Just yesterday I created !printmything@lemmy.world for this very purpose, so I’ll plug it again. Well, not miniatures specifically, but rather a place for people who haven’t got printers to ask for help from people who do.

I’m not in Oz so I figure shipping to you would be quite prohibitive. But you might be able to connect with someone in your country, who can ship printed stuff to you more cheaply and – importantly – without having to fuck around with customs.

The go-to wisdom is that detailed miniatures are best printed with a resin printer. You can do it with a traditional FDM (filament) printer but it’s harder to get the small details reproduced, and FDM printers can’t print in midair so you either have to be very careful to take that into account with your design or do a lot of work with removing and doing the finish work around printed supports. So you probably want to find somebody with a resin machine.

That may be a good idea.

I’m sure we’ll figure out what so the other good ideas are as we go along…

Not that I can find.

I was about to say something monumentally stupid, along the lines of, “somebody ought to make it.”

The hell with it. I just made it.

!printmything@lemmy.world

Yes, that part specifically is a bit braindead.

It’s probably because they can’t be arsed to figure out who has the rights and who doesn’t, so they just loaded up the ban shotgun.

There are oodles of commercial 3D printing services that will run off whatever you send them for a price. Craftcloud, Shapeways, Xometry, etc.

Or printathing.com, if you’d like to get hooked up with a private(ish) person to do it for you.

Or just ask at any of the innumerable online spaces where people talk about 3D printing (like right here) and someone can probably do it for you, too.

My exception is not to people printing things for others for a specific purpose if asked to. It’s against stealing other people’s work and cynically trying to turn it around for a profit, without putting any effort into it and probably implicitly passing it off as if it were your own work in the process. Likewise, I don’t object to someone designing their own thing and selling their own thing on Etsy. But just to put it into perspective I imagine most people would also rank it as Not Cool to go on Etsy and start trying to sell, say, just printouts random stuff you downloaded from DeviantArt.

Send me the file or a link and I’ll print it for you. I’m sure plenty of other nerds would do the same.

There are also commercial print services, but local nerds are always a great first resort.

Awesome. I fully approve of this. If you want to sell 3D printed stuff, sell it on an appropriate platform and for fuck’s sake, sell things that you actually have the rights to print and sell.

Next, let’s crack down on the hordes of losers on Etsy who just drop-ship crap from Alibaba for a 6000% markup while boldfadedly claiming it’s “hand made” in the hopes that everyone is too stupid to notice. (But people must be, because apparently that’s still working.)

Re: But it has to be watertight, so it can’t have any ports or buttons or doors or hatches or a replaceable battery!!!

Uh-huh. Sure.

Feel free to trot this one out the next time some glassy-eyed Apple apologist is making that argument at you. That one annoys the shit out of me, too. This has been a solved problem for thirty years. Probably longer.

This may in fact not be completely outside of the realm of possibility for someone who has no idea how to actually operate his computer, which is most people. The notion that things can be deleted, not to mention when they should be deleted or when they should not be deleted, and the fact that on most modern systems they aren’t actually deleted when you hit “delete” and instead go to some manner of purgatory elsewhere on your drive where they’re still accessible in full (recycle bin/trash) regularly eludes the majority of computer users.

The problem is, the defendant’s excuse could be explained by him being a moron from multiple avenues, so we’ll never know if he’s inept (as in can’t delete files) or inept (as in so stupid he things everyone else is as stupid as he is in order to believe his dumb excuse).

I’d doubt this is anything approaching universal, but where I am there definitely were three digit signs in the early aughts, which now appear to have all been replaced with two digit ones. I don’t know if this was for cost purposes or the proposed “high score” reason.

There was one right in front of the police station in the town I lived in back in the day, which was a full dot matrix display and didn’t even have discrete digit slots. It could display other messages if it wasn’t in speed readout mode. I passed it at about a buck twenty one night and discovered that it topped out at 99. It’s the first one I recall seeing that didn’t have a third digit, but then they became the norm pretty shortly thereafter.

The ones that are popping up like mushrooms around here now fit within the footprint of a normal speed limit sign and they have a dual color LED matrix that flashes a frowny face at you if you’re 0.01 MPH over the specified speed…

I am positive that the bug removal windshield washer fluid has never actually worked on bug splatters. Not even if you spritz them immediately when they happen, and even if you did you’d go through two gallons of the stuff per day. It’s all marketing; I’m pretty sure they just take the regular stuff and dye it green instead of blue and charge three times more for it.

While we’re at it, I have a bug/air deflector on the nose of my Subaru and I can report that it does indeed appear to work. My truck, conversely, is just a rolling brick and every bug in the county seems to wind up on its windshield. On the Scoob, they splat into the front bumper instead. Most of the ones above that presumably sail right over the roof, except the really big ones.

Bug strike volume overall in my area has not diminished noticeably since my childhood (i.e. it’s still maddeningly incessant) but that sort of thing appears to be quite localized and I don’t have to go too many miles before I wind up in areas that are eerily free of bugs.

In other news, my primary method of transportation is a motorcycle for much of the year and chiseling the little bastards off of your helmet daily – or multiple times per day – is just a fact of life.

Yeah, print out that fuckin’ telephone because we called it. Sometimes it sucks to be right.

Neon, of course!

For anyone wondering about where, just as an example, polyvinyl is: Polyvinyl acetate (i.e. PVA) is the stuff that wood glue is typically made out of. It’s also the binder used for those bird seed bells.

…It does indeed dissolve in the water. In the rain, certainly, which any owner of a bird seed bell could tell you.

All of a true ninja’s tools have multiple purposes.

…Yes?

It’s the dessert of champions.

This works with Maraschino cherries, also. Helps you reach the bottom of the jar and keeps your fingers from turning red. Double bonus.

Said jar, by the way.

I propose the following amendment, then: If you cause harm to a two wheeled rider due to negligence and/or belligerence, you get busted down to a Vespa for a further 5 years.

In some places in the world you can give it a shot and see, but we don’t have rear fog lights in the US. I’ve never seen one on any car designed for this market, and my Crosstrek just to name an example has a conspicuous filler panel over the hole where the rear fog light goes on the same model sold in other markets.

As to why, I have no idea. But we also mandate that front fog lights can’t be configured so they can be activated without the main headlights on at the same time, which kind of defeats the purpose if you ask me. So maybe asking DOT regulations to make sense is a tall order.