This video was far more interesting than I thought it was going to be. It's not only the story of the restoration of a cool barn find, a circa 1890 candy-making machine, but it details how Greg Cohen of Lofty Pursuits in Tallahassee, Florida used it to make strawberry "drops" (hard candies). Cohen is a real candy-making nerd and he shares how he spent 70 to 80 hours restoring this antique machine for the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Museum in Skagway, Alaska:

To this day there aren’t many good roads into it, if any. Imagine how hard it would have been to get this device up there to be used for candy? And how much money there must have been in the 1890s... to warrant someone bringing it up so that miners could have a little bit of happiness in their pocket, some nice candies to eat, I guess, when they mine? It was a good bit of luxury that they could take with them, that they didn’t have to worry about spoiling. Because they lived a really rough life as they mined up there.

And while it probably was worth bringing to Skagway for business reasons, it probably wasn’t worth bringing it back, so it got stashed in a barn and it’s been sitting there for the last hundred and something years, slowly rusting away forgotten.

And now I’ve been given an opportunity to give it a little bit of new life making candy again.

(The Kid Should See This, The Awesomer) Read the rest

I CAN NOT put drops in my eye. It freaks me the heck out. I use this Auto Dropper when things get critical.

I will squirm, wrestle, wiggle and flee from any attempt to put drops in my eyes. The idea of contacts is kind of a laughable non-reality. Teams of luchadores Mexicanos could not hold me down! Nothing goes in my eyes!

I would spend a lot of time trying to get drops to contact the surface of my eye, especially in windy and smoky times like the California winter. Now, I employ the Auto Dropper. The contraption centers the bottle over my eye, holds open my lower eyelid open, and 1 time out of 3 gets the drop in place, because I still fucking hate eye drops.

When I get really twitchy, I'll just fill the corner of my eye with the solution and open the eye. It wastes a ton of liquid tho.

Ableware 786770001 Autodrop Eye Drop Guide via Amazon Read the rest

Seriously, they don't come deeper and harder than this. [via r/videos]

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