Dear Amazon

Do I use PLA, PETG, or ABS to print a patio, lawn, and garden?

The Last American President

…and if I’d meant “previous”, I’d have said “previous”.

People who’ve won an honest victory do not coordinate efforts to silence their defeated opponent and anyone even loosely associated with him. People who’ve spent the last four years lying and cheating in an attempt to overturn an election do.

Nothing Trump has said or done in four years justifies the way he’s being treated now. This is just revenge porn.

Unicorn Chaser: The Return of Sukabu

The Jack Vance Mindset

A while back, I made fun of the insane overload of boggle-dice names in the 1979 fantasy novel The Alien.

Yesterday, I picked up the Kindle edition of the first book in Jack Vance’s classic Alastor novels, set waaay off in space and time. I… apologize to Victor Besaw…

starments, Connatic, Lusz, Numenes, Oman Irsht, Idite, Whelm, starmenter, Primarchic, Erdic, Rubrimar, Trullion, Merlank, Trill, hussade, pulsor, paray, cauch, Trevanyi, prutanshyr, Gaw, Kerubian, Maheul, Vayamenda, Welgen, menas, jerdine, Saurkash, Rabendary, Jut Hulden, Marucha, semprissima, Ambal, Gilweg, Saur, fanzaneels, sheirl, Shira, Glinnes, Glay, Sharue, merlings

That’s just the first few pages, and many of these terms are explained in footnotes or lengthy asides, further reducing the amount of actual narrative.

Fuck Macintouch, too

Another fuckwit who doesn’t know what the word “seditious” means. And who slept through the last five years of unhinged Leftist character assassinations, trespassing (including Capitol buildings, hinthint), occupation, violent assaults, rioting, looting, pillaging, arson, murder, and outright domestic terrorism, much of it perpetrated by an organization that proudly displays its Communist Party heritage.

(side note: it occurs to me that this was the first appearance of the modern incel)

Apple QA, still wet behind the ears

Apple’s fondness for closed systems has resulted in their top-of-the-line headphones filling up with moisture. Best comment: “You’re holding it wrong”.

And another thing I hate about Cults3D…

…is the sensory overload of all the damn animated GIFs that model “creators” (I use the term loosely) use as thumbnail images. They’re spending more time trying to attract attention to their uploads than they spend making or testing them. Honestly, I’d almost be willing to pay a monthly subscription to hide the animated GIFs and weed out (coughcough) all the 420 and fraud.

MyMiniFactory is slightly less frenetic, flipping through the thumbnails for each upload every few seconds as you page through search results. On the bright side, while it has its share of inane and pirated products, most of the non-free items appear to have actually been made by their uploaders.

And they host Scan The World, a useful archive of actual cool stuff gathered from museums and collections around the world. Many of them are difficult or impossible to print, but there are some real gems in the collection. I can’t find Darmok or Jalad, though.

Potential filament filter

This is an interesting design. Huge compared to most of them, and specifically sized to fit a Prusa printer, but designed to use microfiber cleaning cloth for low drag, and sensibly printable with chamfered edges and rounding for the filament path. I’d prefer a locking connector to the “pause print and insert magnets” trick, but I can just tape it shut for the initial test; my goal is to get back to printing things other than printer parts.

Japan, maybe?

My sister sent me an update indicating that when the current restrictions are lifted in Japan at the end of January, the new rules for entering foreigners will be A) recent COVID test before boarding the plane, B) mandatory COVID test when you arrive. I need to look up the details to see if there’s also a quarantine while you wait for the results.

I expect they’ll be trying to streamline this as spring progresses, in order to shore up the tourist economy and possibly hold the delayed 2020 Olympics. There’s a lot of money on the line.

Included, Batteries

The other set of third-party batteries I ordered recently, a pair of NP-BX1 and a charger from Powerextra, distinguished themselves by actually charging. No idea yet how their working life compares to real Sony batteries, but even if they’re only half as good, they’ll still keep me from running dry during day trips when I get back to Japan.

Even without shooting video, the little WX800 has the potential to drain the batteries faster, because the long zoom range and slow lens means that I’ll be leaning more heavily on using the optical image stabilization and multi-shot noise/blur reduction.

Sony does have an awesome new body that goes up to ISO 409,600, but…

Things I Won’t Buy in 2021

1. new camera or lenses

2. new computer

3. new car

4. new oven, stovetop, and range hood

5. non-emergency home improvements

Why not? Because with Democrats desperate to pay off a frankenhooker coalition that has nothing in common but hate, I expect massive spending and tax increases. Drunken sailors will stare in shock.

It won’t appease their mobs, who’ve learned that there are no consequences to destroying cities, but they’ll do it anyway, because it’s all they know, and they can skim a percentage off the top for themselves.

Reasons not to use Cults3D, #4

Stolen designs. Seriously, these are obviously professional product photos of objects that are not 3d-printed, and a quick Google image search finds them for sale all over the world. Some clown just scanned them in and is trying to sell them as their own work, using the original product photos as bait.

And, yes, there are plenty of scanned copyrighted statues on all the sites, but usually they aren’t brazen enough to try to sell them. Thingiverse tries to cover their costs with ads, while Cults3D is a marketplace that happens to have some free items.

Not Going There

Yesterday was not a good day for America. I will not discuss it further at this time, so here are some pictures of cute girls with cats.

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1. The SolarWinds breach allowed Russian hackers to vigorously penetrate the US government.

2. Most Secure Election Ever.

After several quite successful prints with the Sunlu PETG, I started getting occasional defects on the vertical edges, accompanied by squeaking or clicking noises. After some basic troubleshooting and a few hits of the “purge” button, I watched the next print lay down a perfect first layer followed by a big glob of filament that stuck up high enough for the nozzle to plow right through it and create a loop.

I switched back to the Hatchbox PLA and kicked off a 5-hour print, and had no defects or unusual noises. I’ll have to inspect the Sunlu filament carefully; with luck it’s just surface cruft that can be removed with a filament filter.

…as soon as I find a filter design that is A) sensibly printable, B) doesn’t cause immense drag on the filament, and C) doesn’t occasionally shed foam onto the “cleaned” filament. Most promising idea I’ve seen so far is to double-fold a small piece of microfiber cloth and attach it around the filament with a standard binder clip.

(and, no, I won’t use it to “oil the filament”; that seemed like a bad idea even before I read up on it)

In other news, my two free spools of Dremel PLA arrived, and instead of the old half-kilo spools I was expecting, they’re the new 3/4-kilo size. Both blue.

Dear Amazon,

I don’t want to spray this in my kitchen…

Design flaws

Slight revision to my earlier comments about the external spool holder working perfectly. It has one flaw: when a brand-new spool is loaded, the mounting angle puts enough of a twist on the filament that it’s possible for it to slip over the outside edge. It can’t get tangled, because the arm is in the way, but it won’t feed as smoothly.

My quick fix was to just put something inside the Cambro that was big enough to keep the filament on the reel. Tomorrow, I’ll design and print a clip-on filament guide to ensure it stays on track.

Meanwhile, the Sunlu PETG prints pretty well (shiny!), although I’m still tinkering with the settings a bit to eliminate stringing.

I got an angle

I did have to change one PrusaSlicer setting for one of my common test prints, the baby takadai koma. PS supposedly attempts to pick the best angle for supported overhangs, but in this particular case, it does nothing at all, and uses the same angle regardless of the part’s orientation. Could be a bug in the 2.3.0 release candidate that I just upgraded to; if I scale the part to 250%, it changes the behavior on one of the two overhangs.

For now I’m just going to set it to 45° in my profiles, and double-check the print preview when I know I’ll have significant horizontal overhangs. One of the nice features in PS is the ability to define override zones for settings like this, either with bounding objects or layer height ranges. In this case, there’s only one pair of overhangs, so it’s easier to just set it globally.

Fuck off, Microsoft

Woot stopped scrolling in Safari, so I visited the site with Edge to see if there was anything interesting. It promptly popped up a coupon using Edge’s built-in affiliate system, informing me that I could save money for me and make money for Microsoft by clipping a coupon.

Um, no. Not now, not ever. One more privacy setting to keep track of, I guess.

Oh, and the scrollbars were broken there, too, so apparently Woot picked up a bunch of discontinued web designers for cheap.

Thingiverse is in a horribly broken state, and apparently has been for quite a while (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). The Customizer feature has been down for months, and the search engine still hasn’t registered the miter box cam pin I uploaded over a month ago. Despite being downloadable from the direct link, it doesn’t even show up on my profile page.

(a lot of people seem to be migrating to Cults3D, which is at least functional, although the ongoing infestation of garbage seems to be clobbering its performance; I mean, how many dozens of kit-bashed buddha-with-another-head variations does anyone really need to upload in one day? Also, you have to create an account before they’ll let you download anything, and they don’t have an equivalent to Thingy’s customizer at all)

So I haven’t bothered to upload the customizable spool adapter I made to fit Sunlu filament to the Dremel 3D45 external spool holder.

Printed at 0.3mm layer height, all four pieces only use up 17 grams of filament, and take less than 90 minutes to print. OpenSCAD source after the jump.

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April in Saga

Not me, zombie idol singers.

🎶 Don’t fuck with me, AT&T… 🎶

🎶 …the truth is, we all have left you. 🎶

I canceled DirecTV on 11/26. Following their instructions, I took the equipment to the nearest UPS Store for return shipping on 11/28. I got a receipt.

Good thing I still have it, because they just tried to bill me $155 for “Non-Return Recordable Equipment”. That’s $135 for the equipment and $20 in city and state taxes. (less the $8 credit on my account that they never refunded to me…)

I’m sure that next week they’ll send me a glossy color mailer offering me a special deal to become their customer again. Yeah, not gonna happen.

[Update: spent twenty minutes on hold, carefully spoke the 20-digit return confirmation number from November to the rep, and after 10 minutes of loading time, received a guarantee that the charge will be removed from my bill.]

Don’t eat the yellow ducky

I could print this Thing, but I have no snow to use it on.

Come to think of it, though, I did buy a rubber-duck ice cube mold some time back; I should try it out, now that I’ve got all the Omaha Steaks boxes out of the freezer. Oh, and the Death Star ice cubes, as well.

Asked and answered!

Macrumors: What do you want to see from Apple in 2021?

J: QA.

Not Batteries, Included

Somewhere in my holiday ordering, I bought myself a pair of third-party NP-FW50 batteries for my Sony A6500 camera, with included charger. They have pretty good reviews, and RAVPower has been around for a while.

Since I already packed them up to return them the same day they arrived, you might guess I’m not happy. One battery charged, the other did not. At all. I’ve bought their stuff before and gotten what I paid for, but this time, no.

I have a different brand of batteries coming for the WX800 next week, and I’ll be interested to see if that company has QA.

Why camera batteries, when I’m not really even leaving the house for the foreseeable future? Gift cards; I just started picking things off my wish lists.