Category Archives: Hands-on

Get in, get out, get back to work: Wes Bos on the McMaster-Carr website

I was introduced to McMaster-Carr corporation early in my postdoctoral career, now well over thirty years ago.  The firm is renowned for stocking all sorts of parts and equipment and getting them to customers fast.  I went up one floor to the rapid orders room, checked the massive catalog, filled out a simple slip, and had electrical, mechanical, and/or vacuum parts the next day.  Sometimes they came the same day if I got the slip in early.  The paper catalog is not easy to get but I managed when I started my research position at UCLA after that postdoc.  The warehouse in Santa Fe Springs enabled California McMaster-Carr to meet the responsiveness of the New Jersey operation.

Fast forward to the era of e-commerce and the firm inspires affection even from the cynical, world-weary souls of HackerNews.  mcmaster.com is simple, well-organized, cruftless, and faster than any of its competitors in the Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul market.  Consumer websites aren’t even in the discussion.  I’ve even ordered from them for my personal needs when the slightly higher prices are more than offset by the speed from order to delivery.  Youtuber Wes Bos dives into why the website is so fast, marvels at the developer team that enables it, and the management team that maintains focus on the customer’s desire to search, order, and get back to business.

Youtube Channel: Wes Bos

Virtue of Reality: Peter Dibble on Modulex

The pendulum of modern engineering has swung to asserting that digital models can always represent reality faster, cheaper, and better than any physical manifestation of it.  Mockups, prototypes, and test articles are out, “Digital twins” and augmented reality are in.  More’s the pity.  While much can be represented in CAD/CAM, the compute horsepower required to mimic the real world drains budgets as fast as it drains the power grid.  Very few have the savvy to accurately represent the range of physical phenomena in bits and then know when the model can be trusted.  The craftsmen who enabled the preceding revolutions are in retreat and in exchange we get ever increasing development times and costs despite the glowing promises of hype men and the C-suites that golf with them.

In that spirit, Oregonian Peter Dibble looks back fondly at Modulex, a Lego spinoff for architects to present concepts to their clients.  An ingenious change in dimension yielded bricks ideally suited to metric and Imperial drawing scales.  Sliceable parts, slopes, ridges, and custom colors yielded a system that grew well beyond its original intent into project management and signage.  A Mark-1 eyeball can look at, around, and  into such a physical representation and get some idea of its strengths and weaknesses.  Digital design software and Lego’s surprising hostility to the product line unfortunately sealed Modulex’s fate as a modeling tool.  The company lives on for signmaking.

Dibble’s channel is a trove of meticulously researched and well-presented histories emphasizing  the Pacific Northwest.  The Spruce Goose’s move from Long Beach to McMinnville is eye-opening.

Youtube Channel: Peter Dibble

 

Second childhood: Techmoan’s new old tech

You’ve reached “a certain age” when the unaffordable supercosmic products of your youth have gone through at least one cycle of obsolescence and have been rediscovered as charming antiques by succeeding generations.  Vacuum tubes, LPs, cassettes, and laserdiscs are back after a fashion and the prices for old analog are reaching baseball card levels.

Meet Mat from the Merrie Olde.  His oddly named Techmoan blog and Youtube channel feature his charming analyses of old devices in a modern light.  There’s lots of tech but no actual moaning.  The videos are homemade, exceptionally well-crafted, and balance historical perspective with teardowns, light repairs, reviews, and comparisons of old against new where old often wins.  He’s been at it since 2009 but I only learned about him recently.

His presentation of the German Tefifon is a good example:

Youtube Channel: Techmoan

If that scratches an itch, here’s his RetroTech playlist:

The international man of mystery is also a trenchant comedian with a flair for puppets.

 

Strangely soothing… the rhythm of baking

Check out King Arthur Flour’s six part series ‘Techniques for the Professional Baker’. Even non-to-amateur bakers can enjoy the dough wrangling, shaping, and baking. The underappreciated difference between the home kitchen and the production environment is expertly presented with reserve and understatement.

The King Arthur company’s web presence is very well done. The firm and its design team, assuming they went outside, must have hit it off very well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=masipMhrV5c&feature=share&list=PLE2D447C3F9AAD68F