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. Each Monday, we’ll 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. Be sure to check in each Monday morning for a new crop of freshly sprouted words curated straight from the source of your favorite homegrown ‘Smack.…
Ahh… do you feel that? That turkey bone stuck in your throat as you ponder discounts and deals on all sorts of gadgets, gizmos and product dev tools? Well, wash that bone down with a swig of cranberry sauce quick, because we’ve got our eye on the best deals of the day. Keep an eye out too, because we’ll be posting more throughout the day. See a deal too good to pass up? Send it in and we’ll get it on the list. Ready? Here are the best deals and discounts we’ve found for Black Friday 2016! Seagate 8TB Drive A massive 8TB of external storage plus 2 USB 3.0…
As anybody who sits in front of the computer for at least eight hours a day knows, a great office chair is an absolute necessity if you plan on walking upright without pain any time in the next 20 years (or good heavens, the next 20 minutes). And unsurprisingly, behind every great office chair is a deep knowledge of human-centered design. When it comes to the upper echelon of the modern office chair, it’s hard to have a conversation without mentioning the Aeron from Herman Miller. The brainchild of design engineers Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick, the Aeron provided a gigantic step in human ergonomics and material innovation without the…
Despite drastic efforts to increase STEM education across the country, as well as a renewed interest in industrial design thanks to a new crop of product design startups in London, the number of skilled UK engineers is actually on the decline. Enter James Dyson. As the sole owner of Dyson Ltd, James Dyson is no stranger to taking matters into his own hands when it comes to problem-solving. Heck, it’s been said that he spends over $6 million per week to solve design and engineering problems in his R&D department alone. To help curb this skills shortage, the British inventor is opening a new college to train engineers in the…
We don’t really know where to begin with this one, so we’ll just start by putting our hands on our heads to keep our brains from exploding. Created by a student at the Jade University of Applied Sciences in Lower Saxony, Germany, the Papercube is a “LEGO Mindstorms Education-Based Process for Manufacturing Paper Cubes” at least according to the video. More importantly, though, is that somebody sat down with hundreds of LEGO Mindstorm bricks and created an entire miniature factory for doing one thing and one thing only: laser cutting and folding miniature paper boxes. Consider us impressed: https://youtu.be/BHBlOzzV-Qk
Think about it. What are you suppose to do with your fingers when you’re not CAD’ing about or peeling through the pages on SolidSmack? You could eat… or make stuff… or give your co-worker a very awkward massage, OR you could fidget. Fidget, fidGET, FIDGET. I’m a pen spinner myself, but Francesco Pantaleone has just revealed to me another way to fidget my life away. Francesco says, “This Trispinner is smaller than other designs on Thingiverse” ….wait, there are more?! Sure enough. There are no less than a thousand other fidget spinners on Thingiverse, but this one, THIS ONE, is designed so it spins between the fingers at every position.…