35 Strangers, Microchips, Solar Punk & Voltmeter Clock
#78 of 10+1 Things | Kerala, India
🌴 Back home.
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I travelled to India over the weekend and reached my home in Kerala. The green tropical lush was definitely a change of scenery from the desert.
Being home this time of year means eating lots of mangoes and jackfruit. While growing up you could eat as much as you want, but I’m trying to be mindful now. Our mangosteen tree had lots of fruits this year too. I ate 3 today and it’s a sharp contrast against buying the same fruit from the exotic/expensive section of a grocery store in UAE versus something that just grows at home. If you haven’t tried mangosteen, I’d highly recommend it, it’s native to South East Asia if I’m not wrong.
Other than that, my routine is a bit messed up with almost 10+ hours ahead of USA where one of my clients lives. I shall probably join a local gym or workout at home to stay in shape. Rain is around the corner, clouds are dark and monsoon is almost here. More monsoon stories hopefully next week.
Without further ado, here are 10+1 Things worth sharing:
🏋️ 35 Strangers: Thienan was lonely after college and decided to talk to one stranger at the gym every day for a month, documenting everything along the way. The first few days were terrifying but it got addictive once people responded well. By the end he had gym buddies, weekend plans, and smash burger invites!
⏰ Voltmeter Clock: lcamtuf built a clock using three analog panel voltmeters to display hours, minutes, and seconds. Each needle sweeps smoothly across custom printed dials, and the whole thing is driven by a simple microcontroller with no fancy components. While most voltmeter clocks look very DIY, he went with a beautiful maple enclosure for this one.
☕ Instant Coffee: Making instant coffee sounds simple but it took decades to figure out how to dry coffee without ruining it. This piece by Works in Progress traces the whole journey, from a 1771 attempt using butter and tallow to Nestlé's spray drying breakthrough. Turns out coffee's flavour compounds are exactly the ones most likely to disappear during processing.
📏 Online Ruler: This cool site turns your screen into an actual ruler. It auto-detects your device and scales to real-world centimetres and inches, or you can calibrate it with a credit card. Super handy when you don’t have a ruler around.
📓 Standing Journal: I was browsing through funded Kickstarter projects and found this cool self-standing leather journal! It opens at a 24 degree angle so it doubles as a display piece on your desk. It's got velvet and leather cover options with gold embossing and gemstone accents, and works as a ring binder so you can reorder pages.
🏛️ Roman Roads: This open source project by a team of EU researchers maps every known road in the entire Roman Empire in incredible detail. It even has a route-finding tool so you can explore travel times in the ancient world. Total rabbit hole material.
☀️ Solarpunk: In this great deep dive, Skander writes about how 600 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa skipped waiting for the grid and built their own solar infrastructure instead. Startups sell solar home systems on pay-as-you-go plans for as little as $0.21 a day, powered by mobile money and carbon credits. Over 30 million solar products were sold in 2024 alone.
✨ Becoming a Magician: At 14, autotranslucence wrote a detailed fantasy of her ideal life that felt completely impossible. At 24, she found the notebook and realized 90% of it had come true. This essay is about seeking out people whose competence feels like magic and using that to grow beyond incremental improvements. One of my all time favourite reads.
🔬 Micro Chips: This stunning visual by FT shows how modern chips are made. Some of the smallest transistors are just 50 nanometres tall, and a single chip can contain almost 500km of wiring. The coolest part is how the industry is now going vertical, stacking transistors like skyscrapers because they've run out of room sideways.
📸 Dhaka's Dying River: This beautiful photography by Jozef Macak captures life along Bangladesh's Buriganga River, which is apparently nearing "biological death." But millions still depend on it every day for transport, work, and washing. The shots of workers unloading tuk-tuks from ships and rigging up makeshift bridges are something else.
🚢 AI Titanic: I was glued to this video by Chloe, a creator who uses AI to time travel by recreating historical moments from actual references. She boards the Titanic as a third class passenger, sneaks into first class, and tries to warn the captain about the iceberg. It can feel AI-ish at times but still has a charm to it. I wonder if she’ll ever make one about Petra.
That’s 10+1 Things for the week!
Which one was your favourite this week?
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With Love,
Rishi
“Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.”
~ Michael Jordan.