Here’s a story from 3DPrint.com that ticks all my boxes.

From artwork and historic buildings to monuments and other priceless artifacts, technologies like 3D scanning and 3D printing are often called on to help restore and preserve touchstones of history. A recent example is a 193-year-old sterling silver menorah that belongs to the Mollie and Louis Kaplan Museum of Judaica at Congregation Beth Yeshurun, which houses more than 700 historical pieces dating as far back as the 17th century. Made in Russia in 1827, this menorah stands almost two feet tall, and features eight hinged oil lamps in the form of lions; unfortunately, one of the lions went missing sometime in the last thirty years.

Herman Fontenot is the Business Development Manager for 3DPrint Texas, the company that was hired to do the restoration. Fontenot played running back for the Cleveland Browns from 1985-1988 and the Green Bay Packers from 1989-1990. He played longer for the Browns but I’ll claim him.

This wasn’t a simple upload an STL and print type of job. The team had to use 3D scanning to develop a base model. They had to use 3D sculpting to add fine details. They employed 3D printing to produce high resolution molds, and they used the age old lost wax casting method to pour a new silver lion. It’s a beautiful restoration.

Since we are already considering women who make stuff let’s talk about Gwynne Shotwell. She is a mechanical engineer with a long history in the aerospace industry and she is currently the COO of SpaceX. The Autodesk Fusion 360 blog recently published a profile of her and I found it interesting.

One thing they didn’t mention is how she manages to indulge Elon Musk’s fantasy while keeping him out of the day to day operations of SpaceX. We’ve all seen what a mess he can make in a company. She’s found a way to keep him involved while not allowing him to make a mess of things. There is bound to be a useful book that could be written about the interactions between those two.

Since last year I’ve worked to follow an inclusive set of blogs and twitter feeds. I was intentional about reducing the number of men I follow and added more people that aren’t roughly 40 year old white dudes. I’m glad I did. I have found so many interesting projects in the past year. I’ve had more insightful conversations. I encourage all of you to add more diversity to your feeds this year.

In that vein Becky Stern recently published a list of women makers. Becky works for Autodesk, has written numerous articles for Make Magazine, and has been featured on several podcasts, including “Cool Tools” which is one of my favorites. I think you should follow Becky’s blog and I think you should check out the amazing makers she has listed. I’m a fan of many but there were a few I didn’t know. I bet there are some you don’t know either.

I became hooked on Good Sudoku. I’ve been playing the dailies for several months. I’m better (relatively) on Classic puzzles than Good and Arcade puzzles. I was proud of myself last week. This is my best showing ever.

I have always loved the Pegasus. I couldn’t help myself when I saw these. I ordered immediately. I got them just in time for the Divisional Playoff game.

Often data is passed around in “comma separated files” (.csv). Postgresql has a function that copies this data into existing tables. Let’s imagine you have a set of employee data that you need to copy into a table.

First create the table. For the purposes of this exercise our table looks like this

CREATE TABLE employee (
  id SERIAL,
  first_name    VARCHAR(50),
  last_name     VARCHAR(50),
  date_of_birth DATE,
  email         VARCHAR(255),
  date_of_hire  DATE
  PRIMARY KEY (id)
);

The CSV file looks like this

FIRST NAME, LAST NAME, DATE OF BIRTH, EMAIL, DATE OF HIRE
John, Doe, 1970-03-31, john.doe@example.com, 2006-07-05
Jane, Doe, 1986-06-03, jane.doe@example.com, 2018-03-01

To import the file run the following while connected to your database

COPY employee
FROM ‘path_to_csv’
DELIMITER ‘,’
CSV HEADER;

It is best to use absolute paths in the FROM clause. You can change the DELIMITER if your file uses a different delimiter. For example, we often delimit file with ‘|’ because other standard delimiters are present in some of our fields. If your CSV does not include a HEADER you can omit that line.

Postgres will inform you that it completed the task above by printing COPY 2.

MacRumors commentary on a Fast Company article.

Last month, Apple introduced a new privacy section in the App Store to inform users about some of the data types that apps may collect, and whether that data is linked to them or used to track them. Developers have been required to provide this info to Apple when submitting new apps and app updates to the App Store since December 8, 2020.

Interestingly, Fast Company noticed that Google has yet to update any of its iPhone and iPad apps since Apple’s requirement went into effect, with apps like Gmail, Chrome, and YouTube having last been updated on December 7, 2020 or prior. As a result, all Google apps still say “No Details Provided” under the new privacy section in the App Store, with a notice that “the developer will be required to provide privacy details when they submit their next app update.”

I don’t find it interesting. I’m not surprised at all. I think they will wait as long as possible because this type of thing is embarrassing.

Apple should run a full page ad that’s just this :P pic.twitter.com/DTHh6FAtvZ

— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) December 17, 2020

Keyser Söze curates Thruhikes.net, a list of long hikes from around the world. If you love hiking or just pictures of great scenery you should check it out.

The New York Times reports this afternoon that,

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, has told associates that he believes President Trump committed impeachable offenses and that he is pleased that Democrats are moving to impeach him, believing that it will make it easier to purge him from the party, according to people familiar with his thinking. The House is voting on Wednesday to formally charge Mr. Trump with inciting violence against the country.

Say what you will about “Moscow” Mitch McConnell but don’t call him dumb and don’t call him weak. He’s a slick political operative. Other reports say that he is extremely angry with Trump over the recent riots. I think this was finally a bridge too far for Mitch. He has the power and he may now have the will to finish Trump. I believe Trump’s political career is over.

The United States is currently building a coast to coast bike trail from Washington D.C. to Washington state. “The Great American Rail-Trail” will stretch over 6000 km when completed. To date 3200 km are complete. The World Economic forum reports that the trail will connect more than 145 existing paths and serve more than 50 million people.