10 Steps, Button Stealer, Nobel Disease & Wind Knitter
#84 of 10+1 Things | Abu Dhabi, UAE
✈️ Two biomes.
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Howdie!
I missed the last two weeks intentionally to reset and reflect. I had this edition almost ready with just proof-reading pending, but then a terrible flu hit and lasted almost a week, so the 2-week break became 3!
In the last edition, I talked about going to Wayanad in the Western Ghats. After that, I did another trip to Kodaikanal with a friend. It’s a hill station in the Western Ghats, further south.
I have fond memories of Kodai from college. The pine valleys, the smell of eucalyptus, watching bisons, eating Indian pears. Kodai reminded me of my college days and a road trip I took with my friend Hari, who unfortunately is not with us anymore.
It was a good trip.
I’m now back in UAE, middle of summer, a stark contrast to what I was experiencing back home. A 4-hour flight takes you to polar opposite biomes!
I’m back to work on full throttle and can’t wait to share more interesting stuff next week!
Before I start, I remember one of you emailing me to connect or for a quick chat. I remember reading it and had marked it as unread, but I can’t remember who it was. So if you had reached out and I didn’t reply, I’m sorry, please send a hi again!
Without further ado, here are 10+1 Things worth sharing:
🧣 Wind Knitter: Merel Karhof built a wind-powered knitting machine that attaches to the side of a building. When it's windy, it knits fast. When it's calm, it slows down. The scarf drops down the facade and every finished piece gets a label with the time and date the wind made it. You can even buy the scarves!
😊 10 Steps: Pieter Hintjens wrote this simple list on how to be happier and it stuck with me. Walk through the city at night in the rain. Do things you're bad at. Get rid of bad actors. Want nothing, accept everything. Bookmark it, read it often.
🔘 Button Stealer: This fun browser extension steals a button from every website you visit and adds it to your collection. It works automatically in the background, so you just browse like normal and watch your stash grow. It's useless, free and satisfying.
📦 Lost and Found: Riley Walz did something interesting. He scraped the archives of hundreds of stadiums, airports, and universities that all use the same lost-and-found software. The result is thousands of accidental portraits of lost stuff, from water bottles to sunglasses to endless phones. There's something weirdly beautiful about this.
🚂 SBB Resale: Swiss Federal Railways runs this online shop where they sell off decommissioned railway gear. You can buy anything from steel beams and freight wagons from 1967 to forklifts and lockers, some of it for free. Great gifting site for train nerds.
⚽ Data Portraits: The World Cup is over, but this interesting project by Alexander Bogachev is worth checking out. He turned all 104 matches into generative visualizations where two colored blankets represent each team's territory, hills rise where shots happen, and goals flood the entire pitch.
🎒 Collectorium: Remember the OG Fidget Cube? The creators are back with another product, a backpack for trading card and enamel pin collectors. It's a backpack, display vault, and wall-mounted rail system all in one, with a built-in LED display to signal what you're trading or hunting for. Haven't seen anything like it.
📚 AI Biography: Kashmir Hill, a NYT journalist, accidentally discovered that someone had published a 90-page AI-generated biography of her on Amazon, filled with factual errors, scraped internet facts, and of course, em dashes. She couldn't reach the author, but came across another guy in Maryland who has published close to 445 AI books!
🏅 Nobel Disease: Some of you loved these weird Wikipedia rabbit holes, so here's a fun one. “Nobel Disease” is the term for when Nobel Prize winners start endorsing strange ideas outside their field. One guy believed in telepathic raccoons and another even promoted homeopathy!
📄 Paper Sculptures: I was in awe when I came across the work of Manabu Kosaka. He makes these hyperrealistic replicas of cameras, watches, radios, and even a Big Mac using nothing but paper. He disassembles the real objects first to understand the mechanics, then recreates every tiny component by hand.
🍜 Eau Chew: Kolkata was once home to a thriving Chinese community of nearly 70,000 people, and this beautiful short film tells the story of one of its oldest family-run restaurants, now in its fourth generation. They never expanded, never franchised, and still cook what they'd eat at home.
That’s 10+1 Things for the week!
Which one was your favourite this week?
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With Love,
Rishi
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life."