Omar Rizwan has created TabFS — "a browser extension that mounts your browser tabs as a filesystem on your computer." It's an extremely cool idea. Anything in your browser becomes… Read the rest of the article: "TabFS" turns your browser tabs into files on your computer

By the 19th century, the vanilla plant had long been used as a flavor, but it was generally gathered wild. That's because it's devilishly hard to farm. As this fascinating… Read the rest of the article: How a 19th-century slave kickstarted the world's vanilla-farming market

Zelda speedrunners have long stumbled over a particular point in the 2002 game "Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker". About thirty minutes into it, you have to play a minigame… Read the rest of the article: Gamers create web tool to help solve the worst Zelda minigame ever

There's something about ingenious bookshelves that deeply pleases the literary soul. If you love books that means you buy a lot of books, which means pretty soon your house is… Read the rest of the article: Gallery of ingenious bookshelves

Back in the late 19th century German glassblowers Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka created these incredibly lifelike models of sea creatures, sending them around the world for schools to use as… Read the rest of the article: 19th century sea creatures made from blown glass

Chess, Go, curling — is no game safe? I'm coming a bit late to this one, but as a Canadian I am morbidly fascinated to discover that a group of… Read the rest of the article: Watch an AI-propelled robot beat humans at curling

The BBC reports that a firm and a university in Japan are designing a satellite made out of wood. Apart from the bespoke, hipster qualities of such a noble material,… Read the rest of the article: A satellite made out of wood

I stumbled across these instructions on how to fold the unicorn from the final scene of Blade Runner. It's a print-up PDF of folding instructions, which is decidedly old-school, as… Read the rest of the article: How to fold the unicorn from Blade Runner

If you're looking for a new house in Guildhall, VT, here's a listing: It's a 4-bedroom, 2-bathroom house from 1880 that sports bright, colorful bedroom walls, a cozy wooden banister,… Read the rest of the article: Beautiful Vermont house for sale also includes seven creepy jail cells

When you do computer programming, what sort of mental work are you doing? For a long time, folks have speculated on this. Since coding involves pondering hierarchies of symbols, maybe… Read the rest of the article: Study finds brain-activity of people coding isn't quite like when they use language, or do math

I'm really charmed by these wooden puzzle boxes: You can store stuff inside the inner metal tube, but to open the box you need to rotate the wooden outer cylinder… Read the rest of the article: Wooden puzzle box for storing stuff

With its DIY-adjacent industrial model — get the customers to build the stuff — Ikea furniture has long invited tinkering and modifying, as with the excellent Ikea Hackers site. Now… Read the rest of the article: 3D printed add-ons for Ikea furniture

There's a fantastic feature in the New York Times about "The Lasting Lessons of John Conway's Game of Life" — well worth reading on its own, since they solicited short… Read the rest of the article: Game of Life running on Penrose tiles

I went to college at the University of Toronto, which saw a ton of growth in the 1950s and 60s, when brutalist architecture was a big deal — so the… Read the rest of the article: The renovation of a gorgeous brutalist house in Brazil

Apparently there was a trend — beginning in the late 18th century, and continuing for a few decades — of lovers exchanging tiny portraits of one of their eyes, and… Read the rest of the article: Why 18th-century lovers exchanged portraits of their eyes

Behold the "Circle Guitar", an invention of Anthony Dickens, which has a motor-driven disk that spins and strums the strings. You can place pick-pegs in the disk to represent different… Read the rest of the article: Self-strumming guitar

This video — captured by vice.aviator on Instagram — is the chaser for 2020 that I desperately needed. From the post: After leaving the airport this morning after my flight… Read the rest of the article: Using an excavator to play with a Learjet like a toy plane

These Lego-shaped crayons by Goober are totally delightful, though it occurs to me that they're pretty fragile. Using them as crayons — even a little bit — could sufficiently deform… Read the rest of the article: The existential dilemma posed by Lego crayons

Researchers closely studied the wings of two moth species from China and Africa, and found that their tiny scales form a "metamaterial" that absorbs bat sonar — thus becoming an… Read the rest of the article: Moths have evolved stealth acoustic cloaking to evade bat sonar

I doubt there's any serious AI at work here, but there is plenty of acid humor! If you give the app "How Bad Is Your Spotify?" permission to access your… Read the rest of the article: AI judges "How bad is your Spotify?"