F.A.T. Lab
fffff.at · Group blog · on HN since 2010
F.A.T. Lab was an art and technology collective that made open-source projects, web tools, and pranks on tech culture.
What HN saysHN links it for the Free Universal Construction Kit, which has adapter bricks between toy sets, and mourns that the lab shut down in 2015.
43HN people shared it
14linked it in comments
31stories submitted
421story points
6 months agolast shared
2010people per year2026
Most-shared posts
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- 15(no subject) – F.A.T1 people · 1 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
jbl0ndie · 2024-10-01
Glorious. Excellent work @walz. Reminds me of the work of the artists in the now very sadly defunct https://fffff.at/
haspoken · 2022-01-24
The true value of 3D printing and Lego (or any construction toy) is the ability to print custom parts.
For example, take a look at the Free Universal Construction Kit which includes adapter bricks so that any of the following 10 different construction sets can connect to one another: Lego, K’Nex, Krinkles, Tinkertoys, Zoob, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Gears! Gears!, Lincoln Logs, and Zome.
https://3dprint.com/9147/3d-print-adapter-lego-knex/
http://www.sy-lab.net/Free-Universal-Construction-Kit
http://fffff.at/free-universal-construction-kit/
QuantumNomad_ · 2026-04-26
The archived version from 2012 is showing the characters correct. So probably some migration like you said.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120319180000/https://fffff.at/free-unive…
The website itself has been closed since 2015 according to the front page.
https://fffff.at/
Which also suffers from encoding problems making weird characters show up.
But which was showing the characters the way it should on August 1st 2015 when the site was closing down.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150801234212/http://fffff.at/
Who wants to bet that at some point after the closing of the site, they switched over from a live CMS to a static copy of the site and in the process of doing so things got a little screwed up when exporting data from a MySQL database with the different encoding weirdnesses that can sometimes occur with MySQL and how the db schema was set there.
jadamson · 2026-04-25
If you go to the homepage (or look at the banner) the project is shut down since 2015.
https://fffff.at/rip/
michaelmior · 2024-07-13
Very cool! I still think to date one of the coolest uses of 3D printing I've seen is the Free Universal Construction Kit[0]. There are adapters for any pairing of LEGO, Lincoln Logs, K'NEX, and several others. This is something that would likely never happen commercially due to licensing issues.
[0] https://fffff.at/free-universal-construction-kit/
etjossem · 2013-05-24
Tangentially related: a Facebook app called Social Roulette (which purported to have a 1/6 chance of "helping" a user delete his/her account) was recently deactivated.
http://fffff.at/when-you-dont-own-yourself/
Facebook certainly doesn't want to make leaving easy, but really, what else did we expect?
splatcollision · 2012-10-21
Cool nice work, you'd also like Evan Roth's Typographic Illustration - he's got a video and source code here: http://fffff.at/jay-z-kanye-west-source-code/
smartt · 2012-09-19
Didn't the old Makerbot print at 100 microns? The notes about the THE FREE UNIVERSAL CONSTRUCTION KIT http://fffff.at/free-universal-construction-kit/ referenced this as a limitation when trying to print LEGOs.
retroafroman · 2012-01-06
This one sprang up as a direct result of Flickr privacy/censorship issues:
http://fffff.at/fuckflickr-info/
jgv · 2011-12-22
Greg Leuch of FFFFFAT has a similar project:
http://fffff.at/stop-sopa-blackout/
https://github.com/gleuch/STOP-SOPA-Blackout
dzuc · 2011-10-17
It makes a call to this thing: http://www.wdyl.com/profanity?q=interesting
http://fffff.at/googles-official-list-of-bad-words/ if you want the complete list of offenders
rbcoffee · 2015-08-14
huertanix · 2011-01-03
Enter, Google Alarm: http://fffff.at/google-alarm/