Sticktoitivity

Accepted wisdom is that the maximum practical layer height for a given nozzle size is ~80% of its diameter, or 0.32mm for the common 0.4mm nozzles. I was tinkering with Cura’s adaptive layer height feature (which does not offer the customizability of PrusaSlicer’s, and is hidden away as an experimental feature), and it happened to generate some layers all the way up at 0.4. So I figured, what the hell, let’s try it on something that doesn’t have to be sturdy, and that would still work just fine if the top half fell off. Or even the top 2/3.

Turned out just fine, with some very light stringing on the inside of the tube that was easy to shave. Fits nicely, too. I’m sure there are plenty of models where 0.4mm layers wouldn’t work, but it’s a time-saver when it does.

(and, yes, if I want to really speed things up, MicroSwiss does make 0.6mm and 0.8mm nozzles for the 3D45, as well as replacement 0.4mm ones; all of them are also rated for abrasive filaments, something I’ve had no reason to try yet)

Related,

My miter box cam pin has finally been indexed on Thingiverse, and shows up both in searches and in my profile. It took two months.

Found a Zorkmid

Well, printed one, anyway, as a Cura test. Came out pretty decent, printed on edge on a raft.

No pie for you!

Corona-chan apparently took down the local Pizza Hut a few weeks ago. Permanently? Still showed as closed on Friday night at dinnertime. If I wanted good pizza I’d make it myself, but first I’d have to go buy pepperoni and cheese. I tend to order from PH if I don’t want to go out, because it’s better than Domino’s, half the price of Round Table, and won’t make me sick like Mountain Mike’s does.

No cut for you!

The local chain haircut joint was shut down by the governor (again) at the beginning of December, and despite him opening things back up a little in a likely-futile effort to stop the petition to shitcan his l’il-dictator ass, they haven’t reopened yet. It looks like their location in Seaside is back online, and I know the folks from the Salinas shop were working shifts over there, so maybe I’ll make the 20-mile drive today or tomorrow.

No kids for you!

Episode 4 of That Spider Show was a bit more interesting, because it didn’t advance the B ArkArc.

(spider is unrelated)

No shows for you!

I haven’t found anything else worth watching for days. Last thing I managed to make it through was Matt Smith’s final arc in Doctor Who.

Amusing Note

Shady web sites that redirect you to malware are still using the “your Flash Player is out of date” con. And it probably still works about as well as it ever did.

This Just In

Remember the “insurrection” that Trump supposedly incited with his speech, that was used to take down Parler despite being coordinated on Twitter and Facebook? Y’know, the one where police opened the doors to let protesters into the building before killing an unarmed woman who wasn’t threatening anyone? The one where they found pipe bombs that the FBI just revealed were planted the night before?

Stream No Evil

The Disney+ streaming service is protecting children from Disney movies. Another way to protect them is to cancel Disney+ and go back to buying DVDs. And, y’know, parent instead of leaving them alone with a remote and a megacorp deciding what they should watch.

Amazon “recommendation” roundup

I’ve got a lot of mice and laptop stands around the house, but I’ve never really thought of them as “decor”.

FYI, police are not generally well-disposed toward people who carry spiked “keychains”, which are in any case more of an urban-defense thing than “hunting & fishing” accessories. And how many people actually need to color-coordinate their stabby-sticks with their wardrobe?

“They are gardeners and carpenters. They are not tomato-men.”

While there are occasions where I would agree that pom-poms constitute appropriate apparel for women, I don’t think I should be the one buying them, even as gifts. It’s really more of a gift for me.

I can at least understand how they ended up here.

This one strikes pretty close to home, because I was just about to run out of the stuff, and Gevalia seems to still be struggling to deal with Covid-induced coffee distribution issues. There are people trying to scalp their K-cups on a number of sites, and pretty much every local store that carries them hasn’t restocked in months. I’ve had to redo my monthly subscription several times as the different SKUs come and go. I wasn’t sure that I’d be getting any this month at all until yesterday morning, and it wouldn’t be the first time that Amazon marked something as “shipped” that wasn’t really, really on the way.

Fingers jittery and crossed.

Update: 1 out of 3 is bad

My Gevalia k-cup order arrived, but while the box was the correct size, it was suspiciously light. Opening it revealed that my 3-pack had been reduced to a 1-pack. Sadly, the amount I was charged was not reduced to match. Amazon does not offer a “hey, you sent the wrong stuff” button, just a “return or replace” button. Not even a “hey you shipped me a box of lightbulbs in just a padded envelope” button, which also happened today, although those at least work.

Update: Yes, we have no more coffee

Since the only option Amazon offered me was to return the undersized coffee shipment, I did so, selecting the “missing or broken parts” reason, with details in the comment. Their new system determined that it’s not worth it for them to have me mail them back, so they’re refunding my money but letting me keep the partial shipment.

The only ones in-stock at Amazon are $20 for 6 k-cups, so I have about two weeks to find another source for the stuff.

Ah, coffee!

Found an Amazon marketplace dealer whose price for 3 6-packs was only moderately extortionate, and which became reasonable when I factored in the cost of the 12-pack I got to keep out of the return. Hopefully with the remarkably-sudden nationwide discovery that lockdowns are bad, supplies will stabilize in time for next month’s shipment.

On CallCallCallCall

Yesterday was the beginning of my first week of on-call since I started the new job at the end of August (pause for hysterical laughter at the thought of only one week at a time). When Baby’s First Alert went off, PagerDuty simultaneously sent email, SMS, a push notification, and a phone call; it sounded like my phone was having an audiogasm. My first priority was trimming it to one alert at a time.

And, yes, one of the Nagios errors I’ve been paged over was a log-scanner that flagged an unfamiliar error message. It turns out that “X dose not exists” is a surprisingly popular typo, in a variety of contexts.

Technically not a lens!

Despite the high risk of higher taxes this year, I decided to stretch my no-new-cameras-or-lenses rule slightly to buy a Nikon-to-Sony tilt/shift adapter. +/-10mm of shift, 10° of tilt, and 360° of rotation with click-stops so you can use them in any direction. It’s not a true view camera adapter, but it also doesn’t cost $850 and weigh considerably more than the camera.

A quick test with my really old Nikon 35mm f/2.8 and 50mm f/1.4 allowed full movements with no vignetting on my A6500. It’s something I’d only pack on days where I was planning to visit a castle (or if I ever made it waaay out to the Yamato museum in Kure to get some pics of the 1:10 scale model), but it does something software simply can’t.

(and, yes, there are half a dozen 3d-printed tilt/shift adapter designs out there, but most of them have the wrong mount on one or both sides, and are clunky and/or hard to print. Also, I’m not really willing to trust my lenses to their design skills. I’ve had a camera fall four feet onto concrete due to a defective strap; trusting a 3d-printed connector seems worse)

(and, yes, my current straps are very sturdy)

Also not a lens!

Somewhere I have a very nice pinhole adapter for my 4x5 camera, which would be great if I had a darkroom, or a high-end digital back. Since I don’t, I was idly looking at the various body-cap adapters, which range from actual body caps to nicely-made adapters that take lens caps and filters.

That Amazon listing didn’t include the effective aperture size, which is kinda useful information, so I went to their official site, and the very first sample picture from the product was:

Because nothing says “infinite depth of field” like a giant replica of a masturbation device.

Monster Girl Doctor

Sometime last year I read the first two light novels for this and lost interest, so the anime wasn’t high on my list. After idly watching the first few episodes, I’m not terribly interested in more, unless they focus on the cyclops girl Memé.

Someone has work-in-progress configs on Github to get the current version of Cura to work with the Dremel 3D45. The basic functionality is there, but there’s no network or camera support, and the output quality is… poor (way too much retraction and stringing, and big gaps in pin-like elements). I’m happy with PrusaSlicer for now, but it’s nice to see someone working on more options.

Incidentally, I took a look at how Dremel got the network printing and webcam support into their customized old version of Cura. They heavily edited the UltiMaker 3 script to use their API, but it looks like they never got any kind of network discovery working. It would be faster to write a new Python plugin than to try to modify the current version of the UM3 code, especially since I’ve already got a working Bash script.

Quality update!

To no surprise, replacing the 6.5mm retraction with the 2-3mm that Dremel had in their version of Cura significantly improved the results. I can now do head-to-head comparisons between Cura 4.8 and PrusaSlicer 2.3, to decide which one handles specific parts better.

For my babydai koma, I find the overhang+supports quality unacceptable in both, so I’ve added some 0.5mm-wide manual supports to the model that can be easily snapped off. This forces both slicers to treat them as bridges, which significantly improves the results. And cuts the print time and filament use a bit.

Problem #1: search engines.

I searched Thingiverse for “coat hanger”. The first page of results included a hydroponics planter, a broom holder, custom-word pens, filament holders, a geared card shuffler, a toolbox, a chicken water dispenser, and a trebuchet. 8 of the 20 items did indeed have the words “coat hanger” in their description, but 5 of them were really coat hooks, and one of the hangers was for doll clothing. One of the remaining two was a copy of a commercial folding design not optimized for 3D printing: when you need both rafts and internal supports, and it’s still a “work in progress” after three years, and it takes half a day to print…

I didn’t actually need a coat hanger, even the fancy folding travel kind, but a lot of the hype around 3D printing was based on the idea that instead of shipping things to our homes, we’d download plans for things and print them ourselves. Which leads to…

Problem #2: too much fiddling around

Turns out that future is gated by someone managing to build affordable foolproof turnkey climate-controlled dual-extruder 3D printers with precise tolerances and automated (non-toxic!) part-cleaning and ejection, that accept data in a vendor-independent format that clearly describes the parameters needed to print successfully.

Also, the commercial travel hanger linked above is 10 for $10 on Amazon, so that imaginary practical printer also has to be really cheap and really fast.

I expect we’ll see 3d-on-demand shipped overnight from Amazon long before we’ll see it in non-hobbyist homes or even neighborhood print services. Speaking of which, I’d like to see some numbers on just how effectively all the hyped “distributed pandemic ppe printing” efforts actually delivered usable products to people who needed them.

Finally, something practical to print!

Not gonna lie, it won’t be easy…

Unrelated,

The first book of the Solo Leveling light novel is now coming out February 16th. Dead-tree-only, at the moment, without a Kindle version listed.

I ran out to Costco in between meetings Friday, where I found Clorox sanitizing wipes for the first time since March. A 5-pack of giant containers, of course, Costco being Costco, and it turned out that two of them had been crushed just enough that they’d be dried out by the time I wanted them, so I pulled out the wipes and double-bagged them in freezer bags.

Before I left, I started a six-hour print job. When I came back, it was finished. Or, more precisely, it wasn’t printing any more, and there was no error message on the display, but it was only maybe a third done. It looked fine, I had plenty of filament left, and a quick extruder test showed no issues of any kind. I wish I’d left my status script running, which would have captured any error messages.

Lesson learned. Reprinted the same file and it worked perfectly, of course.