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brooksmosesToday was a rather lazy day for me, and I ended up watching a fair bit of YouTube videos. I ended up with a couple of standout things to recommend.
First, Dalibor Farný's channel. Dalibor is a young Czech entrepreneur with a rather unlikely goal: Making nixie tubes. A nixie tube is a type of vacuum tube that's used as a display; it contains plates that light up with a pleasant orange glow when provided with high voltage. (The glow looks rather like a hot filament, but it's an electrical effect instead.) The most common ones have plates in the shape of the digits 0 through 9 to provide numeric output. These were basically obsoleted by LED displays, and the last ones before Dalibor's were made in the mid-1990s.
This is a remarkably challenging process, combining labratory-grade glasswork, high vacuum, materials science, and plasma physics. Most of the details of how to get these to work well were trade secrets of companies that no longer exist, and these were the sort of thing that required dedicated teams with years of labratory time to figure out -- not usually something a small company can do. Dalibor is a pretty determined fellow, however, as well as being smart, and I believe he came into this with some of the appropriate glasswork experience as well.
One of the things that makes this particularly interesting, I think, is that Dalibor cleverly realized that the way to start making money on this at tiny-company scale is basically doing what are almost "artisan" nixie tubes. Since early production has to be mostly handcrafted, might as well make them the sort of thing people will pay handcrafted prices for -- which means also means doing custom work as well as regular production. The latest set of videos are based around a commercial-art-display commission that Dalibor's company recently took on, which involves making an 11-by-11 grid of what will be the largest nixie tubes ever made. For this, he decided to do a video log of pretty much the entire process of figuring out how to make these, and all the failures and successes along the way, rather than just doing what he described as "here's the final product and the successes that went into it" occasional videos that he'd been doing.
Another interesting thing about Dalibor is that he decided to put a little "how is my company doing" counter up on the company's website, partly to build trust but partly also because it's interesting data. It has a ticker of the number of nixie tubes they've made to date (over 10,000), the failure rate (a little under 4%), and their current 30-day income, cash balance, and days of cash remaining.
Second was the 2019 Classic Tetris World Championship -- specifically, one of the quarterfinal matches, and the finals. This had some of the energy of a good SF convention panel -- a couple of hundred people packed into a hotel convention room to watch, and typical hotel-provided tables and stage adapted for the purpose. I love that the contestants are clearly having fun despite the challenge, and the two announcers did a great job of explaining what was going on in a way that made it easy to follow the subtleties.
It was particularly entertaining that I could tell (though it took a while to notice) that the contestants could hear the announcers, and were subtly having fun with them sometimes -- there's a bit involving what are called "pushdown points" in I think the third game of the final match where one of the contestants does what I think is best described as trolling the announcers.
Another piece that I loved was how the contestants treat each other; at least in these two videos, they seem to be not only good sports, but genuinely happy for their opponent's success when they get beaten. There is a moment at the end of the finals, where the second-place contestant loses the game but the mechanics and score mean his opponent has to play out the next half-minute or so to technically get to the win -- and he's just watching with this joy on his face of watching the play, and when it's done he practically leaps out of his chair to give his winning opponent a celebratory hug and lift his fist into the air as champion.
Adding to the emotions is that the inventor of Tetris was also there as a special guest and announcer. (He has an amazing Tetris formal jacket, which is worth opening up the video just to see.)
First, Dalibor Farný's channel. Dalibor is a young Czech entrepreneur with a rather unlikely goal: Making nixie tubes. A nixie tube is a type of vacuum tube that's used as a display; it contains plates that light up with a pleasant orange glow when provided with high voltage. (The glow looks rather like a hot filament, but it's an electrical effect instead.) The most common ones have plates in the shape of the digits 0 through 9 to provide numeric output. These were basically obsoleted by LED displays, and the last ones before Dalibor's were made in the mid-1990s.
This is a remarkably challenging process, combining labratory-grade glasswork, high vacuum, materials science, and plasma physics. Most of the details of how to get these to work well were trade secrets of companies that no longer exist, and these were the sort of thing that required dedicated teams with years of labratory time to figure out -- not usually something a small company can do. Dalibor is a pretty determined fellow, however, as well as being smart, and I believe he came into this with some of the appropriate glasswork experience as well.
One of the things that makes this particularly interesting, I think, is that Dalibor cleverly realized that the way to start making money on this at tiny-company scale is basically doing what are almost "artisan" nixie tubes. Since early production has to be mostly handcrafted, might as well make them the sort of thing people will pay handcrafted prices for -- which means also means doing custom work as well as regular production. The latest set of videos are based around a commercial-art-display commission that Dalibor's company recently took on, which involves making an 11-by-11 grid of what will be the largest nixie tubes ever made. For this, he decided to do a video log of pretty much the entire process of figuring out how to make these, and all the failures and successes along the way, rather than just doing what he described as "here's the final product and the successes that went into it" occasional videos that he'd been doing.
Another interesting thing about Dalibor is that he decided to put a little "how is my company doing" counter up on the company's website, partly to build trust but partly also because it's interesting data. It has a ticker of the number of nixie tubes they've made to date (over 10,000), the failure rate (a little under 4%), and their current 30-day income, cash balance, and days of cash remaining.
Second was the 2019 Classic Tetris World Championship -- specifically, one of the quarterfinal matches, and the finals. This had some of the energy of a good SF convention panel -- a couple of hundred people packed into a hotel convention room to watch, and typical hotel-provided tables and stage adapted for the purpose. I love that the contestants are clearly having fun despite the challenge, and the two announcers did a great job of explaining what was going on in a way that made it easy to follow the subtleties.
It was particularly entertaining that I could tell (though it took a while to notice) that the contestants could hear the announcers, and were subtly having fun with them sometimes -- there's a bit involving what are called "pushdown points" in I think the third game of the final match where one of the contestants does what I think is best described as trolling the announcers.
Another piece that I loved was how the contestants treat each other; at least in these two videos, they seem to be not only good sports, but genuinely happy for their opponent's success when they get beaten. There is a moment at the end of the finals, where the second-place contestant loses the game but the mechanics and score mean his opponent has to play out the next half-minute or so to technically get to the win -- and he's just watching with this joy on his face of watching the play, and when it's done he practically leaps out of his chair to give his winning opponent a celebratory hug and lift his fist into the air as champion.
Adding to the emotions is that the inventor of Tetris was also there as a special guest and announcer. (He has an amazing Tetris formal jacket, which is worth opening up the video just to see.)