Supplies for making a green roof on my garden shed arrived. Can’t wait to see what that will look like in a few months. With the warmer days this past month the garden is growing all sorts of plants in all sorts of places. It’s fun to see where the plants we planted last year will end up spreading to. I don’t know if I have mentioned this here before, but I have been leaning into my rollercoaster hobby much more the past year or two. As a child I was positively obsessed for years, despite (or because?) the amount of themepark visits in my entire youth can be almost count on one hand. I let the hobby go halfway through my teens, went back to it by getting over my fear for big rides in college, but then it waned again and went away completely during covid. I’m so glad I have now picked it back up again, and I now have more park visits planned this year than my entire youth combined. I even got myself a season pass for my local park! It feels redemptive, like I’m finally doing what eleven year old me has dreamt of. (His biggest dream is to one day go to Cedar Point. That’s not in the works yet, but mostly because of self-restraint…)
Had a weekend trip with the S/O in-between ring shopping/designing days. Traveled throughout Georgia and stopped through historic sites. Only really hit after the trip that Jimmy Carter was a direct beneficiary of the New Deal, growing up only an hour and a half’s drive (today) from FDR’s ‘vacation’ spot where he recovered from polio - and used as a place to educate himself on the needs of rural Americans. The sheer amount of wealth - personal and public - poured into the place lasted and show further accentuated the difference in legacy . On a national level, it really only seemed like Carter could streamline some of the processes left over from the New Deal and further clean up any credibility as an “outsider” after Watergate. Anyways, used birthday gift to buy a tinywhoop and a cheap RC plane. So out of practice on aerodynamics that the RC was lost to the wind. Big bummer. Earned a tick and plenty of thorn pricks searching the woods adjacent to the field. Ended up swinging by Walmart for a kid-sized kite for a few bucks to at least enjoy the windy evening. Both RC and TinyWhoop kit had spare brushed motors and props. I’ve been really hung up on the idea of building a light-weight monocopter using toroidal or seed-pod propeller. Got a long way to go, and should really start out making simple RC planes first. Dipped into savings for an extremely rare impulse-buy before the tariffs kick in: a 3D printer. Figured it will pay for itself doing design-work, rather than hand-crafting from raw materials with tools I don’t have, or repeatedly purchasing spare parts.
Do not overestimate the competence of the Internet when it comes to troubleshooting 3d-printed parts. Overture PETG and PLA are good about four rolls out of five. If things suddenly change and suck ass it's nothing you did, it's their quality control. There's a vast legacy body of dead bullshit on Thingiverse because Thingiverse has been mismanaged for more than a decade. There's a vast thriving community on Printables because Prusa decided Thingiverse was too embarrassing to deal with. Both communities suffer a continual brain drain to Cults because people start getting greedy at about the thousandth download and put their shit behind a paywall. Anycubic PETG and PLA cost barely more than Amazon Basics and are of vastly higher quality. They're also regularly on sale. There, see, you never have to experience the heartbreak of Overture. All of the filament you will buy will be Chinese. Prices may well go up. The good shit is ProtoPasta, which is made in Oregon. It's spendy but of impeccable quality. Maybe less spendy now, comparatively speaking. Nobody has a good support algorithm. You will need to learn how to draw supports for anything even vaguely challenging. PLA is about four times as easy to work with as PETG. PETG is substantially more durable. ABS is only necessary for high temperature shenanigans; as a material I hate it. PLA should be glued down on a smooth sheet. ABS should be glued down mercilessly on a smooth sheet. PETG should be printed on a textured sheet. You should wash them with soap and water occasionally but much less often than you think. Don't resort to IPA or anything dumb; see above about internet. Concerns about VoCs out of 3d prints are greatly overblown. ABS stinks but the level of toxins it kicks out are around a tenth what you get simply living with a laser printer. That said, an enclosure keeps temperatures more stable and it matters if you're printing anything more exotic than PETG. If you're replacing nozzles more often than once every six to eight months you're doing something wrong. And don't worry, you'll do a lot of shit wrong. But eventually you'll realize that all the advice you're reading is also wrong. The "makers" will convince you that you should do everything in OnShape. They are fucking dumbasses. The "professional makers" will give you coupon codes for OnShape while doing everything in Fusion. They are dire fucking dumbasses. You will flail around for a while trying to prove me wrong and then you will do what everyone with half a clue eventually does, which is succumb to SolidWorks. It will cost you like $80 a year from Cleverbridge, and then you will spend two months' tuition at SolidProfessor getting through the first and second levels of self-education. Seriously. Start there. I had a fifteen year autoCAD education and experience with Solidworks 1.0 backintheday and I couldn't so much as draw a cube in SolidWorks without going through basic training. But once you go through basic training the world is your oyster. I would say I print out maybe nineteen designs of mine for every one I print for someone else. Everyone's designs are so bad.
Most prints I've seen across YT have had some form of jank associated with them to get the job done - post-print sanding by hand, acetone vapor smoothing, or hard to grasp support systems. Most of these are hobbyists doing testing videos which end with some sort of "lol oops" error w.r.t. makeshift post-print processes. BUT, that seems part of the fun. Good to know on VoCs. That and the fire risk OB joked about were the most chatted about when googling safety concerns... though concerns about fumes never seemed substantiated. Or, at least not as well documented as house fires. Threw a few extra spools into the 'cart' before ordering. For better or worse, there's an IKEA trip in the cards now for storage. Got a whole new bookmark folder with this and veen's comments. Really gotta get a workspace that's away from the pets (read: seriously consider speeding up plans for a house if the Powers That Be make it possible without strife). But
You gotta keep in mind that you don't know how many of the people in the hobby are twelve. Once upon a time there was a column in Pro Sound News called "the cranky old sound mixer" which was some nameless flinty asshole who basically shit on every trend. he was right more often than he was wrong. One need only search "orcs with tits" in Hubski to get my general opinion on the 3d printing community. That was before I got a cheez whiz printer; I will know also refer to "knitting for dudes." My wife and I agree that "maker" is one of the dirtiest words the millennials ever coined. It's their way of saying "dilettante, but make it aspirational." You have to be exceptionally stupid to have a printer catch fire. Not that there aren't a lot of exceptionally stupid people out there but! PLA extrudes at like 220 degrees. Water boils at like 212. You have to have reached new heights of stupidity if your melty process involves combustion-grade temperatures. And yeah - you probably don't like the smell. Those of us who grew up building plastic models can tell you that what you're smelling is orders of magnitude more benign than we used to put up with just opening up a plastic pack of Tamiya, heaven forfend if you were stretching sprue to make antenna wire. It's just fucking polystyrene and that's the shit everyone thinks is toxic. There was a time when you bought a Prusa and were fucking done with it. Me? I bought a Prusa and was fucking done with it. I bought a Prusa because every camera house in LA prints their shit on a Prusa, and their shit is thrown into a box with $200k worth of glass and hauled out to the desert where it is not allowed to break. then everyone bought Bambu because all their talk about independence and makers and shit was a total fucking lie, they were all about the bottom line and they didn't give a single fuck that it all went through Chinese servers. And when all their printers turned on in the middle of the night and crashed they got what they deserved. Now everyone's all "zomg can Prusa ever catch up" because none of them print for any duration or any real use. It's all shit their wives don't want or need but can be justified by making low-poly napkin rings or some shit. Yeah and see if I sent a TPS report to my Epson and needed to soak it in a bag of nail polish before I could give it to my boss I wouldn't say nice things about Epson. "but I made it!" no one gives a fuck, Chad. "Makers" have been trying to make "3d-printed X" cool for fifteen fucking years now, fucking give up. It's a tool for rapid prototyping. I use it for rapid prototyping. You run into this with the jewelry community. "I spent over four hours piercing this piece with a jeweler's saw!" Great! You should probably be paying yourself about $70 an hour for survivability, can you sell that thing for $300? No? Well than let's call your hobby what it is then, shall we? Buddy of mine bought a skookum laser. He's making dog tags. He's got 'em down to 45 minutes of burn time each! yay! Except he accepted a contract for 100 of them which means he's looking at the better part of two work weeks sitting there swapping pieces out like a Vietnamese sweatshop. If that's really where you want your hobby to be, good on ya but as business models go, yours sucks. I wrote this over ten years ago. The difference between now and then is I'm probably 18,000 hours into 3d printing, two different kinds. Oh, and bulk ABS has come down by a factor of 3. TWO OTHER FUN FACTS FOR THE 3D PRINTED AVIATION COMMUNITY 1) There is no difference from a compression/tension/deformation standpoint between 25% infill and 100% infill. Carnegie Mellon ran the numbers you can look them up. I print nearly everything at 10% with 2-3 shells, gyroid fill. If it's a bracket that requires screwing things into it I run 25% gyroid with like 5 shells, which gives you enough material that you can print threads and tap. Which isn't nearly as strong as using threaded inserts but threaded inserts also like having 3-5 shells to gloop into. 2) you can make damn near anything fly through sheer power to weight BUT, that seems part of the fun.
To add to the above (most of which I wasn't aware of, so thanks): start out with TinkerCAD + PrusaSlicers. TinkerCAD is super easy to get started, but does allow for fairly precise building blocks. PrusaSlicer has a bit of a learning curve, but once you know there's almost nothing you need to change other than level of detail (nozzle setting) you should get pretty far on your own. I learned a bunch of printing wisdom from /r/fixmyprint, one wisdom of which is that given a seemingly simple problem there are always four different solutions proposed cuz overstimating internet users. But the good one is usually in there. With infrequent use of the printer, there's a good chance the nozzle will clog and your printer will not print a single good layer. There's a few YouTube videos on how to solve that, it looks hard but it's not that hard once you're comfortable opening up your printer head.
Messing around with TinkerCAD today and likely through the weekend as I get started. Thanks for the rec. Dipping my toes into electronics/soldering for the flight controls itself is the least interesting part of the long-term goal, mostly due to ignorance. This'll help alleviate some of it. r/fixmyprint seems a goldmine. Funny (and encouraging) seeing a few of y'all able to chime in on 3D-printing. Wasn't expecting it, but all-the-more excited for the gadget to arrive.
Any dipshit can learn to solder in 45 minutes. Any dipshit who knows how to solder can learn to do surface mount in 2 hours. Sincerely, some dipshit who has gone through four entire rolls of solder
If I can run a mini fleet of ender 3's, make useful stuff and not burn my house down, I'm confident you're capable of learning to run a 3d printer. Yes to everything kb and veen said. Anecdotally I buy my PLA and PETG in bulk for approx $10-11 per roll from a guy near me who bulk imports and resells the stuff. ( I don't actually know if he's still in business anymore with the whole once in a century trade war thing) No matter the brand I chuck it in a dry box full of dessicant beads for a while before I use it, no issues. Heated filament dryers are nice, I've never found I needed one since I got 4 Ikea samla boxes and filled them with dessicant beads and rolls of filament. I'm actually going to an additive manufacturing conference here in Metro Detroit in a few days, I'll report back with anything cool. PLA and PETG filament recycling is becoming a bigger and bigger deal as people come to terms with how much waste is involved with fdm printers. I save all my waste, segregated by plastic type with the long term end goal of grinding and re extruding it, eventually.
Burning the house down has been the concern for myself and my partner when looking up safety. Your vote of confidence is much appreciated, as a result. Not planning letting that print anything out of my sight. Please do. That sounds sweet. Noted on the recycling bit. If I can run a mini fleet of ender 3's, make useful stuff and not burn my house down, I'm confident you're capable of learning to run a 3d printer.
I'm actually going to an additive manufacturing conference here in Metro Detroit in a few days, I'll report back with anything cool.
I feel I should mention that I printed about 4kg worth of filament that a buddy had stored in his garage in a rubbermaid tub for six years. I think it was all PLA. This is in maritime Washington State, no climate control, stuff wasn't even in ziplocs. As a consequence I'm skeptical that moisture matters as much as has been implied. I do keep my filament in vacuum-evacuated ziplocks with a little desipack but that's the extent of my prevention. I think that formulation can be shit, and what people think is "moisture" is actually 'shit formulation' because they don't print enough. I, on the other hand, would buy 3 1kg rolls in the same lot, print one in two days, and then the second one would be garbage while the third one would be fine. Talkin' less than a week.
Thanks Cory Booker, for doing something, even if it's small and likely won't change anything in the short term. Also great he broke Thurmond's record.
I saw he was doing a filibuster yesterday morning but then went about my day. When my daughter's French Horn teacher showed up we chatted and he regaled his adventures the previous week in DC on a gig, where he had run into Cory Booker and got to chat with him. He then said "I sure wish I was there today," and when I asked, cautiously, why he relayed the 400m tiktok likes or whatever. "I'm cautiously optimistic," he said. I told him to rub elbows with me to see if any of it would rub off. I'm maybe an elbow's worth of optimistic. We'll see if it spreads.
Last night I checked my bank and my social security disability payment that I depend on to pay for the basic essentials of life was pending. When I checked today it had deposited. Relief, and then immediate worry again, because this is no longer a certain thing. I have a private long term disability policy from my former employer that still pays for my health insurance, and a bare percentage towards a retirement account I likely won't live to cash out. As part of the terms of accepting this private LTD policy, I had to apply for SSDI. In theory, this plan is responsible for paying me 60% of my paycheck when I was taken off work, less the contributions from SSDI. IN THEORY, this means that if SSDI no longer exists, the private LTD company has to pick up the slack. In theory. If SSDI gets cut as is being promised/threatened, I don't expect to keep my home. If I don't keep my home, my likelihood of ever qualifying for a transplant (Assuming we are still capable of doing them in the future, and our necessary medical personnel survive the coming preventable plagues, resurgence of polio, measles, mumps, rubella, etc) is near zero. People get disqualified for all kinds of reasons only tangentially related to their biological fitness for the transplant procedure itself. I will go dark if this happens, and no one I currently know will ever see me again. The thing I will have to become to survive is incompatible with how I exist now. Assuming I continue to be convinced that long term survival is preferable to the alternatives. I recently qualified for participation in a research study into a new drug that actually has a snowballs chance in hell in helping me. This drug is not produced in the United States and I don't expect us to be able to produce it in the near future, given that the patents et al are the fruits of collaborative international research. I am going to have to decline to participate because I am deeply afraid of starting an investigational drug with cardiac remodeling effects when it's supply is at best, tenuous. I am glad that Elon was rebuffed from purchasing one judge in one state. We won't be that fortunate going forward I expect. Once you own the Presidency what's one more rigged / purchased election? They already probably quietly killed two Biden appointees, what's a few more dead libs when people are heartbroken over vandalized cars but not the illegal detention and international deportation of actual US citizens? We survived last time, some of us anyway. What will be left in 2028? When the very idea of coequal branches of government is derided as 'woke nonsense?' Edit for clarity of tone* I am not defeated, at least not mostly. I am wrathful to a degree I didn't know I was capable of. If my time here is limited, and extra limited because of the actions of the billionaire class, I will not go quietly into that long night.
i have seen multiple people on instagram talking about how they discredit corey bookers filibuster because he made some pro israel remarks and didn’t support palestine during the filibuster this is one of many reasons why i don’t like progressives
I am currently not talking to goobster because he basically lost his fucking mind in the chat over how we'll never get to vote again and when I pointed out that freaking out about the real things is more effective than freaking out about the hypothetical things he got downright mean. The last time things got this stupid was over me saying that an Israeli overreaction to October 6 was regrettable but predictable and he decided I was an enemy of Palestine or some shit. Mfer was married under a chuppah ffs The problem as I see it is most progressives are white people with white friends who feel bad about minority oppression but the only avenue of expression they have is playing woker-than-thou with their friends. And if you won't play woker-than-thou you aren't a friend.
that’s unfortunate to hear about goobster totally agree on the woker-than-thou thing. the only other aspect of this I’ll add is that there is no pleasing those types of people. you will always lose at some point.
I’ve been on a creative tear lately—writing a screenplay. I mentioned the idea to my daughter, and she said, “You’ll never do it.” I replied, “You clearly don’t know your father.” So now, I have to finish it. I’ve also been making music that I actually enjoy. Really dig this new one. Work is going very well. We’re in the process of spinning out the stem cell banking company and bringing in a new leadership team to grow it, while we focus all our efforts on SuperShotPRP. As one investor put it, “I get two shots on goal for my one investment!” We’re nearly finished building a new home, which includes a detached music studio—a lifelong dream of mine. Physically, I’ve made a major transformation over the past two years. I’ve been playing a lot of tennis and lifting weights. I feel great. On the downside, someone keyed my Tesla last week. So dumb. So cowardly. Idiots abound—left and right. The kids are doing well. Normal kid stuff—grades, messy bedrooms—but they’re healthy and happy. I feel fortunate to have such a strong family. I’m making a concerted effort to be more present with each of them, enjoying who they are now, knowing from experience how quickly they change. I love them all so much. I’ve been enjoying time with my wife too. She shares my love of tennis and is handling 99% of the home design and building process. I’m incredibly grateful. They say building a home and starting a business are two of the most stressful things for a marriage. Well, we’re doing both—twice—and we’re in the best place we’ve been in years. I credit much of that to the changes I’ve made to my physical health. It’s amazing how fitness ripples through everything else.
I have a floor. I have most of a bathroom. I have the start of a ceiling in the kitchen. I binge-watched maybe 4 hours of this stupid bitch last night. It made me feel like Bob Fucking Vila. "Abandoned" home that you spent a buck and a half on that you're going to flail through a terrible fucking teardown while pretending you aren't and attention-whoring your way through being dumber than a sack of hair. "was 1946 wartime?" "You might be boujie if: you have an artichoke lamp in your permit drawings" The most tedious thing the left ever did was believe the right that they aren't entitled to nice things. I've been fighting this my whole fucking life, first from one side then the other, because I've been leftist AF my entire fucking life. And yet I can feel the judgment for spending six figures on tradespeople who never went to college. Why? Because I'm not an attention whore with an Instagram brand. You can't see my hustle therefore it's immoral. That bitch? Clearly paid for by her parents. Me? The Eurovision bands are set and their videos are up. It's disappointing; the whole world wants safe comfort food so the entire slate is basically "safe American pop in a few languages." One lyric stood out - "life is like spaghetti, it's hard until you make it" which is absolutely awful and absolutely brilliant at the same time. I can't fucking express how angry I am that every conversation about wealth I've ever had pops up whenever I try to appreciate what I've got. 'cuz guaranteed - the dipshits that voted for a trade war don't have those demons. Wherever you are, _wage, I hope you're fucking miserable.
|The Eurovision bands are set and their videos are up. It's disappointing; the whole world wants safe comfort food so the entire slate is basically "safe American pop in a few languages." Can't believe they fucked with this masterpiece.
Latest news on the apartment. Auction was held on Saturday. Hardly anybody turned up. It was passed in. Now we have to go to market.