Greg Garcia’s Sprung on Amazon Prime Video is quite good. He’s the creator behind My Name is Earl and Raising Hope. If you liked those, Sprung will be right up your alley. Some familiar faces too. So good.

The Thinking Brick

I took the plunge and ordered a new Ultra Apple Watch sight unseen. I’m very excited for a new wrist computer, especially with a big orange button! Seems weird though that there’s no titanium watch band to dress it up. I guess Apple is going full tilt on the outdoor adventure lifestyle to start. The fancy matching titanium band will probably show up in the spring.

(I desperately want to make an Ultraman joke, but obviously I’m no Ultraman.)

I always wondered if someone would build a clutch-by-wire system like this where there’s a gear shift and a clutch, but not physically linked to the drivetrain. This Koenigsegg gearbox sounds like just the thing. The problem now is that we’re all switching to gear-less electric motors, so will this come to electrics too? Make ‘em feel like a Miata? I guess Dodge is going to try with the eRupt.

Holy Shift! Koenigsegg’s New Transmission Is a 6-Speed Manual *and* a 9-Speed Automatic:

"We still are in the process of developing it, but it's already crazy good. When we are done with it, I don't think anyone will be able to tell it apart from a traditional manual. That's the objective. It should feel like a mix between a Mazda Miata and a Ferrari gated shifter. The best of the two worlds."

On the occasion of a blind squirrel finding a nut.

Wordle 426 2/6
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My favorite new unix too is definitely sponge. It’s from the moreutils suite, but the easiest way to get it on your Mac is a quick brew install sponge.

You know how sed can edit a file in place? Dope, right? sponge makes it easy to do that with all the regular unix tools. If I want to fix a DOS text file by removing the carriage return, I always try doing

cat my_file.txt | tr -d "\r" > my_file.txt

But that doesn’t work because it starts writing to the file before it’s all read and a lot of times, the file ends up empty. sponge to the rescue!

cat my_file.txt | tr -d "\r" | sponge my_file.txt

sponge will read everything from standard in and then write it out to the given file, so this works like you want it to, even for big files.

Also great with jq for prettifying JSON files in place too.

The three hardest habits to break are heroin, carbs and a steady paycheck.

– Nassim Nicholas Taleb (paraphrased)

A research group out of Chicago has developed “liquid batteries”. I have no idea how the chemistry of this works, but it sounds like you could refuel an electric car a lot like you’d gas up an ICE car, and in a similar amount of time. And about a billion other applications.

Illinois Tech ‘spinout’ startup Influit Energ | EurekAlert!:

The unique high-energy density liquid format of the NEF flow batteries allows use of the same fluids in different devices, meaning fluid, charged at the recharging station from renewable energy sources or a grid, can be used to rapidly refuel vehicles, or for stationary storage and other large portable applications,” Timofeeva says. “Discharged fluid can be returned to a recharge/refuel station for recharging or be charged inside the device by plugging into the power source.

Today’s earworm…

Muppet Songs: Ernie - Rubber Duckie - YouTube:

From the New Yorker via DF, a delightful survey of comics and their water bottles. As a kid with cable, I watched a lot of standup, so I found this extremely interesting. And the presentation is molto bene – the animated magazine version of the web.

Daring Fireball: 'What's the Deal With Water Bottles?':

When I was a kid, I expected my tricorder would look like this

But it turned out like this

Which still seems weird.

Via WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR dot COM - vizreef: Yokogawa // AQ1200 Multi Field...: