This was a fun video to make, I hope you enjoy it.

I’m also kicking off a #BrandingAMonth project on Instagram and Youtube, where I’ll be posting one Branding variation a day throughout October. The first one is already up.

Split the atom is still a work in progress. Overall happy with where I am so far! Disregard the exposed dogs in the frame lmao.

The sub is filled with incredible tricks. Here’s my fail that hurt my knuckles and my pride.

I have a new insta @jrdn.btn

1) This was the first time I rode through Eugene with my partner. Previous trips were with yoyo nerd friends and/or fabrication nerd friends. I planned a very short stop over in case she might be bored, but unsurprisingly David and Shawn’s charm transcends. Shortly after asking a few basic questions, Shawn had drawn her in and she was legit fascinated to learn about CnC, XYZ programming, lathes, swarf, and all of it.

2) The Free State. Machined delrin, the next itteration of the Deep State. Up until I’d tried it, the Toybania Thing had been my favorite modern responsive slimline by far. The FreeState definitely edged it out!

They had a serious stack of delrin in lots of colors, so I’m guessing its going to be widely available when it hits production. I can’t wait!

Onedrop4Life! 😆

Thanks as always to David and Shawn 💙

I was driving home late on a dark highway a few months back when an episode playing on my queue used actual primary audio from a phone recording during a break in. The host barely talked, just letting the raw audio play out with subtle background scoring. I ended up having to pull over at a gas station just to turn the lights on in my car because my skin was crawling.

Usually true crime podcasts feel a bit detached when hosts just read wikipedia summaries or chat over coffee, but every once in a while you hit a standalone episode where the sound design and storytelling align so well that it leaves you paranoid for days.

Over the past week or so I’ve been listening to a podcast about a man called Curtis Flowers who was in prison for 23 years and tried 6 times for the murders of 4 people at a furniture store.

Each episode starts with, “This season is about the case of Curtis Flowers, a Black man from a small town in Mississippi who spent the past 21 years fighting for his life, and a white prosecutor who spent that same time trying just as hard to execute him.”

Whether you know the story or not or google the ending ahead of time, this story is incredible. It is frustrating, upsetting and really moving.

In the Dark, Season 2. A must listen.

I have cried more than I ever have to any podcast, the story telling, the deep investigation, all of it.

As we end quarter 3 (and I become increasingly impatient for year-end lists proper), I’m wondering what are everyone’s favourite three of 2026?

For me it would be:
1. What to Carry, What to Burn - an instant all-timer. I feel like listening to Blair Braverman’s incredibly well-researched campfire survival stories shifts my outlook on life and what’s possible. If people can survive plane crashes on snowy mountains I can survive five minutes of public speaking!

1. Dan Taberski’s Manifesto - I didn’t want this mini series about radical action and manifestos to end! Extremely fun and thoughtful exploration from all angles of the political spectrum. He’s the guy that did Hysterical and Missing Richard Simmons, so you know it’s good.

2. Love Trapped - the hype is real. Compelling, shocking and still unfolding. It’s great when the underpinnings of criminal procedures are laid bare.

Honourable mentions:
- Heavyweight - the new season just started but it’s the GOAT and must be on every list.
- …

If you’ve never heard of it don’t start at the end go far far back. I’m in 2016-2017 right now. I’ve never laughed so much in my life. I’m so so sad it’s not being made anymore.

They were both so wild and addicting. I tried a couple of the seasons of “Betrayal” because it was recommended but it wasn’t nearly as engaging.

Came across this podcast because it was recommend several times here. I was so enamored by the host (even though I have to listen at x1.5) and her passion for sharing these stories, I binged through all the episodes, then compiled them into a playlist with songs as “palate-cleansers” for a more immersive experience. If anyone is looking for a 10hr 50min listening experience or going on a long roadtrip (and you have Spotify or would like a reference to copy on another platform) it’s here!

EDIT: if you’ve listened to all of the episodes, would love to hear your thoughts—any favorites? I found episode 7 Painted Ocean left a real impression on me

Will also add to the playlist as more episodes come out!

Also, if you have other podcast recommendations that would go well with paired “palate-cleansers” I’d be happy to give the same treatment

He really loved James Riley’s fractured fairy tale series (Half Upon a Time) when he was younger. He read several of the Rangers Apprentice but got bored with it.

I’d so appreciate any new recs. He’s slogging through Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett and doesn’t love it.

I read to my kids for a long time, probably so long that people would think we’re weird. But we’ve read and mostly enjoyed (or he read by himself:

Mistborn
The Cat Who Turned On and Off
The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern
The Cat Who Could Read Backwards
Truth Witch (DNF*)
The Rithmatist
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (5 book series)
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life, The Universe and Everything

The Giver
City of Ember series
Phantom Tollbooth

Indian in the Cupboard
The Return of the Indian
Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic
From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler

A Wrinkle In Time
A Wind in the Door
A Swiftly Tilting Planey
Many Waters
An Acceptable …

I am a senior in high school and I want to increase my reading comprehension. I would say mine is fairly high but I still want to get better at reading. Please recommend me books that challenge my capacity to find meaning (I cant explain this well).

TLDR: Recommend me hard books!

edit: I really liked the stranger - although not super challenging, I thought I’d mention it.

I want to read something that hooks me right in but it’s nonfiction and it’s like the letters Hamilton wrote everyone including his wife.
Or a total normal story about two famously straight, same sex friends being long time roommates! 😏

I was recently talking to someone about Ben Franklin’s personal journals and man, he did some stuff!
I would love a messy, nonfiction history book about a prominent figure!

I’m tired of reading about heroes or even anti-heroes who deep down are good people. I want a book where the main character is genuinely awful selfish maybe even cruel. They don’t have to be a villain just someone whose choices consistently leave you shaking your head. I’m open to any genre as long as the character is deeply flawed and their flaws drive the story.

Longtime reader, first-time poster.

Our daughter (age 33) works a high-powered, high-pressure type of job and the last few weeks have just been terrible. As a result, she’s been experiencing a great deal of anxiety and has been crying a lot. She just cancelled a trip to come see us because of work pressure (we live about 315 mi / 510 km apart). We plan to ship a care package to her with some of her favorite things, and I definitely want to include a fiction title. I’ll list below some of her 2026 4- and 5-star reads on Goodreads and I would love to solicit suggestions from you.

Blake Crouch — Dark Matter and Recursion

Marcus Kliewer — We Used to Live Here

Chelsea Bieker — Madwoman

Ashley Elston — First Lie Wins

Emma Donoghue — Room

Stephen King — The Institute

Jeez. A lot of her titles, including some above, appear to be rather anxiety-inducing! Any ideas on some “softer” reads? I’m tempted to send her one of my own recent 5-stars (Ted Chiang — …

honestly i am proper tired of scrolling past recommendations where the main character acts like a sixth former and the kingdom’s entire political system consists of three people in a throne room whispering.

i spent a good chunk of my twenties reading nothing but fantasy doorstoppers before taking a break, and coming back to the current landscape feels like walking into a minefield of hype cycles. everyone keeps shouting about books that supposedly get good once you push through five hundred pages of table setting. tbf if a book needs that long to start working, it is just badly structured.

i want something written for adults where the relationship has some proper weight to it and the intimacy isn’t tacked on just to bump the age rating for the back cover. give me characters who have jobs, responsibilities, and pasts that don’t read like they were invented by someone on a break from revision. mind you i don’t need forty pages of tax law, but a bit of …

By “Age of exploration” I mean the 1500s- when sailors had only a loose notion at best of the world’s geography and were effectively mapping it out as they went along.

I know there are games set in that time period- but the trouble is that WE know what the world map looks like, so it’s just not the same.

The only games I’ve found that really give that feeling of venturing into “here be dragons” and mapping out the world are the Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies games.

Looking for recommendations including FPS, 3rd person shooters, management, conquering / liberating areas etc.

Closest thing I’ve come to is Arma 3 antistasi but am disappointed by the single player mode and jankiness.

Other games that fit this for me were
The saboteur
Far cry games
Freeman: Guerilla warfare
Mount and blade games
Running with rifles

Exatcly as the title suggests, looking at my backlog the majority of my games are focused on taking someone’s life, and honestly that’s becoming so boring, I’m starting to feel like there’s only this type of games out there and I can barely think of any that doesn’t require me killing something.

It could be games like Splinter Cell or Dishonored that I can choose not to kill anyone, as long as I can complete it without ever killing that will be fine.

I’m looking for games with those rare moments where music, scenery, atmosphere, and timing all come together and you feel like you’re experiencing a piece of art.

Road 96 gave me this recently: walking up a hill at twilight with hauntingly beautiful music, then reaching the top and having this huge surreal landscape and mountain range revealed.

I’m not just looking for pretty graphics, sunsets, or scenic exploration. I’m looking for that emotional/awe-inspiring feeling where a moment unexpectedly hits you and you just stop to take it in.

What games have given you that feeling, and specifically what parts without spoiling it?

I’m looking for games where you do some kind of live and work, but with a mystical vibe.

For example, like:

• Dredge
• Strange Horticulture, Strange Antiquities
• Cultist Simulator (it’s a board game, but it works too)
• Sunless sea
• Potion Craft (for example, from the perspective of a witch, where you need to make sure you don’t get burned at the stake)
• Graveyard Keeper

Ideally, something about an alchemist/mage/witch‑trader in a slightly gloomy world.

games like Inside, Journey, Little Nightmares… short, but very good games, you know?

My 73 year old uncle just suffered a bad fall after getting his hip replaced not too long ago. He’ll likely need a walker or cane for the rest of his life.

For years, his only source of music/news has been his radio/CD player, which is giving him issues playing CDs.

He also got his first cell phone a few years ago. In my view, if he can navigate a dumb/flip phone, he can handle this. Also, getting him to use technology will only get harder as he gets older, so this feels like a “now or never” opportunity to make his life a little easier moving forward.

Given his lack of experience with technology, I’m unsure that he’ll even accept this, but I wanted to do what I can to make his life a little easier. He has a girlfriend who is better versed in technology who is gonna help him out with it. She thinks he may be receptive to it and she’ll try to help out with it.

Anyway… I tried to make the experience as simple as possible:

- Designed to be completely offline. All music and movies are …

Apple is preparing an “Opened or Closed” automation in Shortcuts for iPhone Duo.

Screenshot from the iPhone Duo simulator, with the Shortcuts app ported from iOS 27.2. Here it is in action switching between the Light and Night Dunes wallpapers: https://imgur.com/a/sve5X99

From what I’ve seen, you can’t get a readout of the hinge state, so you might have to build two different shortcuts for each case, or use a third-party app to grab the hinge state.

When activated, you type in something that you want to remember, hit “done”, and a notification with what you typed will appear. I also have it write that notification in a backup note for redundancy.

I made this about a year ago and have used it almost daily since then. Just having the ability to add basically a digital sticky note that I see whenever I open my phone really helps me keep track of stuff.
I also replaced the camera button on my lock screen with this shortcut so I can quickly log things.

Link: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/efcdf485b07d461e8eb9b87ec74eeb9d

Edit:
For the shortcut to work, you must create a note in the notes app for it to log your reminders to, then tell the shortcut which note it should log to by replacing the “remember something log” field with your own note.

If you don’t want it to log your shortcuts, just delete the “combine” and “append” actions in the shortcut (the last two).

Just wanna share this here, someone’s probably made something better or it’s not that useful, but it’s obv for those who might need it. :)

Created this so I can send Spotify links to my friends who don’t use Apple Music without having to install Spotify. While I can just search for it on the web, this is much faster.

The flow is: use the share sheet in Apple Music, and the shortcut uses the Lab86 API to convert the link to a Spotify link. Then you can send the output (link) to whoever you want. Please see their documentation if you want to tweak it to convert to another service. Lab86 is an awesome project by Jakob Langtry.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/5c214168a4af449cbdab6c7e9c95cb8f

Edit: Glad some people find this useful, also thanks for being kind!

Hi everyone,

I often find myself needing to jot down small, temporary info—like a flight gate, where I parked my car, or a quick grocery item.

Opening Notes or Reminders always felt like overkill (and I’d often forget I even wrote it down). I wanted something that lets me input text in 2 seconds and immediately see it on my Lock Screen without unlocking the phone.

So I put together a simple setup using iOS Shortcuts and a lock screen widget.

### How it works:
1. Trigger the Shortcut via Action Button, Back Tap, or a Lock Screen control button.
2. An input prompt pops up: type what you need to remember (e.g., flight details, gate, parking spot).
3. Tap “Done”, and it instantly pins to your Lock Screen.

### Setup Guide (takes < 1 min):
1. Download the app (it provides the Lock Screen widget): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/locksticky-lockscreen-watch/id6795869168
2. Get the Shortcut: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/c8eca988d5474d81b7b13f8cb77eadad
3. Add the …

1. PDF to Images

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/3de5fc78418440ad97e7c561888d2b49

As a student and a freeform user, I find this absolutely worth it.

-–

2. Images to PDF

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/deb4463d1b974768a8f9aae4ae06b088

-–

3. Countdown days for events that you select from your calendar.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/925a592a1433494ab2c6726274268d76

By default my own calendar is added, you can edit that and add your calendar.

--

4. Days until Date

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/64b08aea8ec648dbbcb27648a6f3ddc3

Same as the 3rd one.

Did you guys find any of these useful? I would love to know your use cases as well.