Mondays might not be your favorite day of the week, but the good news is that we’re all in this together ladies and gentlemen. As purveyors of prime Grade A web content, the SolidSmack crew has done some of the heavy-lifting to make sure you get your Mondays started on the right track. Welcome to The Monday List. Every Monday, we link you up with some of the most insightful, informative, and socially-relevant stories to keep tabbed, bookmarked, reading listed, pocketed, or what have you to get your week started on the right foot. Be sure to check in each week for a new crop of freshly sprouted words curated straight…

The landscape spread before his peglegs, all nine of them, some wrapped to his hobbled trochanters with makeshift tarsal claws cut from barnside tin. He’d seen decades of fighting, hair matted, antennae torn, but still plenty of seeds scraped from the hulls of these links. Aleks Petruk – Huge color for huge scenes that you’ll find secret mysteries in and details that make it all the more interesting. Coffee Bean Lettering – It seems, shall we say, a monotonous task to create lettering with coffee beans, yet Will Paterson does it so well. 1999 – Remember that year? How did the films that year memorialize the relative stability of the…

It’s quite surprising how many people don’t know the Heimlich maneuver. Rather than taking five minutes to look up a simple tutorial on YouTube, most folks would rather live in ignorance until one of their friends or family starts choking on a piece of food or worse… something which isn’t food. By then, it’s usually too late. But this topic is getting a bit too dark. Let’s switch gears. In this age where just about anything that can be made will be made, it was only a matter of time before someone thought of making an automated anti-choking device. The lifewand is designed by medical engineers to remove any obstruction…

You can’t enter a coffee shop nowadays without at least seeing one iPhone on a single person. First released in June 2007, Apple’s iconic phone has become one of the leading smartphone lines around the world. Goes without saying, right? But what if the iPhone was released earlier than 2007? What if, say, it came out in 1984? Thanks to nostalgia aficionado Future Punk, we can see EXACTLY how the iPhone would be advertised if it was released in the 1980s. Times were different back then; Apple was still using their rainbow-colored logo, the Internet was still a budding network of computers, and blocky computers were still in vogue. All…

Researchers at the Berkeley Lab have developed a technique for 3D printing liquid structures that are reconfigurable. Microscopic Machines The researchers were experimenting with ferro-fluids, which are liquids infused with ferric nanoparticles. These iron oxide particles are only 20 nanometers across, so they are extremely tiny. The liquid was 3D printed into 1mm droplets through the use of a modified conventional 3D printer. The droplets were 3D printed into a liquid. So far, this seems pretty routine. By doing sophisticated analyses, they were able to determine that a phenomenon known as “interfacial jamming” occurred, where the nanoparticles in each droplet rushed to the edge of the droplet, forming a kind…

This tour of MADE Makerspace in Barcelona, Spain was my last stop of jet setting through Europe to learn about HW startup culture there. Watch the video below to take the tour with me, or read on for details! I’d like to give a big thank-you to Oriol Fernandez of “MAking props” for taking the time to be our excellent guide. If you missed the articles on the other stops of this European adventure, you can see the one about Berlin here, one on Warsaw, Poland here, and the piece on Kiev, Ukraine here. MADE’s Facility This makerspace was one of the bigger ones I’ve toured. They boast 600 sq.…