversion is amazingly simple: he just straps his 500 disposable vape battery pack into the back seat– the same one that was powering his shop –into the GWiz, and it’s off to...
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FLOSS Weekly Episode 865: Multiplayer Firewall

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This week Jonathan chats with Philippe Humeau about Crowdsec! That company created a Web Application Firewall as on Open Source project, and now runs it as a Multiplayer Firewall. What does that mean, and how has it worked out as a business concept? Watch to find out! https://github.com/crowdsecurity/crowdsec https://crowdsec.net https://www.linkedin.com/company/53443483 Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel ? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or have the guest contact us! Take a look at the schedule here . Direct Download in DRM-free MP3. If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode . Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast: Spotify RSS Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License from Blog – Hackaday https://ift.tt/sgCVkG2
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Designing A Pen Clip That Never Bends Out Of Shape

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If you’ve ever used a ballpoint pen with a clip on the top, you’ve probably noticed they bend pretty easily. The clip relies on you only bending it a small amount to clip it on to things; bend it too far, and it ends up permanently deformed. [Craighill] decided to develop a pen clip that didn’t suffer this ugly malady.  The wire clip design easily opens wide because the spring wire is not actually deforming much at all. Credit: YouTube video, via screenshot The problem with regular pen clips comes down to simple materials science. Bend the steel clip a little bit, and the stress in the material remains below the elastic limit—so it springs back to its original shape. Push it too far, though, and you’ll end up getting into the plastic deformation region, where you’ve applied so much stress that the material is permanently deformed. [Craighill] noted this problem, and contemplated whether a better type of clip was possible. An exploration of carabiner clips served to highlight ...
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