Remember AOL? For a lot of folks, America Online was their first ISP, the place where they got their first exposure to the Internet, or at least a highly curated version of it. Remembered by the cool kids mainly as the place that the normies used as their ISP and for the mark of shame an “@aol.com” email address bore, the company nevertheless became a media juggernaut, to the point that “AOL Time Warner” was a thing in the early 2000s. We’d have thought the company was long gone by now, but it turns out it’s still around and powerful enough of a brand that it’s being shopped around for $1.5 billion. We’d imagine a large part of that value comes from Yahoo!, which previous owner Verizon merged with AOL before selling most of the combined entity off in 2021, but either way, it’s not chump change.

For our part, the most memorable aspect of AOL was the endless number of CDs they stuffed into mailboxes in the 90s. There was barely a day that went by that one of those things didn’t cross your path, either through the mail or in free bins at store checkouts, or even inside magazines. They were everywhere, and unless you were tempted by the whole “You’ve got mail!” kitsch, they were utterly useless; they didn’t even make good coasters thanks to the hole in the middle. So most of the estimated 2 billion CDs just ended up in the trash, which got us thinking: How much plastic was that? A bit of poking around indicates that a CD contains about 15 grams of polycarbonate, so that’s something like 30,000 metric tonnes! To put that into perspective, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is said to contain “only” around 80,000 metric tonnes of plastic. Clearly the patch isn’t 37% AOL CDs, but it still gives one pause to consider how many resources AOL put into marketing.

You want lice? Because hacking a network of smart washing machines on a college campus is how you get lice. Or at least that’s the somewhat overwrought fear after someone broke into the smart washing machines at a housing complex serving Amsterdam college students earlier in the year. The hack, which disabled the electronic payment system on the washers, was discovered in July, which seems like a strange time of year for students to be doing laundry, but whatever. The company that owns the machines finally disabled them, leaving 1,250 residents with only a couple of old coin-op machines, most of which they report are chronically out of order. That fits well with our college laundry experience, which more often than not was a waste of time and quarters, enough so that it was worth the drive home to use Mom’s machines. But what about the lice? It seems that some students are complaining that their unclean clothes are leaving them itchy and in fear of an outbreak of lice unless the laundry situation improves. So much for the hacker’s attempt to become a folk

Being an amateur radio operator, we’re always on the lookout for ham-adjacent stories, especially the increasing number where amateur allocations are being infringed upon or worse, privileges are being outright revoked. That’s why we were alarmed to see a story about amateur radio licenses being suspended in Equatorial Guinea, but it turns out that there’s a little more to the story than just anti-ham sentiment. All existing amateur licenses in the African nation were temporarily suspended thanks to the discovery of a foreign citizen who apparently illegally purchased a license and then accessed “sensitive areas” of the country. It sounds like Equatorial Guinea is pretty strict, requiring inspection of equipment and proper licensing prior to allowing radios into the country. The suspension of all licenses seems like overkill to us, especially since no apparent timeline for restoring privileges has been communicated. Separately, we’d also like to call out the article’s graphic designer for one of the worst examples of map gore we’ve ever seen.

If you write a column like this and you see a story with a title like “Jay Leno 3D prints toilet seat for Harrison Ford,” it’s really hard to resist writing it up. But as it turns out, there’s not a lot to the story, at least to those of us used to printing unobtanium parts. Jay Leno, famed for his amazing collection of antique and rare motor vehicles, has gotten into additive manufacturing in a big way, often printing parts for his restorations. Harrison Ford, on the other hand, isn’t much into 3D printing, but he does have a toilet he’s especially fond of — we can absolutely relate to this — but whose seat has seen better days. Being out of production, he couldn’t source a replacement until he remembered a visit to Jay’s garage, where he was first introduced to 3D printing. So Harrison sent the seat to Jay (eww) for reverse engineering and printing. We’d love to know a few details, such as what plastic was deemed fit for Indiana Jones’ tush. We’d also like to know which printing modality was used; we hope it wasn’t FDM, because layer lines would be pretty gross on a toilet seat.

And finally, clear your viewing calendar for this four-part series on custom bookbinding. We know, we know; bookbinding isn’t really the kind of tech we usually feature around here. But watching Dennis over at Four Keys Book Arts take a cheap book-club edition of Frank Herbert’s classic Dune and turn it into a work of art is absolutely mesmerizing. From disassembly and restoration of the original to tooling the new leather cover and applying gold leaf, every step along the way is absolute craftsmanship. Check it out; we doubt you’ll be disappointed. Enjoy!