“Tomorrow, we have to decide which country we want to buy”

Went through the first pass on my taxes last night, and came out better than expected. That is, the two different employers, large severance check, and stock sales (options, ESPP, RSU) were effectively balanced by the extra amount I had withheld and the amount my new job over-withheld for Social Security, etc, leaving me with my usual close-to-breaking-even little refund checks. I’ll let it bake a week in case some late paperwork or surprise changes arrive, but it looks like the money I carefully saved for potential tax payments goes into my pocket instead. And there’s a semi-annual bonus on the way.

But I’ve already said that I’m not buying a new car this year, or a new computer, or a new camera, no matter how Sony tempts me. Oh, my. Wait, this one has gigabit ethernet?!?

We haven’t finalized the dates on the re-re-re-rescheduled Japan trip, but it’s currently “three weeks in November”, with enough time in Tokyo for me to spend way too much money. Probably not on camera gear, unless I find myself in a shop full of classic Minolta lenses…

Maybe this will be the trip where we take a few overnight trips off the beaten path. I’ve already penciled in a day trip to Kamakura and a whistle-stop tour of Nagoya (mostly for the Totoro House) on the way from Tokyo to Kyoto, but Nikko and Amanohashidate would benefit from full days, and a return visit to Ise would be cool, too. My sister’s not a big fan of cable-car rides, but she might go for an overnight stay at one of the many temples on Mt. Koya.

Solo Leveling Offline

File under peculiar the fact that the first half of the Solo Leveling light novel is out today in paperback only. No Kindle edition listed at all. I’d have to wait an entire day before I could start reading it. I think I’ll hold off for a week or so to see if the ebook turns up.

Which reminds me to check up on the online comic, which was supposed to start back up this year.

Marshmallow Oppai (マシュマロおっぱい), to be precise. I can’t imagine which recently-watched anime might have inspired this theme; target-rich environment, really. The only difficulty is that roughly 80% of the available pics are either Rem or Mashu Kyrielight (the latter being basically the trope namer, Marshmallow = mashu-maro).

Rigid tool holders…

Figures that right after I rant about poorly-designed 3D printable holders for 3D printing tools, someone shows how it’s done. Minimal volume of plastic, no supports necessary, fits on a lot more printers (175x125x58mm), with generic slots. It even has nicely-rounded edges. A few points off for abusing the words “generic” and “universal” while not including a wide slot or larger round hole, but other than that, it’s an excellent piece of work. Still not going to print it, though.

Unrelated Cura plugin

Material Settings, in the marketplace. This gives you a GUI method of making additional settings filament-specific (such as material_flow for a brand that runs thick/thin), rather than having to edit the XML by hand.

Yes, the only documentation for how to do this is in a comment on a bug that was closed with “won’t fix”. And the plugin exists because its author commented on the bug and agreed it would be nice to have.

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One for Rick C…

Overture PLA Plus/Pro is giving me a much less shiny top surface, at least in the dark blue (love the color, by the way).

Related, while using my heat gun to de-string a print, I noticed that it did a nice job of slightly dulling the extremely shiny finish that I get on the bottom from printing on glass+hairspray. I had it set to 350°F with the fan on high, and kept moving and rotating the parts to avoid melting anything thicker than strings.

Note that this is unrelated to the use of heat guns to restore smooth plastic finishes, which involves reducing the impact of UV and oxidation damage without sanding/polishing off the surface layer.

Oh, and What was I printing? A bag clip, of course. 😁

More specifically, this stl, scaled up from this clip by a designer at Prusa. I found the original wore out too quickly when used to secure twice-folded-over coffee bags, so I scaled it up (a bit more XY, a lot more Z) and printed at 0.3mm, with 5 walls so it printed solid without any infill pattern. The (quite mild) stringing came from testing Cura’s “smart hiding” of layer-start positions with a spool of filament that’s a bit thicker than the nominal 1.75mm.

(picture is unrelated)

Don’t Be A Tool

In the grand tradition of using your 3D printer to print 3D printer accessories, quite a few people have designed little stands to hold all their 3D printer tools and published them to the various “search” sites. With few exceptions, they suck.

Common problems include:

1. I need seven inches or more: requires at least 180mm in at least two dimensions. My printer’s build area is 255x155x170.

2. Carve away anything that doesn’t look like an elephant: designed as a solid block of plastic with small holes for tools.

3. If your love life requires close air support, something has gone very wrong: requires significant supports to print successfully.

4. Hours will seem like days: all of the above contribute to ridiculous print times.

5. Where does the third one go?: assumes specific workspace layout (wall-mount, pegboard, attaches to one model of printer, etc).

6. One ring to rule them all: very-specifically-sized slots for every tool you could possibly need, not just the ones you actually use regularly.

There’s a pretty reasonable one designed specifically for the Dremel 3D45. Except for the part where it mounts to the right side of the printer, which isn’t where I use any of the tools.

File this one at Cults3D under “baffling” (even though it would fit nicely on my printer), because it has prominent storage for seven spare nozzles. Why? Not even “why do you need seven nozzles”, but “why do you have them all out on your workbench gathering dust in unlabeled bins?”.

Right now, I don’t want to print any of them, and I don’t want to spend the time to design my own, so my tool holder will continue to be a $5 box from Michaels. Maybe I’ll make a little organizer insert for it sometime, but honestly, I pretty much just use the scraper, flush cutters, emery boards, and a small sharp knife, and those fit on the lid of the box, with room left over for the calipers.

66%の誘惑

(classical reference)

Next time, Nancy, maybe you shouldn’t buy your souvenir pens from China…

"That's the trouble with godhood: it robs you of your finer

judgement. A deity so rarely has to pay for his mistakes!”

"​...while heroes... heroes have an infinite capacity for

stupidity! Thus are legends born!”

How Disney destroyed Star Wars, catfight edition.

The images for the day are the intersection of the tags “virtual youtuber” (バーチャルYouTuber) and “ass goddess” (尻神様). This is a short NSFW set, just so I could get the joke in.

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Thickness

I renamed my Cura 0.35mm layer-height preset from Coarse to Thick, because the Custom Printjob Naming plugin tries to abbreviate quality names to their initial letters, and if I have to choose between coarse and chunky, I’ll take chunky (this is not dating advice, but it could be). That makes the full set UAHGMOLTSC, which proves that I’m CACA (Crap At Creating Acronyms).

Mal-Adaptive

It seems Cura’s adaptive layer-height mode is experimental for a good reason. I printed a folding tablet holder that’s a good test of how well you’ve dialed in your filament settings, and it had a bunch of small holes in the top flat surfaces. Why? Because Cura calculated the number of top layers required for a 0.8mm surface based on the nominal layer height of 0.2mm, but because of nearby curved elements, printed them at 0.05mm instead. Four of those doesn’t make much of a surface. The stand is fully functional, just a bit moth-eaten on top.

This explains some other minor flaws I was running into with this feature, so I’ve stripped it out of my config set for now. UHGMOLTSC.

I’d Rather Summon The Mazoku Musume

Lacking anything else to watch, I made it most of the way through the first season of How Not To Summon A Demon Lord. The main elf girl has ridiculous gag boobs made of pudding while the main catgirl is pure AAA-cup angst, but most of the other females are somewhere in between, which is refreshing after Highschool DxD.

It’s better than those other fan-service comedies I’ve attempted to watch recently, although Our Demon Lord’s social-anxiety freakouts get old fast. It seems to run at the usual light-novel adaptation pace of four episodes per book, which is too fast if the cast is large and there’s any non-trivial world-building. In this case it only feels slightly rushed and sparse, as if the original author hadn’t gotten around to doing those things yet in the first three books.

Note that the original title is a bit more direct: 異世界魔王と召喚少 女の奴隷魔術 = “other world demon lord and summoning-girl slave magic”. Pretty much what it says on the tin, although the Crunchyroll version restricts itself to pokies and not-quite-sexual climaxes. That said, the flatcat girl did take an offscreen finger in the last episode I watched.

Season 2 coming in April.

Cutting the strings

When I switched back from PETG to PLA and tried to print the mini traffic cone that was filled with spiders, I still got some spider-webs. Fortunately, I’ve been keeping my WIP Dremel configs in source control, and determined that I’d inadvertently deleted an important option from my top-level definition file:

"infill_before_walls": { "default_value": false }

The default inherited from fdmprinter.def.json is true, and a cone is pretty much the worst-case scenario for this, cutting across the circle from the end position of one layer to the start of the next, smaller layer. Adding this back eliminated every single bit of stringing inside the cone.

Tarball updated. Several times, actually; among other things, retraction_extra_prime_amount is something that can’t be overridden on a per-filament basis. You have to create a whole set of filament-specific quality overrides, which I generated with a script, because I’m up to 10 quality settings now. Each one contains a dozen lines of boilerplate and one actual setting line.

Which reminds me that I’m due for a rant on the fact that Cura uses three completely different file formats to store configuration information: XML, JSON, and Python’s ConfigParser (which is more-or-less Microsoft Windows INI format). Machine and extruder definitions are in JSON, quality settings and variants (like different nozzle sizes) are ConfigParser, and filament definitions are in XML. Some settings are valid in any file, some only in specific ones, and the only documentation is some help strings in fdmprinter.def.json. If there’s any good documentation, it’s not on Ultimaker’s support site or Github repo wikis.

Then there are settings that I couldn’t find in any file, including some that caused Cura to decide that all my configs had been corrupted and needed to be wiped, after I added or removed things from its directory. I let it do the reset once, to clean out a bunch of cruft; downloading filament profiles from their marketplace was a mistake, and saved custom settings are “messy”, to put it gently. Since then, I’ve kept tarball snapshots as I tinker.

Note that their contribution policy is to only accept new printer definitions from the actual manufacturer, so even if I (or the other guy) produce really awesome config files for the Dremel, they won’t merge a pull request.

Useful Cura plugins

1. RawMouse: enables support for 3DConnexion 3D controllers. I’ve been using mine extensively with PrusaSlicer, and kinda-sorta with OpenSCAD (where it doesn’t work very well). 3d mice are worth every penny, if all your core apps support them. Cura doesn’t, and doesn’t offer a plugin in the marketplace, so this one’s on Github.

2. Z Offset Setting: tweak the Gcode output up or down to compensate for nozzle height and material differences.

3. Auto Orientation: try to orient models to reduce the amount of support needed to print them.

4. Custom Printjob Naming: simple, flexible way to embed useful information in Gcode file names.

5. Startup Optimizer: hide the cruft (dozens of printers and materials you don’t have) so Cura doesn’t try to load it all.

6. Setting Visibility Set Creator: lets you override the standard basic/expert/advanced modes to expose only the settings you actually tinker with.

7. Export HTML Cura Settings: only useful for A/B testing, but really useful for that. This is how I diffed two sets of Dremel configs.

8. Barbarian Units: most STL files use millimeters as units, but every once in a while some application gives you Love American Style.

Set for the long weekend

With all the testing I’ve been doing, I’m finally running low on the Hatchbox Grey PLA, so I started to order some more, and then remembered that I’ve got five spools of Dremel PLA in assorted colors. I do need some more neutral gray for babydai koma at some point (good contrast against most thread colors), but that’s to make sets for other people; I’ve got mine.

Flossy!

Unless you work with embroidery floss or other fine thread, you won’t have any practical use for this floss bobbin STL file. It is, however, small, flat, and requires only 1.5 grams of filament to print, making it an excellent choice for testing adhesion, elephant’s foot compensation, and top/bottom quality.

’cause rasterized is best!

The English word raster pretty much only refers to converting vectors to bitmaps (displaying text/graphics on a monitor, etc). The German word raster means “grid”, which leads to some confusion when someone says their 3D model is rasterized. I always interpret it as “has blocky pixels like Minecraft”, but they mean “sized to a specific X/Y/Z grid”.

“Asking for a friend…”

Does this picture of Mayumi Yamanaka count as Tenga cosplay?

(raise shields and disable javascript before clicking on the picture)

InDirecTV

I’ve received email and a text message informing me that DirecTV has finally acknowledged that I returned their equipment over two months ago, and it’s no longer being charged to my account. I won’t really believe it until it shows up on paper, and even then, I doubt they’ll ever send the $8 they owe me.