Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.
They all thought the foreign company paid the tariff.
This is probably what Trump thinks, too. I can easily believe he is that stupid.
I’m also wondering just what the fuck Trump and co. are going to do with all the money obtained from these tariffs. Just, like, spend it all on hookers and blow or what? Remember how you all believed this was the party of “low taxes?” Yeah, guess what a tariff is, fuckers.
Here’s the problem with that, though. It’s not going to be like there will be roving goon squads going from door to door snatching away your wives and daughters or anything. Even the MAGA-heads are just barely clever enough not to form themselves into any kind of entity that you could physically fight.
Instead, they’re going to chip away at everybody with asinine laws and legislation, selective enforcement and remote harassment, by filing mountains of frivolous lawsuits, etc. They’ll seize property. They’ll get you fired from your job. They’ll kick you off of your health insurance and freeze your bank accounts. Those responsible are never going to actually expose themselves in any capacity in which they can get got, because they’re cowards; they’re going to hide behind their desks and layers of security and fences and metal detectors and cops and the secret service. If it turns to outright violence vis-a-vis war in our own cities, it would be monumentally stupid for them to send troops marching down the street, and they won’t. They’ll just remotely bombard an entire city block and blame all the collateral damage on “leftists” or “wokeism” or whatever. And idiots will believe it, and then blame the victims.
“That’s ridiculous,” you say. “The government would never bomb anyone on US soil.”
Measuring with the printer is an excellent idea. When in jog mode, mine displays the nozzle coordinates right on the screen.
I was considering that a truly dedicated nut could figure out which layer the print failed at (possibly approximately) and hand edit the gcode for the print to just replace all the layers up until the failed one with Z axis move up to that height. I think that would be problematic, though, because on my machine at least the model still being on the bed would definitely be in the way of the print head homing at the beginning of the print, and I don’t know if there’s any way to force it to skip that part of the procedure. Failure seems likely, and the penalty for failure is high.
Just printing the remaining half of the model and supergluing the parts together seems like a better idea.
My Qidi has a heated chamber and can allegedly do it stock, and I’ve had an unopened spool of pure Nylon sitting in the printer cabinet for over a year.
But I’m chicken.
If your nozzle can withstand it, glass filled is way easier to print.
Your slicer should also be able to compensate for this already.
PLA only shrinks about 0.3% which is negligible unless you are designing with super tight clearances. A 6mm hole, for instance, will be out 0.018mm which is probably scraping against the XY resolution limits of most consumer 3D printers anyhow.
Other materials can definitely shrink more. ABS is harder to manage than PLA, but for instance Nylon/PA’s shrink rate is comparatively immense – around 2%. The various engineering polymers that are filled with something like carbon or glass fibers actually tend to shrink less than their raw counterparts.
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Cripes. I’d dissolve like the Wicked Witch of the West.
If it were me, I probably would not be able to resist the urge to make whatever inserts you develop compatible with a Gridfinity baseplate, because I am that kind of nerd.
To create perfectly console-shaped two dimensional inserts, or at least close enough, I would start by laying each system flat on a piece of paper and tracing around it with a narrow bodied mechanical pencil. Stick this in your scanner and make an image out of it, and then trace over that image at scale in the CAD software of your choice (FreeCAD is… free). This will automatically come with a built in amount of clearance in the amount of half of the width of the body of your pencil.
Just make a flat base with a wall sticking up maybe 2-3mm thick or more if you feel like it, to roughly half the height of each object. You can put some gaps in it if you prefer to have places to grab the item directly.
And for anyone who winds up struggling with this when trying to gauge their own printer, make sure this option is enabled:
This is in Prusa/Slic3r and its derivatives. If this is disabled, the final outer wall perimeter can wind up being pushed out by some fraction of the width of the wall behind it, which will have the net effect of shrinking vertical holes in your model (and other critical clearances in the X/Y dimensions) by an unpredictable amount.
As long as you stay within its plastic deformation limit, “many cycles” should not matter.
PLA’s downfall for flexible design elements is permanent deflection. It cannot be used on anything that is expected to stay in its tensioned state for anything more than a few seconds. This is why PLA works for catapults and toothpick guns and latches that have a single position rest state where the flexible element is relaxed. If you leave it under tension, though, even just for a few hours, it will not spring back fully. Eventually, it just won’t spring back at all.
Through much testing (read: slowly pissing myself off) I determined in the course of developing my Rockhopper that ABS is the best commonly available choice for permanently or semi-permanently loaded printed spring fixtures – at least out of what most normal and sane people can print with their hobby level machines. Even PETG is better than PLA in that respect, but PLA was useless for me.
Given that I’ve consistently pirated Windows since I was tall enough to reach the keyboard, I am positive have never been in compliance with the Microsoft ToS. Somehow, I’m not too worried about it.
Sure, but it’s up from just a couple of years ago when Linux was sub 2%, and was hovering around only 1.5% in, say, 2020.
Y’all need to point me towards one of those tiny Linux systems. I have an old no-longer-bricked Toshiba Satellite that somebody gave me and I got it to boot again, so I slapped Mint on it to see how I liked it since I’ve never messed with that distro before. The only problem is this sucker is a dog, it’s only got 2 gigs of RAM and a pokey 5400 RPM platter drive in it. The thing sits there and thrashes swap constantly even when it’s doing nothing, and when Mint is creating one of its automated system image rollback things it’s completely unusable. I’m surprised the laptop platters don’t escape their casing and bore into the Earth like a drill bit.
I found that it will… eventually… load and run the latest FreeCAD build and once it’s going it’s actually not bad (awful screen resolution and single touch only trackpad notwithstanding). But getting there when taken altogether takes about 20 minutes…
I’ve always considered the six switch variant more iconic, but my six switch one is also the one I’ve got that doesn’t work. So there’s that.
Weight is really the only reason, but even then I think that’s self-defeating on a bicycle.
Believe it or not, a chain and sprocket drive is actually the most efficient method in terms of energy transmission losses. And when it’s you physically pedaling your bicycle, that’s kind of important. Turning any significant fraction of your pedaling input into heat rather than forward locomotion is kind of a raw deal, which is why even fancy high end bicycles are still chain driven even to this day. A chain drive loses 1-4% of energy in the driveline whereas as comparable belt drive is more in the order of 9-15%.
From squinting at it, all the blocks appear to be 8x8.
I already have it, and the source code. It’s too late for Nintendo.
This port scales the graphics down to the GB’s resolution. I imagine it takes a lot of CPU cycles just to rearrange the graphics data into the Game Boy’s 8x8 tile structure in display RAM. Either that, or it’s precomputed and the ROM is huge.
What would make anyone think they’re downscaling graphics in real time on the Gameboy of all things? The graphics have been flat out redrawn to better fit the Gameboy’s lower screen resolution.
For anyone wondering, here’s the first little bit of what 1-1 looks like:
Look at that doofy goomba.
INB4 “But Mario Bros. DX already exists.”
I dig how the graphics have been reworked and tile size reduced to provide roughly the same field of view as on the NES.
doesn’t have Microsoft store
That is not a drawback.
I found some additional articles on what he said about this, and he did indeed flat out say he expects the “other countries” to pay the tariffs. For instance, this.
That’s not how tariffs have worked at any point in history.