An update on a 20-year-old story.

• MasterMilo builds a 12-metre high 360° car swing! With the help of a big team and a lot of heavy engineering. My first reaction is "I want a go on that". This is a project that can't easily be summarized in a few words, or even thumbnailed particularly well, but the first 25 seconds are a perfect demonstration. This video's in Dutch, but full English captions are available, and there are more in-depth videos about the build on his channel. (Thanks to Lars for the suggestion.)
   
• A charming vlog: kurikurinton and his wife drive a small Japanese train through the countryside! This is a good story, well told, with solid editing and presence on camera. It'll likely inspire other people to do the same — or, perhaps, to search "train driving experience" in their local area. (Thanks to kurikurinton's friend Kevin for sending this over!)
   
• Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg is the world's greatest miniature railway: not just trains and models, but roads with moving cars, ships on a tiny ocean, even an airport with planes that "take off". And in the last few years, they've built up an incredibly professional YouTube channel documenting their build process and the people behind it. That first link is just to the channel, because there's a lot to show: from a 47-minute TV report running through the whole creation of their new Monaco section, with an autonomous miniature Formula 1 race... or just the spectacle summed up in a six minute promo video. Diving deep into the channel reveals a lot more technical detail.
   

And away from the world of video:

• Thrice is an interesting daily quiz game: five questions with three clues each. It's well written, although very US-centric, and frustratingly they've built it to check the answers server-side! I think it'd be much better and faster if each answer didn't require a round-trip to their slow server, particularly when players can easily cheat by Googling anyway. But the questions are decent, and I've found myself enjoying it despite my grumbles.
   
• As the AI content apocalypse rumbles on — yes, apparently Google really did suggest that people can eat glue — Facebook has announced that they're going to train models on everyone's old posts. Some people (like me) still need a Facebook account for social or business reasons, so if you're one of them and you want to opt out of that model training, the page is here. In the UK, you only need to put a simple one-sentence message like "I object to this processing" in the "how this impacts you" box and it'll be approved. In countries with less strict privacy laws, that may not be the case!
   
• Joseph Brennan visits all the funiculars in Britain*.
   
• RIP ICQ, 1996-2024.

And finally: the last link in this week's newsletter is somewhat unique, and calls for a different kind of introduction.

Almost twenty years ago, I got in trouble with the UK government after making a parody web site of their "Preparing for Emergencies" leaflet. I told the whole story in this video, but in summary: that was the first thing I made that went properly viral. Which means that this week, a few people have sent me a link to the government's new emergency preparedness site, which is simply called "Prepare".

And I can see why people have sent it! At first glance, it looks similar. The 2004 leaflet and site, available on the Internet Archive, contained advice that was either obvious and unhelpful ("If a bomb goes off in your building, look for the safest way out.") or strangely overspecific ("wait for the emergency services to arrive and examine you and, if necessary, decontaminate you"). It was very much a post-9/11 publication, perceived as a PR exercise rather than a lifesaving exercise. Plus, it was physically printed and posted to every home in the UK.

But this new web site? It's good! A little overdramatic in its masthead, perhaps, but it's actually about emergency preparation! For example: I didn't know there were Priority Service Registers, so that people who have communication, access or safety needs can tell their water, electricity and gas providers about them. I didn't know the UK had a specific national phone number for reporting a power cut! (It's 105.) It's even got a section on coping with trauma. It's far from perfect, and I'm sure emergency responders and local volunteers will have a lot of opinions on what should be added or changed, but it seems like the intentions are in the right place this time.

And so it seems right that, if I mocked the original, then after twenty years I should at least support this latest version.

All the best,

— Tom