Flamingo Luxury Safety Matches

I very much like the design of this matchbox.

feediary

Another RSS reader designed with privacy in mind.

Buying a washing machine from the Co-op

We recently had to buy a new washing machine. We bought a Beko machine from the Co-op. It was not as smooth a process as one might hope.

I’m in half a mind to write up a frustrating experience trying to arrange a redelivery with Royal Mail.

Private by Default

I want Feedbin to be the opposite of Big Social. I think people should have the right not to be tracked on the Internet and Feedbin can help facilitate that.

The Secrets of the Wave Pilots

For thousands of years, sailors in the Marshall Islands have navigated vast distances of open ocean without instruments. Can science explain their method before it’s lost forever?

A pre-history of weeknotes, plus why I write them and perhaps why you should too (Week 16)

Tokyo’s Long Lines Lead to Magic (and Life-Changing Ramen)

There’s a phrase in Japanese for places like this⎯gyouretsu no dekiru mise: “restaurants that have very long lines.” The lines are often self-fulfilling prophecies: The wait isn’t part of the cost, as I’d always considered it; to a Japanese person, it’s part of the value.

/via @janchip

Why does it take so long to mend an escalator?

There are 409 escalators on the London Underground. At present about 95 per cent of them are operational at any one time. Statistics come with a whiff of smoke and a flash of mirrors. Numbers are a distraction when the grind of a necessary escalator is silenced. They do, however, tell you that one dead escalator in twenty is more of a nuisance than you would have guessed, and they put what is demanded of public-service escalators into focus.