@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

dual_sport_dork

@[email protected]

Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.

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Cyclists blame "utterly ridiculous bike prices" for brands' ongoing struggles ( road.cc )

Cyclists blame "utterly ridiculous bike prices" for brands' ongoing struggles, after Giant's sales slashed again; Visma–Lease a Bike's cursed 2024 continues; Devastated Arsenal fan turns to... Lance Armstrong; Bargain hunting + more on the live blog

dual_sport_dork ,
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I bought my Giant Warp DS2 in 2004. I still have it. There it shall remain.

There isn't a damn thing wrong with it (and it's motorized now). 26" wheels were good enough for our forefathers, so they're good enough for me.

Will Biden's new 100% tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles affect e-bikes? ( electrek.co )

The Biden Administration announced sweeping new tariffs on imported goods from China, including increasing tariffs on electric vehicles from China.......

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

TL;DR: No one knows yet.

Saved you a click.

dual_sport_dork ,
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Fuck it, we're going to six skins.

Did the premise of an entity approaching you only when it's not being viewed originate with Doctor Who's Weeping Angels?

The Weeping Angels apparently originated with Steven Moffat seeing a statue of a weeping angel in a structure in a cemetery and returning later to find out it was gone. At least according to this RadioTimes article. They first appeared in 2007 in the episode Blink....

dual_sport_dork ,
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Released October 23, 1988... In Japan.

Us gaijin did not get it until 1990.

dual_sport_dork ,
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I generally do them by locating the center point, constraining the radius, and then the angle. The angle tool is a little janky specifically on arcs, but it does work. Or if the ends of the arc are fixed to something also immovable, you can just do the radius and angle and use the coincident constraint to stick its endpoints to the ends of other lines and leave the center point alone.

Yours was an interesting approach. I probably would have used a bezier for the pointy end of the heart.

dual_sport_dork ,
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When I print ABS/ASA, I print it on a kapton sheet with hairspray as an adhesion aid. My printer (X-Max 3) does have an enclosed and heated chamber as well. I have not had an issue with getting parts off after the build plate has cooled. However, the addition of the kapton sheet means that the nuclear option is always available: Peel the sheet off along with the part, and put down a new one.

They cost like 50 cents each in bulk. The skinflint in me prickles at this, but that's a lot cheaper than having to replace a borked build plate. I have not had to do this with my current printer, but I did with my old one once.

dual_sport_dork ,
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I put the build plate in place as normal, but with a layer of kapton tape applied to it. (My printer won't work without the steel build plate installed; my Z home sensor is magnetic.) In my case, I have a smooth backed one that doesn't have the texture on it. You can apply it over the textured side of your build plate, too, but it gives you a resulting bottom surface that's kind of weird and lumpy.

Kapton tape will work in a pinch, but covering your entire build plate with it is a pain in the ass with all the seams between each strip. I get big sheets of the stuff like these ones, and do it all in one shot. You can pretty easily trim them to fit whatever size your printer's built plate is.

Remember to readjust your Z offset after you apply the tape because you'll have to account for its thickness.

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

If you have that much warp you either have a temperature gradient problem, i.e. your enclosure is not enclosed, not retaining heat, or is too cold, or in extreme cases you have a part that's just not going to work with FDM printing in ABS or ASA (or probably nylon or polycarb either, at that rate). I think you were on the right track with your initial assessment.

Do you have a build chamber heater? My Qidi has one, and I feel like it's basically cheating. Especially compared to my last printer. It allows me to Just Print with ABS without any of the prior nail-biting or headaches. It feels kind of weird.

dual_sport_dork ,
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I think the chamber heater will go as high as 90, although for ABS the slicer warns me not to go higher than 60. It is PID controlled so you can set a specific temperature setpoint. And if my thermal camera is to believed it's pretty consistent. The good news is also that it can heat the chamber to 55 or 60 in just about ten minutes.

dual_sport_dork ,
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Presumably the manufacturers of these things would have to set up a dealer network in the US of some sort in order to be competitive at all. Otherwise, these will be completely dead in the water with US buyers. Plastic crap from Temu and AliExpress is one thing, but I can tell you nobody will buy something as expensive as a car knowing it's completely unsupported.

Historically, importing Chinese vehicles has been a totally buyer-beware operation. You might get a short replacement parts only warranty from whoever the importer is if you're very lucky. Otherwise, you're on your own. Both finding the parts and doing the labor. I say this as an owner of three (3) Chinese motorcycles which have been fine enough machines for what they are, but never mind a warranty -- no mechanic's shop will touch them even if you're willing to pay. So I do my own work on them.

But cheap motorcycles are way less complex than a full sized electric car.

dual_sport_dork ,
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Parts, sure. So, after a 3 month shipping wait from China you get a replacement battery or drive unit dropped at the end of your driveway on a pallet. Now what?

I don't think any buyers other than maybe the guy who runs the Aging Wheels channel are going to be willing to take apart their own Chinese EV and do major repairs to it. If no one works on it, or if they open a perfunctory couple of service centers that are all conveniently thousands of miles away from where you live, that's not going to do you much good.

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

glue to the base

Por que no just fuse them together in your slicer and print as a monolithic part? You could probably even skip the base and just arrange the four bins together.

dual_sport_dork ,
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Wasn't there a Lifetime original movie about that?

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, that seems like the obvious response to me. Want to pretend like we're armed? Okay, now we're armed.

dual_sport_dork ,
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I have to wonder just how many people are left who are willing to deliberately sign up to work for Tesla at this point anyway. I certainly wouldn't.

After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year ( www.billboard.com )

When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not...

dual_sport_dork ,
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I can believe it. I still have multiple libraries of physical media, and I pretty much never buy anything new that I can't likewise physically own. I might rip and make MP3's or transcode or emulate, or whatever, for convenience, but sometimes it's just nice to be able to stick the disk or cartridge in the machine and have it just work without any of the associated modern ancillary bullshit.

Everything wants to be a service now. I just find that so irritating.

dual_sport_dork ,
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Wow, they specifically call out Sealioning. Rad.

dual_sport_dork ,
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The flame retardant thing is baffling me, anyway. Flame retardant fabrics/plastics in a vehicle either toting around 10-20 gallons of monumentally flammable gasoline, or hundreds of kWh of lithium batteries. Sure, chief, the fabrics will keep it from catching on fire...

dual_sport_dork ,
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Like cotton/linen fabrics? Cotton is pretty naturally flame resistant. Probably can't help you on all the plastics in a modern car interior, though.

dual_sport_dork ,
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Crap like this is why I ride a motorcycle.

Only one of my bikes even manages to have enough electronics in it to have a clock.

dual_sport_dork ,
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Playing MP3's off of a USB stick is literally all I do with my car's stereo, and in fact all I want it to do.

This Street-Legal Two-Seater Trike Is No Spyder, but It May Just Be the Deal of the Year ( www.autoevolution.com )

Massimo Electric is the crew responsible for selling this $7,000 electric trike that can fit up to two people and reach a top speed of 50 mph

dual_sport_dork ,
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Drink every time the author says "bugger." Must be Australian.

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

Notwithstanding the instant privacy nightmare this would create, essentially abolishing online anonymity overnight, this is kinda-sorta what MAC addresses are already. As to why MAC addresses can be spoofed so easily without any real impact on anything, refer to my first statement.

dual_sport_dork ,
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Yeah, this definitely was not a case of "competition makes everything better." More a case of every greedy motherfucker wanting to have their own private walled fiefdom making everything worse. Who's going to be the first to bring up the GabeN quote?

I'm with you, I am proud to say I subscribe to precisely zero streaming services. There's very little on any of them I actually want anyway, and anything I might actually want to see is readily available... elsewhere.

dual_sport_dork ,
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Well, only relatively.

In order to work batteries need to have a certain amount of instability built in, on a chemical level. Them electrons have to want to jump from one material to a more reactive one; there is literally no other way. There is no such thing as a truly "safe and stable" battery chemistry. Such a battery would be inert, and not able to hold a charge. Even carbon-zinc batteries are technically flammable. I think these guys are stretching the truth a little for the layman, or possibly for the investor.

Lithium in current lithium-whatever cells is very reactive. Sodium on its own is extremely reactive, even moreso than lithium. Based on the minimal lookup I just did, this company appears to be using an aqueous electrolyte which makes sodium-ion cells a little safer (albeit at the cost of lower energy density, actually) but the notion that a lithium chemistry battery will burn but a sodium chemistry one "won't" is flat out wrong. Further, shorting a battery pack of either chemistry is not likely to result in a good day.

dual_sport_dork ,
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It is if it's a dry electrolyte cell.

dual_sport_dork ,
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It is definitely that. That's kind of the point, actually. Sodium is easier to come by than lithium and does not require mining it from unstable parts of the world, nor relying on China.

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

Well, metallic sodium liberates hydrogen real fast on contact with water, which I guess is tantamount to the same thing.

Yes. But not to the same level as just dropping a brick of pure sodium in a bathtub. In a battery like this there is not pure lithium/sodium/whatever just sloshing around inside. The sodium is tied up being chemically bonded with whatever the anode and cathode materials are. Only a minority of the available sodium is actually free in the form of ions carrying the charge from cathode to anode.

Just as with lithium-ion chemistry batteries, it is vital that the cells remain sealed from the outside because the materials inside will indeed react with air, water, and the water in the air. Exposing the innards will cause a rapid exothermic reaction, i.e. it will get very hot and optionally go off bang.

dual_sport_dork ,
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Post vid, please.

dual_sport_dork ,
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I'm sure they'll want to, but that'll be a little better than need to, i.e. relying on them for the raw materials as well.

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

Honestly even at this price point I don't see much use for a machine like this for hobbyists. Plastic SLS printing only has a few advantages over the significantly cheaper and widely supported FDM machines most of us use. SLS printers can create overhangs and do "print in midair" tricks that FDM can't because the partially completed part is supported by the unfused powder, and they theoretically produce parts that are isotropic, i.e. there is no difference in layer vs. planar adhesion and they are as strong in the Z axis as they are in the X and Y. This might matter for mechanical parts, but it's not terribly important for the vast majority of people who are just cranking out low-poly Pikachus and Deadpool busts or whatever.

Yes, I can definitely foresee this being a mess. You know how people clutch their pearls over microplastics? SLS powder is microplastic, factory made, in a bucket.

It would be a different story if we could get a metal-sintering SLS machine at this price point. Even if it could only do aluminum, that would change everything.

dual_sport_dork ,
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There absolutely were pocket TV's. As a kid, even, I owned two of them. They are now of course functionally useless because they predate the switch to digital television by a significant margin. Both of mine were Realistic brand ones, which was an in store label for Radio Shack. Color LCD displays, telescoping antenna, and they ran off of 4 AA batteries. They were about the size of an OG Gameboy or a large Walkman.

I might even still have one in a box of tech junk somewhere. I believe the second one was a Realistic Pocketvision 27.

You can still buy a portable digital TV. These were always a bit of a stretch for a "pocket" television, more the size of a small tablet but thicker. But they totally did, and still do, exist.

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

It's also significantly easier to clean off the windows/plasticwork than cigarette residue. Vape juice and its byproducts are literally water soluble. Just, like, use some Windex.

Tobacco crud is nearly impossible to remove, especially from cloth upholstery. I inherited my truck from a smoker and despite thoroughly cleaning it multiple times you can still tell when you sit down that it was owned by a smoker, despite the fact that no one has smoked in it for at least a decade. I've decided it's just my beater truck and I don't care. (Crank windows, manual transfer case, AM/FM radio, no CD, etc.)

How do you build complex shapes? ( i.imgur.com )

I've made a large number of custom prints, and all of them were created using TinkerCad. It's an amazing toolkit, stupid easy to use but versatile. That is ... until something needs a tiny adjustment somewhere. That's when I feel it would've been neat to use parametric CAD instead....

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

I can't comment on other software since my experience with the commercial options is near-zero. However, specifically in FreeCAD you can do some incredibly tricksy things with sweeps and lofts. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of them.

You could create your shape there almost entirely with lofts. A loft takes two or more sketches and you can think of them like "keyframes" in 3D space. Typically you would stack them on top of each other at the specific locations you need, and at the location of each sketch the 3D solid have a cross section of exactly the shape and dimensions of that sketch, and then the shape will be interpolated in the space in between in various ways you can select. The dimensions of each sketch can, of course, be completely parametric and as dimensionally accurate as you need them to be.

The pocket tool is also extremely powerful if wielded creatively. You can knock holes of arbitrary shape and complexity through things, not just circles and hexagons, to any depth. You can create complex three dimensional curves by making a solid of some shape or another, and then making a pocket all the way through it at right angles or indeed any angle. Think of it kind of like a milling machine pass.

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

Yes, you can.

You can set up datum planes in arbitrary orientations but in all honesty, I've never bothered. You can position a sketch in any orientation, at any angle, at any position in 3D space. You are not confined to right angles of the X, Y, and Z axes.

Sketches used in a loft don't even have to be oriented on the same plane relative to each other.

dual_sport_dork ,
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https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/22a07bfd-206d-4b6a-ab10-be925ac1ea47.png

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

This is the exact opposite experience I've had. My area has (had, at least) an unusually high Juggalo population in the mid 2000's.

I have never met a more violent, bigoted, ignorant, petty, and hypocritical bunch of people in my life. For all the talk about being "all family," they sure do like inventing trivial shit to beef about constantly, and then accuse each other of not being "real" Juggalos. If you get more than two of them in one place, a fight is guaranteed to break out eventually. If it's not over drugs or somebody's girlfriend, it's some manner of asinine doctrinal shit, like their taste in shitty music is an actual religion or something. And that's before they even start fucking with outsiders.

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

Fuck you if you own a motorcycle, I guess.

My RV200's tank only holds 1.7 gallons, and my CH50 will only take one. I guess I'm meant to just dispense the remaining three gallons onto the ground, then...?

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

archaic and inflexible.

No, it's working precisely as intended. There are so many layers of byzantine laws and ordinances in the US on multiple levels -- federal, state, county, municipal -- that anyone who really wants to is guaranteed to be able to find something to harass and/or arrest you for, no matter what. Probable cause can be rendered meaningless by making a humongous array of trivial things technically illegal.

Does your window tint meet the specific requirements for this county? Is your stereo 0.01dB louder than our municipal maximum? Are your license plate and registration sticker acceptably clean? Do your tires have the correct tread depth? Do you have a radar detector installed? Do you have an air freshener hanging from your rearview? Are you carrying your written prescription around with your pills? Is your pocketknife blade too long? Do your cigarettes have the wrong state's tax stamp on them? Did you remember to sign the back of your registration card? Whoopsie doodle, this state passed a law mandating minimum headlight height from the road, too bad your car left the factory out of compliance. Could you step out of the vehicle for me, sir?

Etc., etc., etc.

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

?

The NACS connector is the Tesla connector. NACS was entirely their doing; Tesla won this format war. So what's for them to be salty about?

The only wrinkle is that older Teslas require a reflash to work with the new (or rather old, same as CCS) communication standard that would be used by NACS equipped non-Tesla charging stations.

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

Gigabyte (remember them?)

Sure do! Both my board and the board in my wife's computer are Gigabyte. So's my video card. The only issue I've ever had with their stuff has been a bad stick of ram a few years ago, which they exchanged without argument.

Brands in this sphere I definitely have had trouble with: MSI, Razer -- so many problems with Razer -- and ASUS.

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

You’re not rewarded for maintaining or finishing products.

No kidding.

It is 2024, and here is your yearly reminder that you still can't create a new folder/label in the official Gmail Android app despite the online documentation implying that you can.

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

As your attorney I advise you to buy a motorcycle. Bikes and bike parts are cheaper. And then you can have more bikes than cars, and more bikes to buy parts for. Wait, where was I going with this again?

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

This horseshit again? Physical product available for independent analysis, or it didn't happen.

It's not like the Chinese are famous for lying about the specs on things they manufacture or anything. Every week we hear about some Chinese company poised to "revolutionize" the EV with pie-in-the-sky range figures and yet the market continues to remain resolutely un-revolutionized.

And as usual, this article harps on "range" as if that's not an easily fudged figure. The real numbers we need to see are watts per volume, or watts per mass. And number of charge cycles tolerated, and how many before it loses what percentage of capacity. Any idiot can claim to make a 1,300 mile, 2,000 mile, 5,000 mile, 1,000,000 mile battery pack -- just make the pack bigger, or the vehicle lighter, or both. That tells us nothing meaningful whatsoever about the battery chemistry itself. Advertising us what hypothetical ranges someone thinks a pack made of these "could" build is meaningless. We could build a 1300 mile battery pack right now with LiFePo cells if we wanted to, via the simple expedient of filling a dump truck with the things.

dual_sport_dork ,
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And like all of these novelty phones, it has no 5G support and extremely narrow 4G band support, which means this will be nearly worthless for users in North America. And it will quickly become even more worthless as carriers are actively discontinuing their existing 3G and 4G bands.

This'll work great for most people who don't want to actually use it as a phone. I.e. it'd make a killer media playback device, remote control, or tiny PDA.

I was interested in their Titan a while ago but it, like all of their phones, has the same problem. There is no sense whatsoever in buying a new phone in 2024 that has such piddling network support.

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

FWIW and for anyone else reading this, I am running Win10 Pro in the US on my work machine and it let me uninstall Copilot just now when I tried it.

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

I was exposed to quite a few teachers and administrators throughout my public school career who clearly shouldn't be trusted with a pencil and compass, let alone a firearm.

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