Today I got a message from my friend and former Make: colleague, Matt Stultz. Matt now works for Prusa Research, the award-winning Czech 3D printer company created by force-of-nature, Josef Prusa. Matt forwarded me this tweet from Josef:

#goodnews Did you know you can make your own sanitizing products eg. hand gels? @WHO published an easy guide https://t.co/dxZUdACOd7! We are making 1000l for everyone to use here at work and to take home. Big thumbs up to Prusa Polymers team to finding it and making it happen 💪 pic.twitter.com/koEkXr3lOS

— Josef Prusa (@josefprusa) March 12, 2020

And Matt writes:

We have converted over some of the equipment we use to make 3D Printers into the production of hand sanitizer for our employees and the office. Kind of an interesting sign of the times and a show of what a flexible company who cares can do.

As Josef's tweet links to, the WHO has instructions [PDF] on how to DIY brew hand-sanitizer in large batches. Of course, you need to make sure you know what you're doing and that you have the right concentrations of ingredients. Also, a humectant (moisturizer) must be in the formulation as a skin care agent. Glycerol is used for this purpose in the WHO recipe. As is all things: Attempt at your own risk and use common sense.

It goes without saying that hand sanitizer is no substitute for 20 seconds of washing with soap. But if you don't have access to soap and water, it beats doing nothing. Read the rest

Since the latest coronavirus broke cover and started scaring the bejaysus out of everyone, you may have noticed that the supplies that folks think they’ll need in the event of a pandemic are becoming hard to find.

I'm paranoid about potential pandemics, but I come by it honestly enough.

In my old life, I worked in law enforcement while SARS was scaring the shit out of everyone in Toronto. Years later, I was charged with coming up with a Swine Flu action plan for the company I worked for in Vancouver. This time around, at the first sign of things going sideways in China, I stocked up on hand sanitizer, disposable gloves and, in case anyone in my household gets sick, N95 masks.

Not everyone's as uptight about hygiene in a time of plague as I am though. If you can’t lay hands on a bottle of hand sanitizer to save your life (hopefully not literally), you'll be happy to know that making your own at home is crazy easy.

The fine folks from ThoughtCo have an easy-to-follow recipe that’ll have you sanitizing your meat-hooks without soap or water, in no time. They explain, at length, how to make the gooey magic happen, but here’s the short version:

Take 2/3 of a cup of 99% isopropyl alcohol or ethanol and mix it with 1/3 of a cup of aloe vera gel. Mix them together. Dump the resulting goo into a dispenser of one sort or another. That’s it.

Like all good recipes, this one should be shared with your friends, family and community: being able to create an unobtainable safety product on your own can go a long way towards reliving stress. Read the rest

60 UK tower blocks, including 9 owned by local governments, have failed a new round of more-stringent fire tests conducted in the wake of the Grenfell fire disaster. Read the rest

"Health and Safety" is the all-purpose excuse for any stupid, bureaucratic, humiliating rubbish that officialdom wants to shove down our throats. In the Interests of Safety, from Tracey Brown and Michael Hanlon, is the antidote: an expert dismantling of bad risk-analysis and a call-to-arms to do something about it, fighting superstition and silliness with evidence.