Swallowing a camera! a coffee experiment! and I talk about rollercoasters far too much.

• Have you ever seen soldering this close? asks Robert Feranec. No, I haven't, and I don't think I've ever seen footage from such an incredibly fancy microscope either. Even if you've never soldered in your life, watch this to see just what's possible with modern imaging technology.
   
• And talking about modern imaging technology: Adam Savage swallows a camera robot! I would absolutely have done this as a video myself if I was still posting to my old channel, but I think Adam's done a better job than I could. It's not every day you get to see the inside of someone's stomach.
   
• An update on last week's bad idea: I said that, surely, someone could do a modern-day car polo? Well, thank you to reader Malcolm for pointing out that Sri Lanka has an annual tuk tuk polo championship!
   
• I have a few thoughts about Chris Young's impossible hot and cold coffee. First of all: what a brilliant video. A story that's well told, well edited, and well paced. Chris is able to demonstrate the dish's history and his qualifications without seeming self-aggrandizing. It's a genius idea to include a collaboration with coffee expert James Hoffmann: I don't think I'd have clicked on this if I hadn't recognised James in the thumbnail. And it includes a recipe that, in theory, can be made at home with some experimentation!
  
  I realised while watching, though, that there's a couple of transition moments that seem artificial and clunky to me, like the walk up to the coffee shop near the end, or when Chris appears to go straight from a video call to a piece-to-camera. That sort of TV-style shot feels passé for an otherwise YouTube-styled video, at least to my eyes. Now, I wouldn't normally mention a small nitpick like that in the newsletter, except: I've used those transitions before! As recently as last year. Not in every video, but certainly a few times. And if my reaction to someone else using those is to go "oh, that seems weird" — well, I think it's time that I removed that particular bit of visual grammar from my work in future. ("O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!")
  
  But like I said, that's a small nitpick: Chris' coffee video is excellent and I recommend you watch it.
   

• I hadn't kept up to date with web fonts: it turns out that variable fonts have been a thing for a while! This starts as a simple and fun toy to play with: oh, cool, there are sliders for weight and width. And then you get to Roboto Flex, and there are sliders for so many things.
   
• You can buy a diamond-making machine for $200,000 on Alibaba. There's more to making diamonds than that, it's not quite that simple, but the idea of a soon-to-arrive "diamond glut" is fascinating.
   
• The Colorado Sun wins the award this week for "best clickbait title that actually delivers": Wrecked rain gauges. Whistleblowers. Million-dollar payouts and manhunts. Then a Colorado crop fraud got really crazy. 

And finally, from TikTok: Thomas the Tank Engine performed on many otamatones.

All the best,

— Tom