So, I’ve been away a while…

…and for once I actually have a good reason, though I wish I didn’t. On August 17th, 2021, my father passed away unexpectedly. My family has been in a desperate struggle ever since, only further complicated by the news two days later that we needed to vacate our apartments so the landlord could sell the building. Well, that still hasn’t happened, there’s literally nowhere to go, everything’s a mess, it’s turtles all the way down, etc.

My sister and I have given up on the unenviable and futile task of damage control, and instead opted to forge ahead and make a solution present itself. Or, to quote one of my favorite lines from the classic Gainax school drama/mecha space anime Top wo Nerae! Gunbuster; “A miracle will happen! I’ll make it happen!”

I’m fumbling my way toward being a grown-ass adult, with photo ID and a bank account and everything, and we’re all getting our ducks in a row and building our credit in the hopes that we can qualify for a home loan, because the rental market is an absolute clown fiesta right now.

I’m going to try and finish up the backlog of draft posts I have in the queue and start on a bunch of new 3D printing content, so please bear with me if the old stuff seems somewhat disjointed, some of them are like a year or more old and only half-written, and I’m going to be finishing them up from memory and posting them, so…… Yeah. 😬

Week 05, 2016 – How Soon is Now?

Okay, I got off to a slow start this year.  But things are looking very promising.

First things first, on a sad note one of my internet comrades, Tim Lazicki, had his house burn down on Christmas.  Some of us banded together to make a new PC for him… It seemed like the appropriate thing to do, after all if it weren’t for computers and internet access, none of us would know him…and his absence due to no longer having one had not gone unnoticed.  (I’ll write a separate in-depth post about this later.) Anyway, working on a new computer for Tim inspired a few other projects which I will be posting about…

The new year also marked my acquisition of a video camera.  The quality isn’t the best without super-duper lighting, which I don’t yet possess, but it’s a hella nice little camera… A Canon VIXIA HF-R62.  I got it very cheap right before Canon debuted the R72…which seems like a thinly-veiled excuse to go back to getting full price on a camera… Since as far as I can tell it is all but identical to the R62 in every way.

I plan to start shooting YouTube videos regularly… Things would go a lot easier if I got some contributions to that end, and I will be making a Patreon and a couple different Amazon Wish Lists once I start posting videos.

I’m going to replace my previous ‘brain dump’ post type with “What’s On The ‘Bench?” videos, where I do a 1-2 minute (each) pitch about any ideas I have or things I’m working on.  This way I can try and both gauge and garner interest in nascent ideas in a more natural and conversational way than simply writing a post about them.

I got so sidetracked with stuff after removing the stock bed of the laser cutter that I never got around to draining the water or doing anything about the coolant loop, and now I think there’s algae growing in it… FML  Oh well, these things happen.  I ordered some Copper Sulfate Pentahydrate to add to the coolant loop, that oughta take care of the stuff.  (Good thing I hadn’t finished the coolant system and added all the water yet.)

Things are getting started, I would expect videos to start showing up any time now.

Subscription-Based Licensing; You’re Doing it WRONG, Autodesk!

Well, here it is, exactly one week before my birthday, and looking at Autodesk’s site this morning, I stumbled across a wonderful little present they’ve decided to give me; as of the 31st, they will no longer offer the perpetual licenses that I have been hoping to one day be able to afford, opting instead for an equally unaffordable subscription plan. Fuck me, right?!

As far as I can tell, they won’t even be offering suites anymore. (See update at bottom!)  You used to be able to get a whole suite of apps, such as 3D Studio Max, Inventor, AutoCAD and a ton of others, together for, what? Nine grand, one time? Now, you’ve got to pay like $1,900 a year just for Inventor.  Which is fine for all their big corporate customers who make all their software purchases without a second thought anyway, but any individual who isn’t a student is basically fucked.  Leaving people like me with no choice but to continue ‘stealing’ their software.

Yeah, I know, “What could some unwashed underachieving poor like you possibly know about such things?” Well, for starters, I can do the maths*, so that makes exactly one of us, Autodesk.  I also know that when Adobe launched Creative Cloud in May 2012, and went Subscription-only a year later, they didn’t try to put the screws to their customers and make it too expensive for individuals and micro-businesses.  An individual can get the whole fucking Creative Cloud suite– which actually has more apps than the old Creative Suite ever did –for $49.99 a month.  That’s affordable.  So affordable that it’s actually less trouble to go legit than to keep pirating it. Think about that.  Adobe made the Creative Cloud so inexpensive that it’s literally not worth the hassle to steal it.

And you tell me, even with such low prices…how’s Adobe doing?

learntomaths

Spoiler Alert: Their stock price has almost TRIPLED since they began offering Creative Cloud,
a subscription plan so cheap that even poor-ass people like me can afford it.

 

And because some people just have to be taught visually…
additional art courtesy of Google Finance:

moreartthanmaths

(Click to embiggen.)

 

 

* Oh, right, ‘the maths’… I almost forgot.  How many people out there do you suppose pirate your software, Autodesk? What if you made the subscription price more reasonable and even just ten percent of those people started paying for it?  Well, you know what they’re paying you now? In the immortal words of the hero of Canton:

“Ten percent of nothin’ is, let me do the math here…
nothin’ and a nothin’, carry the nothin’…”

 

 

UPDATE: Okay, so it turns out you can get a Suite subscription, the site was just harder to navigate than it should have been and there’s some UI/UX people who need to be shot out of cannons.  Not that it really matters, I mean, sure a whole suite is maybe $2,000 to $3,200 a year, instead of $1,900+ a year for one friggin’ app…but $160-260/month still isn’t affordable for the kinds of users I’m talking about. Plus, there should be an a la carte suite option so people aren’t saddled with a lot of apps they’re not going to use just because they want more than one app at all.

Week 37, 2015 – Everything’s (not) Ruined Forever!

So… That went well.

I ended up with a hard plug of PLA in the teflon tube of my printer’s hotend, and trying to clear it I mangled the teflon tube.  Of course, to get even that far, I had to completely disassemble the hotend.  And since I was doing that, I figured it was a good time to replace the thermocouple on the left extruder. And since I was doing that, I figured I’d do some upgrades I’d been planning on. And since I was doing that, I figured… Yeah, the slope just kept getting slipperier and slipperier.

Things didn’t go terribly as you can can see in the few pictures I took…  Nonetheless, things were not working correctly.

Dual-extruder assembly removed from printer.

Dual-extruder assembly removed from printer.

 

Old thermocouple unplugged from MightyBoard.

Old thermocouple unplugged from MightyBoard.

So, I got it back together, with some modifications…  I like the replacement top plate… The 3D-printed strain relief for the cable bundle and the pneumatic press-fittings for the PTFE bowden tubing are fantastic additions.  However, the spring I used in the new 3D-printed extruder was not up to the task and was simply not capable of extruding anything…

Partially re-assembled extruder.

Partially re-assembled extruder.

I ended up disassembling and reassembling the whole thing two or three more times before I got it back up and running.  Still, I’m not happy with the hotend barrels I got off Amazon, they have PTFE linings with a 2mm ID and 4mm OD, and are threaded full-length.  The original barrels only had threads at the end, the rest was smooth, and used PTFE tubing with a 2mm ID but a 3mm OD, and the temperatures and behavior of the new parts were very different.  Also, the original nozzles butted up against the barrel, but the PTFE tube extended down into the nozzle…  The new barrels’ linings don’t stick out…but I do have additional nozzles designed to interface like that…so I put those on there.  Nonetheless, I’m going to try and get some 3mm OD tubing.

UPDATE 2015-09-16: Teflon Tubing Trials and Tribulations.
I couldn’t actually get PTFE tubing via Amazon Prime, so I had to order it from China– meaning it will be here whenever it bloody-well feels like it –and instead I ordered some PFA tubing that was rated for the same temps as PTFE.  Anyway, that’s a god damned lie, because when I went to print PETG, the god damned PFA tube liquified.  Not ‘melted’, not ‘distorted’ or ‘deformed’…it straight-up fucking liquified, leaving a quarter-inch blockage of rock-hard PFA in the end of the barrel.  Managed to get printer back up and running by using one of the new nozzles, and the old barrel, and cutting the original PTFE liner so that it’d fit. (And thus removing the part that’d been all crinkled up.)

Melted PFA tubing.

Melted PFA tubing.

Week 32, 2014 – Well, That Escalated Quickly…

In the middle of the night on July 31st, the motherboard in my workstation burst into flames.  Things just sorta went downhill from there… Read more…

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