☕ Caffeine curious.
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I had a rather bleak last week. My flu from a few weeks ago hasn’t completely gone away, and to top it off I got a weird irritation on my left eye. Not fun.
It’s peak summer here with temperatures crossing 41°C (~105°F) and 70% humidity, so stepping outside feels like walking into a steam room. I’ve been longing to go for long walks but tried an indoor air-conditioned walking facility and it just felt weird. So I’ll stick to the late night sweat-drenched outdoor walks gasping for air!
On the brighter side, I’m into 2 new things right now.
First, after years of drinking endless Nescafe instant coffee, I decided to hop on to the rabbit hole of specialty coffee. I gifted myself a Timemore C3S grinder along with some coffee beans from India. I now have a Moka pot and a V60 setup, though in terms of convenience the Moka pot wins. The fun part is experimenting with different grind settings and beans. Since I’m super sensitive to caffeine, if I get something wrong I have to wait until the next day to tweak it. Delayed gratification right there!
As for the second thing, this intro is getting long and I don’t want to bore you, so I’ll save that for next week.
Without further ado, here are 10+1 Things worth sharing:
✍️ A Letter to My Daughter: Julie Zhuo wrote this lovely letter to her 11-year-old daughter about creativity in the age of AI. Her point is that if you never struggle to make something yourself, you'll never develop the taste to know what's actually brilliant. Beautiful writing!
🌍 Folding Globes: This site lets you print, cut, and fold your own paper globes from real satellite and scientific data. Since you can’t flatten a sphere without distorting it, the globes are split into geometric shapes like icosahedrons and cubes that you fold together. There are free templates for everything from Earth at Night to Mars to Pangaea.
🔐 Crypto Museum: Two electronics engineers from the Netherlands have been collecting and restoring cipher machines, spy radios, and Cold War encryption gear since 2004. They've documented everything on this massive website with detailed histories and working principles. A wonderful rabbit hole!
✍️ Searching for Meadows: Jaap Grolleman writes about moving back to the Dutch town he grew up in and discovering that the street names around him still carry old words for meadows, marshlands, and herds. Places that have long since changed but whose names remember what was once there. It's a quiet, beautiful piece about leaving home to understand it.
🏴☠️ Pirate Preservationists: Jesse Walker writes about how bootleggers and pirates accidentally became the world's most important cultural archivists. The 1922 film Nosferatu only survived because someone illegally kept a copy after courts ordered every print destroyed. HBO pulled entire shows that now only exist on torrent sites. 70% of silent-era movies are gone forever! :(
💶 Future: The European Central Bank is redesigning euro banknotes and the shortlisted design proposals are really beautiful. The themes are European culture and rivers and birds, with designs ranging from hand-drawn portraits of iconic European figures to birds in their natural habitats along flowing rivers.
🖥️ TRMNL: TRMNL is a small ePaper screen that sits on your desk without any glowing backlight. I've been using it for a few months and mine shows weather, my GitHub stars, portfolio performance, and some news feeds I follow. The cool thing is you can set up multiple screens that rotate and refresh on a schedule. Battery lasts about three months, it's open source, and I've even published a few plugins myself.
⏰ 24 Times: This site shows 24 different ways to display a clock, all running in real time. Time as a percentage of the day, as Roman numerals, as Morse code, as the sum of all its digits, and even a broken clock stuck at 8:15 (Hiroshima). A clever little project!
🌊 Sea Peoples: The “Sea Peoples” were a mysterious group of tribes who raided the Eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC and may have helped cause the Bronze Age Collapse. Nobody knows exactly who they were or where they came from, and the term itself is a modern invention that scholars now say is probably a misnomer since most of them travelled by land.
🚲 Velocipedia: Gianluca Gimini did an interesting art experiment where he asked people to draw a bicycle from memory. Most got it hilariously wrong with missing frame parts, chains on the wrong wheel, and impossible structures. He then went one step further and rendered these drawings into realistic 3D models, and the results are hilarious!
👻 Kandittund! (Seen It!): I had seen this video a long time back but it popped up again on my radar. An 89-year-old man from Kerala, India recounts his encounters with local myths, legends, and supernatural beings, all brought to life with beautiful hand-drawn animation. It's spooky but never too serious. The narration is in Malayalam (my mother tongue) but there are subtitles.
That’s 10+1 Things for the week!
Which one was your favourite this week?
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With Love,
Rishi
“A master is someone who has studied their craft for years, and whose natural curiosity has led them to deep explorations of what precisely makes this thing great"
Dude, this stuff is always so wonderful. I really appreciate being able to dive into your lists every weekend. I also went down the coffee rabbit hole some years ago and have a V60 and Chemex with a wilfa svart grinder (I checked James Hoffman's recs). I've gotten so used to it that it doesn't take me much time and I love the ritual. I once did a little blog post with some resources in case you're interested: https://culturalreads.com/world-of-coffee/