dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

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.

  • 16 Posts
  • 765 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 20th, 2023

help-circle
  • That’s because practically nobody here drives a car with a manual transmission, and the reason for those in Europe is (or originally was) to give drivers notice when they need to get back into gear.

    A knock-on consequence of this is that nobody in the US knows how to drive, they just point the wheel vaguely in some direction and mash the skinny pedal. If they don’t get the result they wanted, they stomp on the pedal harder. You ought to watch chucklefucks try to drive in the snow, especially those with SUVs and muscle cars with rear wheel drive. People treat the throttle as if it’s the “make the car go in the direction I’m looking button” and the rest of us know that’s not how it works.



  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldLike its a drag race
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    3 hours ago

    It’s not only natural, it’s a good idea. Especially if you are crossing a large road.

    I ride a motorcycle more often than not (see user name) and it’s vital to ensure that the cross traffic is actually stopping when their light is red. You aren’t “protected” because your light is green, and there’s nothing physically stopping any asshole blowing the light and ramming into the side of you, probably without slowing down in the slightest first. That’s because they’re also staring at their phone. I can’t even go a week anymore without watching some moron sail straight through a red light right in front of me such that if I hadn’t spotted them first they would have run me over. And it’s happening more and more often as drivers are more distracted than ever before. A couple of years ago I’d only see this sort of thing once every few months.



  • melt ceramic

    If you’re melting crockery in your microwave, I assure you whatever it is you’re using is not ceramic. Even the earthenware stuff that cheap coffee mugs are made out of has to be heated to upwards of 1000° C just as part of its hardening process, never mind melting.

    You can absolutely get silica gel beads hot enough in a microwave to melt and deform plastic containers, though, including those faux stoneware textured ones. Beware if what you have is not actually Pyrex or ceramic.

    I cook the shit out of my silica gel beads in the microwave in an old ceramic pie dish I have no other use for. There isn’t a mark on it. Although I will say, you probably want to microwave your beads gently anyway because at high power levels the moisture flash boils out of them fast enough to cause them to split and shatter, or occasionally leap out of the dish like popcorn.


  • I have a Dell Axim X50v in a box somewhere. I imagine the battery is toast and I’ll probably have to keep it in its cradle to remain powered. It was a hell of a machine for it’s day.

    I went through a succession Windows CE/PocketPC machines back in the day, starting with a Casio Cassiopeia E-115, then an Audiovox Maestro which was a rebadged Toshiba, then an HP iPAQ 2215, and finally the Axim.

    The displays on the Maestro and the Axim were really something, and I wish someone would bring these back for a modern smartphone. They were rotten at color accuracy, but both had transflective displays that were fully readable even in direct sunlight. The Axim X50v also had a full 480x640 screen resolution which blew the first few iPhones out of the water on pixel density and even gave the iPhone 4 a run for its money. “Retina” display, my ass.

    I had a Microdrive bunged into the CompactFlash slot on my Axim which was… several gigabytes, I don’t remember how many. I kept it packed with MP3’s, and I had a custom wallpaper with a white-on-chartreuse silhouette of a pacifier on it with the legend, “All 10,000 Songs On Your iPod Suck.”

    But then the entire PDA market got swallowed in one gulp by smartphones.






  • I don’t print TPU on a textured bed. I use the flat side of my build plate, which I also have coated with a giant sheet of Kapton/polyamide tape. Peeling the completed parts off of the smooth surface has never been an issue.

    A word to the wise: Always run with a sheet of polyamide tape if you have a flat build plate. This will go a long way towards protecting the finish and flatness of your plate, and I have definitely saved myself a couple of times when having a Z offset that was too low and thusly crashing the nozzle only into the tape and not the surface of the expensive plate itself. You can apply adhesive and clean the tape’s surface just the same as the PEI surface of your plate, but once it gets worn out or chewed up or otherwise no longer produces parts with a pretty underside, you can just peel it off and reapply. If you’ve already fucked up the surface on your plate you can also paper over this with a layer of tape which will smooth out small scratches, pock marks, and other imperfections.

    And if you really need to employ the nuclear option to get a stuck part off of your bed (i.e. if you’ve printed something with a sticky filament such as TPU or PETG and happened to have your Z offset way too low) you can peel the tape off along with the part. The tape is unlikely to survive this process, but a pack of 12 sheets is only $20 or so.


  • That is a mighty chunky thread!

    I can tell you from experience that the strength of your part is not likely to be due to the design or pitch of the threads but rather down to the layer adhesion strength of your print and whatever material you’re using. Even a dinky 1.0mm thread pitch is perfectly capable of ripping the layer lines of a print apart, and your point of failure will be the layer immediately below where your countersunk head contacts the base of your nut and/or part it’s screwed into, the exact moment you overtorque it.

    I have a bit of experience with this sort of thing. Actually, these days, probably rather a lot.

    Your thread creation approach is similar to mine but I prefer to use an additive helix on the male thread, and then a matching subtractive one on the nut or female side. I find this makes it a little easier to tune for good engagement. If you need to make multiples in a single assembly you can draft clone your sketches to make them all the same. Change one, change them all. You can just use triangles to create both the male and female helices, unless you want to make the tips of the threads flat in which case you can draw a trapezoid.

    There are various threaded fastener workbenches and plugins available, as others have mentioned, but I prefer to do things the hard way since I came up using FreeCAD in not only the pre-1.0 era, but even pre-0.21 back when the hard way was the only way to do anything and there was no path forward except to Git Gud. If you have specific design parameters in mind I find that building screws manually provides much more flexibility. That, and not having your file explode in your face if you happen to open it on a machine that doesn’t have your full selection of plugins installed is always nice.





  • Especially since the majority of computer users worldwide now no longer use a PC to do their computing. The average consumer now uses Windows only at work. Their personal device, whatever it is, runs Android or is some manner of iDevice, two platforms which have thoroughly eaten Microsoft’s lunch.

    It’s too bad for Microsoft that their mobile platform – Windows Mobile, er, I mean Windows 8 RT, er, actually it was Pocket PC, um, no wait, it was Windows CE, et. cetera – all bombed so spectacularly, and the most recent one mere moments before Google took over the world.

    I imagine Microsoft is no longer eyeing private users as a cash cow except purely as advertising targets.

    It’s only a matter of time before some brilliant dipshit over there manages to envision Windows as a subscription service aimed solely at businesses, and the days of Windows as a standalone OS will be over.