A collection of jazz performances, a lost Chinese typewriter found in a basement, and a fantastic interactive tour of NASA space images of our planet, solar system, galaxy, and universe are among the interesting stories I’ve read and enjoyed over the past month.
I hope you enjoy them, too!
What I Found Interesting
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Whee! If you’re a fan of jazz music, you’ll welcome news that SFJAZZ (formerly known as the San Francisco Jazz Festival) released recordings of almost 30 years of their performances through the Internet Archive.
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An incredible lost and found story of a typewriter, but not just any typewriter. The MingKwai Typewriter, the first Chinese typewriter with a keyboard, which could type more than 90,000 Chinese characters.
Nelson Felix, a resident of New York State, posted in the group ‘What’s My Typewriter Worth?’ about a curious find he made while clearing out the basement of his wife’s grandfather.
He shared a few photos.
The keys on the typewriter are all in Chinese, Felix noted, and the model does not appear to have ever been sold in the United States. ‘Is it even worth anything?’ he asked.
Created by Chinese scholar and writer Lin Yutang in 1947 (after three decades of work), the typewriter used a combination of three keys—two character components and one number—to produce a unique address, allowing the user to select the appropriate character.
I’m glad to learn the MingKwai Typewriter has found a home at Stanford Libraries.
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Officially announced by NASA’s Universe of Learning on April 29, 2025, the new ViewSpace Interactive Image Tours take you on a guided exploration of NASA’s astronomical images of our planet, solar system, galaxy, and universe.
While the tours are designed for touch screens in museums and science centers, you can alslo explore on your own. Note: they’re best on tablets or computers (anything bigger than a phone).
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I highlighted a story about switching to Linux in February 2025, but it focused on Chromebook users.
If you’re on Windows 10, but have an older machine that can’t update to Windows 11, there’s another option: convert your Windows 10 machine to run Linux.
And you don’t have to do it alone, there are repair cafes and other places around the world that provide Linux support.
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Seed banks around the world are the last line of defense against extinctions of native plants and agricultural crops.
In the surprisingly tricky art of seed banking, Katerina Zimmer highlights how seed banks around the world use different strategies to safeguard threatened plants and extend seed lives.
At the Sussex-based Millennium Seed Bank of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for instance, seed biologist Louise Colville is working to cryopreserve acorns of British oak species.
It’s part of Kew’s effort to establish a cryobank for plants that can’t be preserved in traditional seed banks.
Preserving seeds isn’t an easy task. Seeds go into dormancy and it can be difficult to wake them up. Some expire, even under the best conditions.
