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Though it might look like some sort of condom testing or water balloon making, what you’re actually looking at is bologna being made. The natural casing gets fitted over a stuffing horn and filled with a meat mixture of beef, pork and seasoning. It’s then smacked with a spike and smoked until it comes out looking veiny and alive. Pretty cool (gross), right!
The path to Columbus Startup Week started with JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s regional office in Denver.
Columbus is one of six cities where Chase is lead sponsor to kick off a national expansion of the weeklong entrepreneurial conference. Other U.S. and international markets will follow with different sponsors. In Columbus, about 70 featured speakers, panel discussions and pitch events are set for May 4-8.
“It hopefully will open eyes to folks who might be drawn to a session or a keynote who otherwise…
via Columbus Business News – Local Columbus News | Business First of Columbus
Here’s why JPMorgan Chase brought Startup Week to Columbus
(PG-13 Language) The Avengers take on The Justice League in this ridiculously over the top cosplay battle from the guys at RackaRacka. Despite Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark’s wonderful toys, the Hulk’s fist is still our favorite weapon.
via The Awesomer
Marvel vs. DC: Fight!
Samsung carries the day—no one else controls the whole manufacturing vertical.
via Ars Technica
From The Wirecutter: The best consumer-grade SSD (for most people)
Down a stretch of country road in upstate New York there is a shed. The shed itself is nothing spectacular, a whitewash number with years of weathering. But inside sparks fly, fires breathe, and slabs of steel are fashioned into capable killing machines. This is Odinblades, a grimy shrine to the ancient art of swordmaking.
And it’s also where John Lundemo, a 58-year-old blacksmith, spends his days.
Ask any sword seller in the NYC area about Lundemo and they’ll most likely know, and sell, his work. Sword forums, filled with buyers, sellers, and makers, sing his praises. People who’ve wielded his blades say they look and feel natural, like they were grown out of the ground. He’s one of the best swordmakers in the northeast, and a contender for the most talented in the entire country. But every work of steel starts right here at Odinblades, an homage to his own Norwegian heritage.
“I was throwing out some encyclopedias that had gotten all moldy, and I was thumbing through them and this picture of Odin came up—the helmet, the wings, the ravens on his shoulder,” Lundemo says. “He was just the coolest…and that’s how I got it.”
The dungeon-esque workspace is like an eccentric house of horrors with whirring grinding wheels and fire-breathing forges next to a Ricky Martin poster, a Ludwig drumkit, guitars, amps, and various Christian iconography. It’s far removed, what some would call “the middle of nowhere,” but that’s how Lundemo likes it. Things tend to get noisy.
“I saw this place, and I knew it was perfect,” Lundemo says. “I can crank up the noise in here. I can run machinery all night if I want. I can sand all night in here…I don’t have any neighbors. It’s perfect.”
Viking longswords, horsechoppers, samurai-style blades. Whatever custom sword you want, Lundemo will make—with a few exceptions. No fictional or historical replicas, so leave your Game of Thrones Ice blueprint at home. All of his swords are his own creations pulled from historical reference and customer specifications. Hilts may be a little longer, or blades a little bigger, but they’re all fully functioning cutting machines.
Every blade begins from a slab of metal. Lundemo cuts out the general shape and grinds it to perfection.
Then the fun begins.
He begins with a process called “normalizing,” where he heats the blade in the forge. This straightens the steel grain so the sword has a uniform hardness. Once the steel is a nice burnt orange, Lundemo perilously drops it into a vat of peanut oil cooking near 400 or 5oo degrees, releasing a burst of flames. This is called a “heat treat” or “quench.” After a few moments, he pulls the sword out of the vat, now a dark charcoal black and smoking. Then Lundemo has about 90 seconds to align the blade just right with a straightening tool. He sets the blade aside and lets it cool.
He repeats this process, called “tempering,” a couple more times, lowering the temperature each time. After that the sword is sanded, and sometimes depending on the make, dipped into a vat of acid to create a “blade pattern,” or hamon, on the sword itself. At last, the blade is attached to the hilt or grip—and there you go. You’ve got a sword.
Unfortunately, the sword-buying market isn’t what it used to be. Lundemo is so quick to sell every blade he makes, he doesn’t even own a sword himself. He represents an old guard of blacksmiths, many of whom have retired or passed away. Some blacksmiths who work for competing workshops have even apprenticed under Lundemo. But the real threat to making a living off custom-made swordmaking is foreign markets creating dressed-up inferior weapons at a low-cost. And for a customer that’s usually searching online and for the best price—it’s hard to sell quality through pixels on a screen.
As a swordmaker who’s spent more than 30 years perfecting his craft, Lundemo never had a teacher. Trial-and-error was his textbook. He started as a jewelry maker in New Mexico and soon became fascinated with swords after watching the Hammer film Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter. After taking up sword fighting himself, he thought he could make better weapons.
“We used to use steel blunts for our swordfighting, and naturally you’d bang them together they’re not going to last forever,” Lundemo says. “I didn’t know about balance, and I didn’t know about heat treating. I was making swords for so many years before even knowing any of that stuff. I was basically swinging around big metal crowbars. It took a long time to learn that stuff. That didn’t happen overnight.”
What didn’t happen overnight, actually took many years. Today, Odinblades, and his own semi-custom shop Longship Armoury, makes swords that sell around the world, from one to several thousand dollars each. Although the US used to be the biggest market, many Odinblades find their way on the other side of the Pacific, mostly in China where buyers are rediscovering their cultural heritage.
“It’s been hard for me,” Lundemo says. A fire a couple years back nearly destroyed his workshop and everything in it, putting him out of work for almost half a year. Sword buying and renaissance festivals aren’t as lucrative as they use to be. But watching him dance among his medieval machinery, boisterously toiling away on one of his many lethal works of art, his enthusiasm is infectious. He doesn’t explain his love for swordmaking in flowery language about preserving history or some forgotten art, it’s simply “what he knows.”
Before leaving Lundemo’s rusted palace of cold steel and the old ways of war, the blacksmith shows off his wares. A five-foot-long horse chopper is destined for a buyer overseas and half a dozen other swords eagerly await future owners. Lundemo grab a long sword with ornate designs near the hilt, etched in dark steel, with brown leather wrappings. It’s the first blade Lundemo made near 3 decades ago, a Conan the Barbarian look alike. He laughs at its crudity, pointing out the number of rivets in the handle, and puts the sword back in the case among the rest.
He’s come a long way. He’s got the scars and the skill to prove it.
Video and GIFs by Michael Hession
via Gizmodo
Inside the Fiery Workshop of a 21st Century Swordmaker
Nostalgia is a powerful force, but we live in a world where some memories are re-livable thanks to the Internet. Nothing really gets deleted from the Web, so from photos of last week’s vacation on Facebook to learning world history, the past is accessible to all. Today, we’re going to go back in time and play some games that you might have enjoyed while in elementary school. Since most of these titles are at least 20 years old, they’ve become publicly available. Some are clones of the originals, but there’s something here for everyone who enjoyed an educational game during free…
Read the full article: Remember Those Computer Games from School? Play Them Now for Free
via MakeUseOf
Remember Those Computer Games from School? Play Them Now for Free
Saw this posted on a Facebook Gun Group. Geco is a German ammo manufacturer. They made this gorgeous 3D animated video to showcase their 9mm match ammo called Hexagon.
The post 3D Animation Of Bullet appeared first on The Firearm Blog.
Here’s the teaser for the new hacker television series Mr. Robot that took the South by Southwest Film Festival by storm earlier this year. It’s sort of like a darker version of Hackers, with a tormented geek hero named Elliot who is tempted by Anonymous-like forces of chaos.
Audiences who saw it at SXSW say it dramatizes Elliot’s struggle to figure out how to make a difference in the world using his technical skills. He’s got a couple of friends, including his therapist and a childhood pal named Angela — and his connection to them keeps him centered. But things get more complicated when he meets a shady guy (Christian Slater, in full Christian Slater mode) who is part of fsociety, a kind of amalgam of Anonymous, Wikileaks and 4chan. Basically they hate humanity and want to bring it all down.
What makes Mr. Robot sound intriguing is that its main character is so compelling, which is key for a psychological thriller. Hard to say whether the hacking in this show is going to be CSI: Cyber awful or on the level of the pretty-damn-good Person of Interest.
We’ll let you know this summer — the show will debut on June 24 on the USA network.
Contact the author at annalee@gizmodo.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: CA58 326B 1ACB 133B 0D15 5BCE 3FC6 9123 B2AA 1E1A
via Gizmodo
This New Series About Hacking Could Actually Be Amazing
(PG-13: Language) Last Week Tonight talks about patent trolls. These ghost companies buy patents – usually vague patents about software – but don’t actually make any products. Instead, they make money by suing businesses.
via The Awesomer
LWT: Patents