No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
- Robert Frost
The pods, small modular units costing from about $26,000, can be assembled in days.
At first glance, this looks like an affordable housing innovation. But the reality is more nuanced.
These pods are fundamentally temporary. Their size, layout and fit-out reflect short-term or secondary use rather than long-term residential living.
Beside this, many pods avoid full planning or building approval in some locations, which is a strong signal they are being treated, legally, as ancillary structures.
They are most useful as offices, studios, guest rooms or extra space but unlikely to be suitable as permanent homes for families.
While the price is eye-catching, it does not include site preparation, ground works, connections for power and water, or any compliance costs, all of which can add substantially to the final price.
Buyers would also need somewhere to put the pod – either owning land, or being able to use someone else’s.
How Do They…?
I was poking around on YouTube for “how to” videos (one of my favorite video genres) the other day when I hit a small jackpot: a bunch of How Do They…? videos from the National Film Board of Canada. A favorite shows how chain link fences are made:
You can view all the videos at the NFB site as well. NFB produced one of my favorite “how to” videos ever: how to build an igloo.
WELL, GOOD: Shingles vaccination associated with delayed dementia onset in older adults.
The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting
Hackernoon: “…The scale of the operation is staggering, but the engineering challenge is even deeper.
How do you build a machine that can ingest the sprawling, dynamic, and ever-changing World Wide Web in real-time? How do you store that data for centuries when the average hard drive lasts only a few years? And perhaps most critically, how do you pay for the electricity, the bandwidth, and the legal defense funds required to keep the lights on in an era where copyright law and digital preservation are locked in a high-stakes collision?
This report delves into the mechanics of the Internet Archive with the precision of a teardown. We will strip back the chassis to examine the custom-built PetaBox servers that heat the building without air conditioning. We will trace the evolution of the web crawlers—from the early tape-based dumps of Alexa Internet to the sophisticated browser-based bots of 2025. We will analyze the financial ledger of this non-profit giant, exploring how it survives on a budget that is a rounding error for its Silicon Valley neighbors.
And finally, we will look to the future, where the “Decentralized Web” (DWeb) promises to fragment the Archive into a million pieces to ensure it can never be destroyed. To understand the Archive is to understand the physical reality of digital memory. It is a story of 20,000 hard drives, 45 miles of cabling, and a vision that began in 1996 with a simple, audacious goal: “Universal Access to All Knowledge”…”
