The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Administrivia

Overhead

  • Poughkeepsie Day School Mini MakerFaire

    In the (admittedly unlikely) event you’re in the neighborhood today, visit the Poughkeepsie Mini MakerFaire. I’ll be doing a “Practical 3D Printing” show-n-tell in one of the tiny music practice rooms in the main hallway, handing out tchochkes, and generally talking myself hoarse. The HP 7475A plotter will be cranking out Superforumulas next door, too, because everybody loves watching a plotter.

    Usually, I print dump trucks or some such, but yesterday I hammered out the models for two adapters that mate the new vacuum cleaner to some old tools, so I’ll be doing live-fire production printing. I’m sure you can get adapters on Amazon, but what’s the fun in that?

    The magic wand that sucks dust off the evaporator coils under the refrigerator slides into the bottom end of this one:

    Refrigerator Coil Wand Adapter
    Refrigerator Coil Wand Adapter

    And the snout of this slides into the tiny floor brush that fits into spots the new one can’t reach:

    Floor Brush Adapter
    Floor Brush Adapter

    And, with a Faire wind in my sails, perhaps I can run off the bits required for a hard drive mood light:

    Hard Drive Mood Light - solid model - Show view
    Hard Drive Mood Light – solid model – Show view

    More details on all those later…

  • Why I Run Ad Blockers on All My Browsers

    The latest new-to-me off-lease Dell PC arrived with Windows 7, which means that I must install UltraVNC (that’s uvnc.com, not the obvious URL, alas) to enable remote desktop access. Here’s what the download page looks like through a fresh copy of Firefox, without ad blocking:

    UltraVNC Download - with ads
    UltraVNC Download – with ads

    Notice that the prominent “Start Download” label-and-button in the middle of the page isn’t the one you want, nor are any of the other things that say “Download”. If you’re not a techie and don’t quite know what you’re looking for, there’s no hope for you.

    Here’s what it looks like with all the ads suppressed:

    UltraVNC Download - minus ads
    UltraVNC Download – minus ads

    Granted, that’s not the most user-friendly download site I’ve ever seen and, most likely, non-techies won’t venture there, but … suppressing the ads certainly eliminates a tremendous amount of noise.

    WordPress places ads on my blog and I get a cut of the revenue, so I am not without a certain conflict of interest. I could forego the ad revenue (currently about 60 ¢/day), which wouldn’t eliminate the ads; WordPress simply pockets my cut in addition to theirs. I could also pay WordPress 30 ¢/day to completely suppress the ads (and get other features I don’t care about), for a net cost of a dollar a day to not show ads.

    Hey, who wants to sign up as a Patreon donor? [grin]

  • Presentation Video: Bring Enough Adapters

    I plugged my trusty Dell Latitude E6410 into the VGA cable connected to a Viewsonic projector at TechShop Detroit to give the OpenSCAD Modeling presentation, but the display showed a surprising amount of ghosting; whether that was due to a bad cable or the usual presentation gremlins, I cannot say. Fortunately, although I didn’t have a VGA cable, I did have a fair assortment of adapters for the laptop’s DisplayPort output…

    On the laptop end, DisplayPort to a DVI-D cable:

    Latitude vs Viewsonic - DisplayPort to DVI-D
    Latitude vs Viewsonic – DisplayPort to DVI-D

    On the Viewsonic end, DVI-D to HDMI:

    Latitude vs Viewsonic - DVI-D to HDMI
    Latitude vs Viewsonic – DVI-D to HDMI

    Worked like a champ!

    The projector in the room for the Arduino Survival Guide presentation had a VGA cable, but had been losing sync and turning itself off, so I unplugged that, rebuilt the DisplayPort adapter string, and continued the mission.

    I must add a known-good VGA cable and corresponding adapters to the assortment…

  • CNC Workshop 2015: Arduino Survival Guide, Workshop Edition

    MOSFET RDS Tester - Arduino
    MOSFET RDS Tester – Arduino

    Armed with bags of electronic parts and boxes of meters, I’ll be helping folks at the CNC Workshop understand the electrical limitations of the Arduino microcontrollers they’re building into projects.

    The presentation in PDF form:

    Arduino Survival Guide – Workshop Edition – CNC Workshop 2015

    We’ll wing it with the source code, because nothing’s more than a few lines long…

  • CNC Workshop 2015: Practical Solid Modeling with OpenSCAD

    HP Plotter Pen Polygon
    HP Plotter Pen Polygon

    This afternoon at the CNC Workshop, I’ll be bootstrapping folks into creating 3D-printable solid models with Openscad.

    The presentation in PDF form:

    Practical Solid Modeling for 3D Printing with OpenSCAD – CNC Workshop 2015

    The OpenSCAD source code for the exercises, in case you don’t want to type along:

    Practical Solid Modeling for 3D Printing with OpenSCAD – Models.zip.odt

    When you download that file, you’ll get something ending in .zip.odt. Rename it to remove the .odt extension, because it’s really a ZIP file; WordPress doesn’t allow users to uploads ZIP files.

  • CNC Workshop 2015: Personal 3D Printing Status Report

    Toroid Mount - Build layout
    Toroid Mount – Build layout

    If all has gone according to plan, I’m in Detroit today and will give a talk at the CNC Workshop on (my view of) the status of personal 3D printing, what to expect in the future, and what you can do with it today.

    The presentation in PDF form: 3D Printing Status 2105-06 – CNC Workshop Detroit

  • Where Web Content Comes From

    Make sure you’re running an ad blocker and perhaps a script killer, feed “Larval Engineer received a Pilot InstaBoost” into your favorite search engine, along these lines:

    Google

    DuckDuckGo

    Bing

    The first (few) hits should be the various ways my original post from late last year appears on wordpress.com, but the rest (particularly from Google) will be spam blogs and scraper sites that ripped my text, ran it past a thesaurus (euphemistically known as article spinning), larded the result with keywords, and reposted the shattered remains. If you click on the links, you’ll have the experience of reading text where short sequences of words make sense, but the overall corpus leaves you shaking your head in disbelief.

    Even though Google allegedly doesn’t reward such sites, they make up the bulk of its list. DuckDuckGo does a slightly better job of suppressing them and Bing kills nearly all of the junk, which suggests that Google operates with a powerful incentive to not notice problems in sites serving (its?) advertisements.

    There’s obviously no point in getting annoyed with any of the participants…

    FWIW, that particular post seems to have drawn the attention of scammers due to the presence of a trademarked brand name with good search-ability. Other posts have been more fortunate in escaping their attention, despite my glowing prose…