Recomendo

Watering hole webcam/Machine Pix/Log cabin craft

Recomendo: issue no. 338

Sign up here to get Recomendo a week early in your inbox.

Namib Desert live stream
This live feed of a watering hole in the Nabib Desert streams live 24/7. I drop in a couple times a week and I’ve seen so many different animals sharing the waterhole. I’ve seen zebras, wildebeests, warthogs, ostriches and lot of different birds. The camera has a microphone and night vision, so you’re always connected to this magical and awesome wildlife. — CD

Fascinating machinery GIFs
Machine Pix is an Instagram account with mesmerizing videos of different machinery performing automated tasks, such as making nails, tying knots, loading pallets, pulling weeds, and peeling fruit. — MF

Ultimate log cabin craft
I’ve watched a lot of videos about people making their log cabin in the woods, but this one (I Spent 3 Years Alone Building a Log Cabin) by a Swedish kid is on a whole nother level. First the guy, Erik Grankvist, is 18 years old. Second the level of craftsmanship is unbelievable. He contours each log and splits humungous boulders by hand! Third he worked on it entirely alone, moving massive logs himself. Fourth he filmed himself, which is a huge chore. There is no narration for 1.5 hours, just mesmerizing old world craft at work.  I watched the whole thing. Two weeks after posting it got 9 million views. — KK

How to break a habit
Any habit needs all its parts in order to function. If some parts are missing, the habit is disassembled.” — Carlos Castaneda
This short insight on the structure of a habit has helped me see my patterns differently. If there is something I want to stop doing, I just remove a “part” or step from the process. Lately, it’s been deleting apps and keeping my phone as far away from me as possible so that using it becomes an inconvenience. — CD

Better than Consumer Reports
There’s a guy on YouTube who does the most thorough and insanely complete testing of tools I’ve ever seen. He test to the breaking point up to a dozen variants of one tool (say cordless chainsaws), including the cheapest and the most expensive, to see which one is actually best. His channel, Project Farm, is sort of a one-man Consumer Reports, only better. This year he rounded up his best results into one video he calls The Top 10 Products of 2022. — KK

Public Domain Day 2023
On January 1, artistic works published in 1927 will enter the public domain, which means they can be downloaded, resold, and modified in the United States without copyright restriction. Duke University has a list of notable books, songs, movies that will become free to use in 2023. They include Metropolis by Thea von Harbou, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, “Trolley Troubles,“ starring Walt Disney’s Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century by Phillip Francis Nowlan, and Popeye by E.C. Segar. — MF


— Kevin KellyMark FrauenfelderClaudia Dawson

01/1/23

© 2022