Elsewhat

I love coffee, but in the summer I don’t want a hot drink, even in the morning. I looked into buying a cold brew coffee brewer for $30+ dollars, but realized I could just make my own pretty much for free. I came up with this simple design which takes about 5 minutes to make. It’s so simple I almost didn’t think to share it here.

Making the Brewer

I start with 4 litre (aka 1 gallon) spring water bottles sold at almost any corner store or pharmacy. I’ve used both round and square ones. Both work, but the round ones feel a bit more stable.

I cut off the bottom of one, and the top of the other, like so:

Then I use a nail to poke a hole in the lid of the bottle, like so:

Then, on the bottle which still has its top, you put a coffee filter on the top. I usually wet it to smooth out the next step. I also remove the handle.

Then I screw on the lid with the hole in it on top. Take is slow so not to tear the filter. We’re pretty much ready to make some cold brew.

Brewing

We take the bottle half with the filter lid, and put it upside down inside the bottle bottom. See the top photo on this post.

We then put about a cup of ground coffee in the top, and then fill it with cold fresh water. Don’t stir! I find it somehow clogs the filter and stops the brew process. I don’t understand why, but I’ve had much better luck when not stirring.

The water should drip drip drip, very slowly, from the top bottle to the bottom one. You may need to experiment with the size of the punctured hole, and the thickness of the filter (two or three layers might be needed), until you have a very slow drip.

Brewing cold brew is a slow-drip process that takes a few hours. Be sure to put it somewhere safe, as having the contraption fall over would be a huge disaster. I usually leave it overnight, then (carefully) transfer to a glass storage bottle to keep in the fridge.

Ugly Gerry is a purposely ugly font, made from the truly hideous silhouettes of ugly gerrymandered U.S. voting districts.

The team is from Chicago, and after seeing how janky our Illinois 4th district had become, we became interested in this issue. . . . Its notorious earmuff shape looked like a U, then after seeing other letters on the map, the idea hit us, let’s create a typeface so our districts can become digital graffiti that voters and politicians can’t ignore.

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Via Sprezzatura

Those outside of Canada might have missed Cory Doctorow’s short podcast series Who Broke the Internet, about the “enshittification” of the internet.

In Understood: Who Broke the Internet?, Doctorow traces the downward spiral from the heady days of ’90s tech-optimism through to today’s rotten “enshitternet.” You’ll meet everyone from visionaries to villains to regular people just trying to survive in today’s online world. And you’ll discover who broke the internet — and, more importantly, a plan to fix it.

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From Information is Beautiful, via Kottke, comes a pretty amazing set of infographics showing a scene-by-scene analysis of how close “based on a true story” films match the historical record. Blue represents a good match, which red are embellishments or fabrications.

You can even click on an individual scene to read more details about it. This is a huge amount of information packed into easy-to-read graphs.

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I stumbled across this 7 year old video about making an audio visualizer out of some very basic parts. So cool and deceptively simple.

(Ex) Youtuber Tom Scott helps visualize the massive difference between a million and a billion. This video is a few years old, but does the best job of this that I’ve seen yet. You may want to fast forward.

This simple carving by Montréal-based Chloé Desjardins caught my eye by feeling incredibly light despite being made of marble.

In artist Jun Ong’s luminous installations, rays of light pierce through concrete, stone, and steel. In his ongoing Stars series features LED strips that intersect with the human-built environment in monumental, illuminated geometries.

Important to note, the above piece is on a former Buddhist temple, hence the iconography.

Though aesthetically very different, I also see echoes in this work of Gordon Matta-Clark‘s geometric works like Conical Intersect, pictured below. Both combine existing architecture with larger geometric shapes.

Yesterday I attended a talk at The Canadian Centre for Architecture given by members of HouseEurope!, an organization of architects pushing for laws which will encourage the renovation/restoration/adaptation of buildings using pre-used materials where possible as opposed to demolition and rebuilding from scratch.

They make some bold claims about the benefits of renovation:

↗︎ Renovation saves homes by keeping prices stable.
↗︎ Renovation saves jobs by boosting local markets.
↗︎ Renovation saves energy by preserving what is there.
↗︎ Renovation saves history by valuing the existing.

The organization pushes for tax and zoning reform to encourage renovation over demolition. Something we could use over here as well.