🎉Hi 2023, Make Roman Concrete, and Wild Coffee Machines

Coffee time!

Jan 02, 2023

Hey friends!

Hope you’re enjoying these first few days of 2023. Do you have any big new years resolutions?

Last year - I had some pretty big ambitions, so I’m going to quench those into the following semi-realistic resolutions.

Get to 5K subscribers this year
Start creating TikToks + YT videos
Release a paid plan
Finish this massive mindmap of all the Land of Random links I’ve shared since I started this newsletter back in 2019.

Oh yeah - it’s a doozy. I’m already at 400 links - and I’m still in August of 2020. I’ve spend over 20 hours on this - and I still have probably another 40 hours of link inputting to go.

Based on the average of 15 links that I share per newsletter - I expect to add somewhere between 700 - 1500 more links to this Kinopio board.

For those of you who may say “ y u no automate this” It’s quite useful for me to go back through my links - especially as I find the dead ones - and remember what they used to be.

Here’s a screenshot. I can’t even zoom out in Kinopio to show you the whole thing.

Anyway, I hope you and your family are doing well. The Arctic blast across America was pretty bad last week - especially in places like Buffalo, NY.

A lot of sicknesses have been going around too - our kids are finally better after a month of sniffles and coughs.

I had some weird cough/ache thing last week - did any of you get that?

I’m still coughing like I’ve got the plague or something. Other than that I feel fine.

Hope you don’t catch it from anyone!

Oh! A friend of mine is working on developing a game. It has some really cool adventure vibes, and the graphics are delightful! He just released the demo - Check out Kingdom Forfeit here.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

🥳Hi 2023

Ah! So 2023 is here. What sort of adventures do we have to look forward to this year on the internet?

Media

Well, for one - Atomic Heart FINALLY comes out this year.

The Day Before comes out this year - and we get to find out if it’s any good (if you’re partial to this theory).

Not to mention - Dead Island 2 after so many delays.

The Last of Us TV show comes out this month.

THEN - we get Cocaine Bear (about the legendary bear who ate cocaine and became mega bear)

Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse, anddddd the new Indiana Jones movie.

Tech

2023 will be the year when we see a lot of crypto / NFT projects mature or die. I’m just in “watch mode” with all of my projects - seeing which ones will make it or not.

Solana is crashing, the market is down, and FTX wiped a lot of consumer sentiment out of the crypto space.

We’re back in bear market crypto mode - which is a good thing because we get to see which crypto projects are gonna make it.

Of all the “newer” crypto projects, I think Polygon is gonna be at the top of the pile - especially withestablished players like Starbucks now using it.

I think we’re gonna see AI apps explode too - we’ve already gotten a taste of this with Lensa and Meitu.

New apps like Wand are going to get popular. Everyone’s gonna be playing with AI apps powered by GPT3, Stable Diffusion, etc.

People are using it to draft messages to send to potential dates on dating apps.

Or how about cover letters for jobs?

It’s definitely already helping the no-coThe de space. You’ve probably seen stories like these.

Jeremiah Tiews @jctiews

Was looking for a counter widget for my site but didn’t want to pay $6/month. Asked ChatGPT to do it in HTML and immediately got 25 lines of code and I easily copied and pasted it into my site. I know nothing about coding. Crazy.

AI has finally gone mainstream - now the question is - how does it fit into our workflow? I’m curious to see what happens in 2023 with AI apps.

What kind of stuff are you most excited for in 2023? Let me know in the chat or comments!

Join David Nichols’s subscriber chat

Available in the Substack app and on web

🧱Make Roman Concrete

Roman concrete is one of the most incredible inventions in history.

Look no further than the ancient Roman seawalls WHICH STILL REMAIN TO THIS DAY.

Standing strong against millions of ocean waves over the past 2,000 years - it’s mind boggling that they still remain.

Around A.D. 79, Roman author Pliny the Elder wrote in his Naturalis Historia that concrete structures in harbors, exposed to the constant assault of the saltwater waves, become “a single stone mass, impregnable to the waves and every day stronger.” He wasn’t exaggerating. While modern marine concrete structures crumble within decades, 2,000-year-old Roman piers and breakwaters endure to this day and are stronger now than when they were first constructed. University of Utah geologist Marie Jackson studies the minerals and microscale structures of Roman concrete as she would a volcanic rock. She and her colleagues have found that seawater filtering through the concrete leads to the growth of interlocking minerals that lend the concrete added cohesion. (source)

You know 100 years ago people read what Pliny said and were like WATT.

Makes you think twice about all the stuff Herodotus said, right????????

Anyway - how does Roman concrete get made?

Romans made concrete by mixing volcanic ash with lime and seawater to make a mortar, and then incorporating into that mortar chunks of volcanic rock, the “aggregate” in the concrete. The combination of ash, water, and quicklime produces what is called a pozzolanic reaction, named after the city of Pozzuoli in the Bay of Naples. The Romans may have gotten the idea for this mixture from naturally cemented volcanic ash deposits called tuff that are common in the area, as Pliny described. (source)

Pretty cooool stuff.

I wonder how many iterations the Romans had to go through to discover just how strong their concrete was?

Our modern concrete - also known as “Portland concrete” doesn’t work so well. In seawater - it only lasts about 50 years!1

There’s certainly an argument to be made that we should use Roman concrete techniques for some applications in our world - at least when it comes to building anything that touches seawater.

And - you can make your OWN roman concrete if you want to. Here’s the tutorial. I found this video via a post by Open Culture.

Interested in learning more about Roman concrete? Check out more at the links!

Secrets of Ancient Roman Concrete

How Seawater Strengthens Roman Concrete

Oh you really want to deep dive?

☕Wild Coffee Machines

COFFEEE - the fuel that drives me each day.

Well, at least the first cup. I don’t drink as much coffee as I used to. I used to drink four cups a day - now I only drink one or two.

My Walmart coffee pot has served me faithfully for several years - but I do often fantasize about getting a “fancy” coffee pot.

And THAT is when I saw the ad for the Terra Kaffe.

It’s minimalist, has a screen . . .

Look at it. It’s beautiful - and it can make lattes, espresso, drip coffee, lattes . . .

It can hold milk . . .

Oh - and it can grind your beans too!

It’s truly an “all in one” coffee marvel.

The catch is that it’s an eye-watering $995.

Here - check it out at the link.

Terra Kaffe

This machine got me thinking - what other kind of cool coffee machines can I find?

Check this one out

THAT’S a sick looking coffee machine if I’ve ever seen one.

I could be wrong, but I feel like I saw a retro version of this in Home Alone last week.

Check it out here.

Moccamaster

Now - here’s a super retro coffee machine

Look at this thing. It’s absolutely a coffee conversation piece for a party.

Oh would you like a cup of coffee from my alchemy coffee pot?

Apparently, it makes a good cup of coffee according to the Amazon reviews.

It only makes a few small cups of coffee - so it might be solely an “after-dinner” coffee machine.

Check it out!

Alchemy Coffee

🐙The Land of Random

It’s time for the randommmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Charlie Brown in the Apocalypse

I’ve seen a lot of apocalyptic takes - but I’ve NEVER seen one like this.

Charlie Brown's Wasteland

Relive Windows 95

IN WINDOWS 11. IT’S A SKIN BUT IT’S AWESOME

I WANT IT

PicoSynth

This delightful little tool will let you make synth loops and beats. It’s a “Name your own price” tool, so you can get it for free. It’s a pretty fun 8 bit tool - and I had to go start reading about synths to even understand how it works. It has a bit of a learning curve - but it’s incredibly cool! A lot of love and work went into creating this.

PicoSYNTH

Simulate Electrical Hardware in Your Browser

Want to build some electronics, but want to get a vibe for the experience before putting down cold hard cash? You can build em with this cool 3D simulator! It’s one of the coolest tools I’ve seen in a while!

With Diode

Country Heavy Metal

I’m always trying to find new genres . . . . and I recently stumbled on COUNTRY METAL. I had no idea this genre existed! There’s music videos too. Here’s a Blake Shelton cover as an example.

FIND THAT MEME

Memes are awesome - don’t you wish there was a way to discover new ones at the type of a keyword? Discover new ones from this meme search engine. There’s over 17 million indexed!

Find that Meme