In December last year, Jean-Jacques Savin, 71, floated away from the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa in an orange capsule he'd built. Last week, he landed at the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Eustatius. Read the rest

1977's Apple ][+ was the first successful personal computer, inspiring a generation of hackers and makers and coders; famously, it shipped with a schematic that showed how the boards and their components worked together, to allow hobbyists to improve and service their PCs (hardware-hacking legend Bunnie Huang credits these schematics with igniting his interest in electronics and computing). Read the rest

On Saturday, Alex Honnold became the first person to free solo climb the 3,000-foot wall of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, California. Look ma, no rope!

"Honestly, I think this is the most satisfied I’ve ever been," he said afterwards. "It was exactly what I hoped for. I felt so good. It went pretty much perfectly."

"Climber Completes the Most Dangerous Rope-Free Ascent Ever" (via @nadiamdrake)

"First Interview With the Climber Who Scaled El Capitan Without a Rope" (Nat Geo)

(photo by Jimmy Chin) Read the rest

Here's a MMO-Champion thread in which Ramsesakama sets out to recreate the World of Warcraft realm of Kalimdor in the maker-friendly game/environment Minecraft, in faithful 1:1 scale. Using procedural tools and a lot of skull-sweat, the task is undertaken, with awfully fabulous results.

I'm trying to create a replica of Kalimdor in Minecraft, and I want it to be the correct scale. I'd like to create the terrain first, so I need to compute the relative distances (in Minecraft blocks) between the different locations in Kalimdor.

If a Minecraft character is approximately two blocks tall, and if we assume the male Orc model is equal in size, then how many blocks is "one yard" in WoW?

Thread: WoW to Minecraft coordinate space conversion

(via Wonderland) Read the rest