“Opening locks” might not sound like scintillating social media content, but Trevor McNally has turned lock-busting into online gold. A former US Marine Staff Sergeant, McNally today has more than 7 million followers and has amassed more than 2 billion views just by showing how easy it is to open many common locks by slapping, picking, or shimming them.
This does not always endear him to the companies that make the locks.
On March 3, 2025, a Florida lock company called Proven Industries released a social media promo video just begging for the McNally treatment. The video was called, somewhat improbably, “YOU GUYS KEEP SAYING YOU CAN EASILY BREAK OFF OUR LATCH PIN LOCK.” In it, an enthusiastic man in a ball cap says he will “prove a lot of you haters wrong.” He then goes hard at Proven’s $130 model 651 trailer hitch lock with a sledgehammer, bolt cutters, and a crowbar.
When I was in high school, my teacher once told us a crazy story. When he started teaching in Northern England in the late 1970s, he and the other teachers would often talk in the break room about how their students seemed to be getting dumber every year. It was so strange — the kind of thing you might say with a worried laugh but no explanation. Smart primary schoolers turned into middle schoolers that just didn’t get things.
Years later, he connected the dots: the school was at the bottom of a hill, in a little valley, and the playground right by the busy main road. All the exhaust fumes pooled and hung in the air there. And these were the 1970s: literally all the gasoline was leaded.1 This was lead poisoning. Over the years, the children were getting brain damage.
Nobody knew. There was no pediatric lead testing.2 Later pilot studies in Birmingham, Manchester, and Glasgow would eventually confirm this: children were found to have average blood lead levels of 3-5x the safe maximum. Just imagine what the severe cases looked like.
This story has stuck with me. It features the shocking and tragic loss of healthy lives — condemned to live in functional disability — brought about by many well-intentioned people doing their best, trusting that the status quo is safe and normal. But it often isn’t — what you hope and trust to be fine is secretly killing you.
The world has come a long way on this. Standards have improved substantially: houses are no longer being built with asbestos, lead paint is no longer permitted (though chances are your house has some), public water is mostly clean, and so forth. But better codes don’t go all the way: if the municipal water is fine but my house’s pipes are made of lead, that’s still a big problem. If mold is silently growing in my walls, nobody’s looking out for that — I’m on my own.
And there are new dangers. Globalization means a world where nobody knows what’s in anything anymore because the supply chains are so complex, the financial incentives are to bring the costs down as much as possible, and when something is full of poison, you have no recourse. Somehow we wound up with steaks from Whole Foods being chock-full of BPAs — yes, even meat has microplastics!3 And regardless of whether you shop on Amazon or at Restoration Hardware, pretty much everything4 is sourced & manufactured far outside your control.
Is the furniture I sit in every day made with harmful substances? I don’t know. Are my plates, pots, and pans safe to eat from? No clue.5 And if they aren’t, there’s no way for me to assert my rights or collect a single penny from some faceless factory in Cambodia. If you think there’s any kind of quality control, there’s zero — nothing is getting inspected. Every nine months it turns out my protein powder contains heavy metals.The border can’t even stop counterfeit Rolexes from getting through, and the bar for listing a product on Amazon is the floor.6 I am sorry to say that for consumers, the buck stops with no-one but you. And your position is totally helpless.
Two years ago, I kept seeing these ads on the NYC subway. It’s so crazy: in one of the wealthiest cities on the planet, babies eating from lead-contaminated glassware is so pervasive a problem that a private company has to step up to do basic quality control.
NYC babies are not the only ones silently getting their IQs nuked because of careless manufacturers. Afghan children probably have the catastrophically highest levels of blood lead — even in the diaspora abroad — because virtually all the manufacturers of traditional Afghan cookpots were using lead-contaminated metals. Even when this was found out, it took Amazon over a year to take down the listings for the damn things. The level of public harm is off-the-charts. Chances are you don’t own one of these, but when’s the last time you might have eaten in a restaurant that does?
The problem is so overwhelming that you almost can’t engage it. There’s just too much stuff to check on your own. This is catnip for neurotic Type-As. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you try to fix it. And, in fairness, none of these hazards are big and likely enough on their own to warrant your deep-dive attention. It’s in aggregate that they’re impactful: in your life, most risk factors aren’t an issue at all, but there’s probably something that needs to be found out and fixed. The only solution is to delegate it to a third party that you can trust to do a really thorough job. Only a business with this as its core competency is capable of the breadth and depth required for this Herculean task.
In Germany, there’s a popular nonprofit which tests consumer goods for safety and publishes the results. When I was a baby, my mom followed their publications, and only bought the baby foods, diapers, etc. that had been deemed high-quality. Those ratings alone directed many thousands of dollars of high-margin spend for her. Consumer goods are as big as markets get, parents are willing to spend virtually any amount of money for the benefit of their children, and the product scope is endless. There’s going to be a generational company that uncompromisingly creates trust and will charge a hefty premium for never breaking that trust. Providing infallible peace of mind is the strongest of moats.
I am seeing the latent demand. Technology is empowering citizen scientists: consumers are taking charge of their health. They’re buying Whoop,7Mira, Levels, Eight Sleep, Nucleus, Ezra, Function, etc. to understand their bodies, optimize their health, and catch potential issues way ahead of time. They’re starting to want things like Blueprint, where the manufacturer is staking their credibility on the work they’ve done to own the whole supply chain.
Soon the penny will drop with the public: health is not just about your body, but about your environment. People are starting to pay attention toair quality.8 They’re realizing that the “premium” consumer brands are full of microplastics. They’re waking up to the fact that life can and should feel better. Everyone wakes up congested, everyone gets headaches, everyone gets a rash sometimes — but these “normal” experiences are your body telling you that something is wrong. It’s just so common that it’s normalized. And so many health outcomes that people talk about in terms of luck are actually deterministic, but people gloss over there being causality at work.9 The problem is large. And we have the science to do better.
Health is the final frontier. The idea of luxury was once conferred by design, materials, and manufacturing — but today, even the highest-end goods are now instantly replicated for pennies on the dollar. The question that remains is what lurks inside: the peace-of-mind escape from hidden hazards is not just necessary, but offers infinite optimization.
This will be a big business. It has been on my mind for many years now. I’ve seen all the startups that have taken a stab here — Yuka, Oasis, Tap Score, you name it. But while I admire their missions, I don’t think anyone’s historically gotten this right as a business. Now I’ve finally met the right founders taking the right approach: empowering people as citizen scientists, and taking on the big task of monitoring for and remediating hazards at home. This is very important to me, and I am excited to help them succeed. If this mission sounds interesting to you, email me at contact@johnloeber.com and I’ll put you in touch.
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Despite this history, the UK, unlike the US, to this day does not perform pediatric blood lead testing. In the UK, testing is only done on “specific suspicion of exposure.”
Not to mention the cases when there is actual fraud in the supply chain: take all the cases of olive oil fraud, where the real thing is diluted by low-quality oils. This kind of scam is especially heartbreaking because it specifically takes advantage of people paying a premium to take care of their health, and then they the carcinogen cocktail instead.
Seriously. Go to Target or Walmart or any other trusted, main-street retailer: the six-letter nonsense brand names, signatures of factories in China going direct, are everywhere. How trustworthy are these products?
I once looked into manufacturing and selling a niche nutritional supplement on Amazon. I hired some lawyers with FDA experience who informed me that I could make pretty much whatever I wanted, that nobody checks anything, and if enough consumers complain then maybe the FDA will send me a letter telling me to stop and then it’s time to take down the product. I was shocked, and did not proceed.
There’s an obvious nod to carcinogenesis here, but I often wonder how much of children being “gifted” or not comes down to actually being born smarter versus just escaping their first few years of childhood without a dose of neurotoxins.
Once I wrote a blog essay titled Seven, Ace, Queen, Two, Eight, Three, Jack, Four, Nine, Five, King, Six, Ten. It was about a “magic” card trick. Magic trick. Take a deck of cards face down. Move the top card to the bottom, then deal the new top card face-up on the table. Repeat this process until all the cards are dealt. And — abracadabra — the cards come out in perfect order!
If you want to perform this trick with one suit, the title of that earlier post tells you exactly how to stack your deck.
In the fall of 2023, I gave this trick as a homework problem to my STEP students. The result? We ended up writing a 40-page paper, Card Dealing Math, now available on the arXiv. At one point, we seriously considered calling it The Art of the Deal, but decided against it.
In the homework version, the deck consisted of cards from a single suit, but we generalized it to a deck of N cards labeled 1 through N. The dealing process we studied is called under–down dealing: you alternate between placing one card under the deck and then dealing the next one face-up. It’s very similar to down–under dealing, where you start by dealing the first card instead. These two patterns are often, unsurprisingly, called the Australian dealings.
The under-down dealing turns out to be mathematically equivalent to the Josephus problem. In that famous ancient problem, people are arranged in a circle, and you repeatedly skip one person and execute the next (much grimmer than playing with cards). The classic question asks: given N people, who survives? In our card context, this corresponds to asking where the card labeled N ends up in the prepared deck.
More generally, the Josephus problem can ask the following question. If we number the people in a circle 1 through N, in what order are they eliminated? In our research, we flipped the question around: how should we number the people in the circle so that they’re eliminated in increasing order?
Naturally, we couldn’t stop there. We explored several other dealing patterns, discovered delightful mathematical properties, and along the way added 44 new sequences to the OEIS. The funnest part? We also invented a few brand-new card tricks.
What was home video gaming like in the early 1980’s? You might consider picturing things like the Atari 2600 or the Intellivision, and those were certainly a big part of it. But another big part were the category I’ll call segmented-display games; portable systems like the Game & Watch, but also more stationary “portable arcade” machines. And in the United States, no name in home mini-arcades was bigger than that of the Connecticut Leather Company, or if you’re a friend, Coleco.
The Coleco Mini-Arcade line were a big deal. In 1982, Electronic Games magazine reported that Coleco was reporting initial advance sales orders of over 4 million for the first four games in its series alone, with 1.5 million units of Pac-Man sold already. Note that at the time of this article two of those four games weren’t even out yet, and even more were added later on. Four million units is more than consoles like the ColecoVision or the Sega SG-1000, nothing to sneeze at.
The technology most of these used were vacuum flourescent displays. These are pretty nice-looking and give off their own light, but beyond that are segmented displays similar to LCD watches (or Game & Watches, spoiler) of the same time period. You might be more familiar with them on stereo equipment, like my 1986 Technics SL-PJ33 CD player.
By the way, did you know many of these are in MAME now? Here’s Donkey Kong. It even includes a form of the rivet stage; is it really a worse way to play Donkey Kong than, say, the Atari 2600 version? And at the time of this writing, segmented display versions of Pac-Man like that 1.5 million-seller are still available today for next-day delivery on monopolistic internet marketplaces. (Not an affiliate link, so go use someone else’s and give them money) Evidently, this is “CLASSIC PAC-MAN AT IT’S BEST”.
So I decided I had to get one of these Colecos.
Donkey Kong Jr.
I decided to go for Donkey Kong Jr., also known as Donkey Kong Junior. After all, my Donkey Kong Jr. arcade PCB is still converted to instead play Hero in the Castle of Doom.
And I have to say I love the look of the Donkey Kong Junior tabletop here. With the pastel aesthetic and its large size, it really stands out on a shelf. Not to imply all the stuff I buy just sits on shelves. I play games a lot, really!
The aesthetic continues on the front. I think the looks were a big part of the appeal of the Coleco tabletops; it’s a substantial-looking machine with arcade-like decorations. Sure, you’re playing a game on a segmented display of the sort used mostly for basic seven-segments numerics, but the experience is everything around it, with the joystick, the large jump button, and yes, the cabinet art.
So why don’t we turn on the game? Well, you see, the game is already on. I’ve fallen for a trick again; unlike Coleco’s Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, or any of the others, this isn’t a VFD display at all! Indeed, it’s lit by a translucent panel on the back of the machine; you need to have some sort of light source hitting it.
And that might sound familiar. Like something else we’ve seen on this blog before; something else that can also play some kind of game called Donkey Kong Jr.– the Game & Watch Panorama Series.
Coleco turned to Nintendo themselves to make this machine. It’s differently shaped than the other Coleco home arcades and not VFD because it’s just a rebadged and recolored version of Nintendo’s Game & Watch Tabletop game Donkey Kong Jr. (If you want to play it for yourself, there’s a pretty decent recreation on Itch.)
And that’s not a bad thing!
As I noted on the Panorama Screen article, this is actually one of the best-looking games out there. And the Tabletop form factor makes it look even better; let’s put this behind some sunlight.
That might be a little too much color. But it shows the point– this isn’t the crude shapes of the VFD games; this is a full-color art. It also shows that the game here is the same as the panorama screen. Look at my previous article for more details, Nintendo made no less than three LCD games out of Donkey Kong Jr., and this one reflects some of the gameplay elements of stage 2 of the arcade, adapted for a horizontal screen.
The tabletop form factor also lets us get a really good view of the colorization sheet mounted at an angle.
By the way, take a closer look at the control panel.
Why is that one button labeled ‘ACL’? The manual notes that it’s the button used to reset the time, and will also reset your high scores, but doesn’t say more than that, like why it’s called that.
Well, the Game & Watch titles, tabletop and panorama included, used a Sharp 4-bit microprocessor. Let’s take a look at the manual to see if it can find any clues. It turns out it’s “Auto CLear”, and we even see a possible circuit for using it to reset.
This gives some clues to how the program works; it boots up in time-setting mode. As a Game & Watch, it never turns off; the high score is only remembered because the low-power microprocessor keeps its RAM always charged. 128 4-bit words of RAM (64 bytes), even. The only way left to change that is to reset it, which also causes it to initialize the RAM again.
You might wonder now about the Soviet Game & Watch I covered a few years ago. While Egg/Mickey Mouse, part of the Wide Screen series, did have buttons labeled “ALARM” and “ACL” just like Donkey Kong Junior here, the Soviet clone used icons instead. A notable improvement, I’d say.
But… why?
There is something interesting here. The Coleco Tabletop arcades, as I noted, were quite successful for their time. But the Game & Watch Tabletops, on the other hand, were flops– the Panorama Screen was introduced to try to give the line some surviving form. I can’t find any precise sales numbers, but judging by eBay sales, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Coleco version of Donkey Kong Junior substantially outsold its Nintendo-branded version.
Image from Wikimedia Commons, copyright Xabi Vazquez. CC-BY-2.0, scaled and cropped but not otherwise altered.
So why might that be? Well, there’s a few things to keep in mind here. The first was that Coleco in the early 1980’s was a titan of the toy industry, with a huge marketing budget. What else were they putting out in 1982? A little line of dolls called Cabbage Patch Kids. This was a company at their peak. (Which certainly wouldn’t burn itself out in just a few years!) Meanwhile, Nintendo, despite its various dalliances, was much smaller in the toy business, especially outside of Japan.
Secondly, I think how these were marketed played a big role. Coleco aggressively marketed its tabletop machines with one goal in mind: this was how you could play the big-name arcade video games in your home. The game titles were licensed big names like Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Frogger, and Galaxian, and the VFD games attempted to simulate those, with surprisingly decent success considering.
Nintendo, meanwhile, treated tabletops as a larger version of their portable on-the-go line, relying on non-video game licenses like Snoopy and Popeye. Donkey Kong Jr. was the most arcade-like of the bunch (and diverged from its source material significantly); Mario’s Cement Factory didn’t share gameplay with any other game with Mario. These failed to capture the arcade-at-home market Coleco targeted, and were too bulky to hit the gaming-on-the-go sweet spot of other Game & Watch titles. (Panorama fixed that, which is probably why that line lasted longer)
Really, though, we all know it’s because Nintendo didn’t include that beautiful pastel side art.
While we use a lot of CAD tools, many of us are fans of Tinkercad — especially for working with kids or just doing something quick. But many people dislike having to work across the Internet with their work stored on someone’s servers. We get it. So does [CommonWealthRobotics], which offers CaDoodle. It is nearly a total clone of Tinkercad but runs on Windows, Linux, Mac, or even Chrome OS.
Is it exactly Tinkercad? No, but that’s not always a bad thing. For example, CaDoodle can work with Blender, FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, and more. However, on the business end, it sure looks like the core functions of Tinkercad.
The program appears fairly new, so you have to make some allowances. For example, the Linux AppImage seems to have difficulty loading plugins (which it needs to import many of its file formats). In addition, on at least some systems, you have to resize the window after it starts, or it won’t respond. But, overall, it is pretty impressive. The Settings, by the way, has a checkbox for advanced features, and there are some other goodies there, too.
One reason we found this interesting is that we sometimes go into schools, and they don’t want us to have kids on the Internet. Of course, they don’t like us installing random software either, so you can pick your battles.
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