“The California High-Speed Rail Authority has five separate layers of consultants and contractors on the bridge. Any one of them could have identified a long series of errors, but it appears no one did so.”
— No-Speed Rail pays (someone) off"The DNC went down to Georgia..."
🎶 …they was lookin’ for some votes to steal.
They was in a bind, ’cause they was way behind,
runnin’ a houseplant with no appeal. 🎶
To pet or not to pet…
I’m not saying I have a cat, but Porch Cat Prime spent three hours sleeping on my chest yesterday, waking up several times to attempt to groom my beard.
Dear Amazon,
Recently when I’ve tried to look up something that I ordered a while ago, the link I get back is for a page in the Amazon Fresh section, with a warning that it’s not available in my area. None of these items were purchased through Amazon Fresh, and aren’t even appropriate for it (such as the plastic calipers I linked to earlier (which, by the way, are crap, but good enough for simple uses like checking for consistent widths)). I have to search for the product again to get a link I can actually buy or send to someone.
Georgia Suitcase Ballots
This is the name of my new Dixiepunk band. We’ll start rehearsing when and if the Democrats let us out of our homes again.
More fun than a suitcase full of Biden votes…
Hairspray, baby!
Pete, I’m getting great results with a very thin layer of Aqua Net Unscented Extra Super Hold. More reliable than the glue sticks with much better bottom surface quality. Best applied with a microfiber cloth that’s been wetted with a replacement cap like this one.
PLA (what I’m mostly sticking to right now) adheres very firmly to a heated bed, but pretty much pops off as soon as it cools.
(note on ABS, since I belatedly noticed that’s what you’re printing with)
Unrelated, plastic calipers. 😁
Dear Amazon,
I honestly would prefer this to the current state of politics:
I’m not sure about your choice of takoyaki as a breakfast food, though:
Unrelated, “why we can’t have nice things”
"Dear user,"
“We are excited to hear about your new project for the first time, and are eager to work with you to meet your team’s needs. However, we will not be able to give a new external partner admin-level access to our internal bug-tracking database by end of day tomorrow, as requested.”
I do not choose you
Anal-Retentive Retention Retainers
After painlessly allowing me to cancel my DirecTV service, AT&T called me five times without leaving a message or supplying Caller ID. I finally picked up this morning’s call, at 10:20 AM on a holiday weekend, so that I could tell whoever it was to fuck off with great vigor. They at least had the courtesy to have a human on the call, but he did not identify himself or his employer until I asked.
Redeemed
The eight special hat-wearing Pikachu that were released for the second Pokemon Sword/Shield DLC expire tomorrow, so I finally updated the games on my Switches, logged in, and entered the codes. For each of my eight save files. Acquiring 64 Pikachu in six different languages takes a little while, so I still haven’t actually played the DLC.
I did not make a thing
Sure, when I’m browsing sites that feature pictures of attractive young women who are not overburdened with clothing, I sometimes find myself thinking, “Daddy’s got a place for you, and the door locks from the outside,” but even if I were in a position to exercise restraint(s), I’d at least be willing to spring for proper cuffs. Hell, it can take days to print a miniature dungeon.
(and, yes, using hard plastic cuffs for anything but cosplay ornaments is a bad idea)
I published a thing
I put the miter box cam pin up on Thingiverse. Yes, I have to be “J.” there instead of “J”, because assumptions. Once upon a time I had a Facebook account, and since they rejected “J.” as well, my name was “Jjusttheletter”. And that was before they started demanding you prove your identity to them.
Make Room, Make Room!
I’d like to thank Omaha Steaks for providing me with such a nice pair of dry-storage boxes for filament. Also for forcing me to clean my freezer, because I hadn’t realized how much space their boxes took up; I think they’ve added more packaging since the last time I got anything from them. Which, admittedly, has been several years.
The peppercorn steak skillet meal was quite tasty, but there were supposed to be two of those in the delivery, so I sent them email, and after 6pm on a holiday weekend, they not only answered but issued a credit for it.
Also, “Soylent Green Is Paimon!!!”
Unrelated
I canceled DirecTV. I pretty much haven’t watched anything on it since before Covid, and they’re raising their prices. They made a perfunctory attempt at customer retention, but I think the reps are insufficiently motivated to push it, given that AT&T’s trying to dump the company like a box of dead bats at a Chinese lab. I just have to drop their equipment off at the nearest UPS or Fedex location and they’ll box and ship it for free.
I already canceled Marvel Unlimited when it came up for renewal, because they’ve cut way back on scanning their archives (“the good stuff”), and nothing that they’ve added in the last six months has been of more than momentary interest (“the derivative woke shitty lame-ass crossover stuff”).
(Unhappy Shamiko is Unhappy)
Also unrelated
I successfully printed a Benchy using hairspray on the bed. Easy to remove, and the bottom surface was much cleaner than with the glue stick. The best part of the hairspray was that touching up the bed after a print takes only a few seconds.
It has a rough spot on the bow, which I’ve seen on some other overhangs, and it seems to only happen in specific orientations. When I printed the big ABLE connector, for instance, one of the three 45-degree angle overhangs came out perfect, and the other two had rough spots that started at about the same height.
A bit of searching suggests this is a cooling issue, and either improving the fan circulation or lowering the print bed temperature should help. You can also apparently lower the actual printing temperature a bit, but that can reduce part strength.
Good to know…
The decision to merge the characters for “dry” and “fuck” in Simplified Chinese is an endless source of comedy.
I made a thing
When it came time to start cutting dowels and building the prototype tinkertoy-takadai (he says, skipping over the step where he made the torii/makitoribō uprights and the gravity ratchet with matching pawl and knob, and it all just worked), I pulled out my $15 miter box and saw, and could only find one of the cam pins.
So I pulled out the micrometer, poked the measurements into OpenSCAD, and made another one. It would probably take less time to search the garage and find the old one, but I always thought it should have had more than two anyway.
Picture Is Unrelated
It just came up when I was shuffling my archive of Pixiv downloads.
…which reminds me that I really ought to log in and try out the new DLC this weekend. And claim half a dozen copies of the eight special Pikachus that expire in a few days.
That's a big fat 'no', Amazon
Quoting from a recent email:
Amazon Sidewalk is a shared network that helps devices work better. For example, if your device loses its wifi connection, Sidewalk can simplify reconnecting to your router and help set up new Echo devices. Sidewalk can also extend the coverage for Sidewalk-enabled devices, such as Ring smart lights and pet and object trackers, so they can stay connected and continue to work over longer distances.
When enabled, Sidewalk uses a small portion of your Internet bandwidth to provide these services to you and your neighbors. This setting will apply to all of your supported Echo and Ring devices that are linked to your Amazon account.
Learn more about Amazon Sidewalk: (url deleted)
Sidewalk is coming to your Echo device later this year, but you can disable this feature at any time from the Amazon Alexa app.
Call me crazy, but this sounds like it defaults to enabling this bandwidth-sharing “feature” on all supported Echo devices, unless you remember to shut it off after it goes live. It currently shows as off in the app, but also “not available yet”. Given that they turned on calling functionality without notice (leading it to call me on my cellphone when I said “porch light on”), I have no reason to trust them.
Note that there appears to be no way to determine what “small portion” means, or who you are currently providing “these services” to.
No Cura for you!
Tried to use Cura 4.8.0 with the settings I linked earlier. Had to abort the print in a real hurry because the leveling probe came down as it started to print the skirt. That does not work.
Despite its flaws, MatterControl looks like the best slicer for me right now. What flaws, you might ask? A completely non-standard UI, an actively user-hostile mouselook implementation, a habit of auto-loading a part that you last looked at two weeks ago, no retention of window location and size, no new Mac builds since April (Windows = 2.20.11, Mac = 2.20.4, Ubuntu = 2.19.10), and it pegs a CPU core when it’s idle. My fans spin up as soon as it launches, even if I never do anything.
The release notes promise a Mac version of 2.20.11, but “coming soon” was two weeks ago. I was able to successfully adapt the cursory build instructions they supply on Github, only to have it blow chunks on launch:
WARNING: The Carbon driver has not been ported to 64bits, and very few parts of Windows.Forms will work properly, or at all
=================================================================
External Debugger Dump:
=================================================================
Abort trap: 6
I wonder how they got it to work back in April, but since the source/build directory is over 24 GB (not counting the Mono and Nuget installs), I’m not going to futz with it any further. I’d like it to work, since they’ve added some nice features, but the Windows version runs fine under VMware. And on the old Surface Pro 2. And the old Asus gaming laptop. And the not-quite-as-old Asus gaming desktop.
So I’m good.
We few, we happy few, we 15 million first-time Biden voters…
🎶 Where did they come from, where did they go,
millions of people, votin’ just Joe. 🎶
If you still have a Mac…
How to use the fingerprint sensor for sudo instead of your password:
sudo vi /etc/pam.d/sudo
# add as second line:
auth sufficient pam_tid.so
(with fallback to password, of course…)
Well, that was novel
A door-to-door steak salesman just stopped by. As he began hawking his wares at a distance of 20 feet, I had to stop him and inform him that I was expecting a very large box from Omaha Steaks in a few hours.
