12 Places, AstroPhage, Offline Church & Vape Server
#72 of 10+1 Things | Abu Dhabi
⚡Quiet between.
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I had a rather relaxed week with Eid holidays and my wife having a couple of days off. On Friday we went to watch the Project Hail Mary movie. As a super fan of the book, the movie was just ok for me. It doesn’t have the grandiose of Interstellar and has less science than I hoped for. On the weekend we ended up in Dubai for a short staycation with a couple of friends. Hotel prices have crashed severely due to the ongoing war, so why not.
The project I shared last week, StackStats (a better analytics tool for Substack writers), had decent traction. I now have 3 users and the feedback has been great so far. I was able to crack one-click data importing from Substack, replacing the annoying csv exports they provide. Most of my time went into tweaking and optimising the product. If you write on Substack, I’d love to hear from you, just hit reply!
I also launched StackStats on Product Hunt today! So if you have a moment, an upvote would help me a lot in getting some eyeballs on it.
Without further ado, here are 10+1 Things worth sharing:
✨ Beautiful Boring: A lovely essay on why beautifully designed products can still feel soulless. The author compares it to the gardens of Versailles vs a tiny neighbourhood park in London. One is perfectly manicured but boring, the other makes you feel alive. Made me think about what we build on the internet.
🍞 Free Pantry: Think Little Free Library but for food. People set up small pantry boxes in their neighbourhoods where anyone can take what they need or give what they can. No applications, no hours, no questions asked. Simple and beautiful idea.
👾 AstroPhage Physics: If you've read Project Hail Mary, this is fascinating. Andy Weir built an entire spreadsheet with actual calculations behind the book, from Astrophage physics to fuel requirements to centrifuge specs. Cool to see the engineering behind the novel.
📍 12 Places: I loved this collection of 12 lesser-known places that shaped post-independence India. Worker-owned Coffee Houses, Sriharikota's humble beginnings, a Tibetan settlement in Karnataka. Each one tells a story of resilience you won't find in textbooks.
📵 Offline Church: A cool website that only works when you turn on airplane mode. Once you disconnect, a beautiful photo of a hilltop church surrounded by mountains appears. A lovely reminder to unplug once in a while.
🏖️ Magnified Sand: TIL there’s a whole community of people who collect sand and photograph it under microscopes. This site by a pathologist who started in 1999 is a beautiful rabbit hole of magnified sand from around the world. Every grain looks like a tiny universe.
💨Vape Server: An interesting write-up on how someone hosted a fully functional website on a chip pulled from a disposable vape. 24KB of storage, 3KB of RAM and somehow it loads a page in 160ms. Why? Because why not!
🌍 Food Footprint: An interesting visualisation showing how what we eat literally shapes what Earth looks like from space. Around 45% of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture and the pasture needed to produce one kilo of beef could grow over a tonne of carrots.
📸Glass Belly This tiny see-through sea creature called a salp was photographed off Indonesia with a bunch of other animals visible inside its transparent body. The photo won bronze at the Tokyo Foto Awards. Fun fact: despite looking like jellyfish, these guys are actually more closely related to us.
🎥 True Form: I came across this stunning depiction of a scene from the Mahabharata, one of the oldest epics from ancient India, where Krishna reveals his true cosmic form to a warrior. Made as a college senior thesis and sat unreleased for years before going viral. Trippy asf!
That’s 10+1 Things for the week!
Which one was your favourite this week?
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With Love,
Rishi
"If the rain that touches your skin travelled miles to find you, then so will everything that is meant for you"
- Unknown