Mechanismatic

I’ve been doing some simple python scripts on a raspberry pi 5 that I’m currently using for a cyberdeck project (designing a printable bigger case for a 65% Bluetooth gaming keyboard and shoving the pi and other devices into a 3D printed skull that will mount on the keyboard case), but even then I at least plug the pi into a full screen rather than use the 7" display I have for it when I’m actually working on it. The 65% isn’t bad though. Even came with a wrist pad.

It was definitely a nostalgia purchase. If I ended up doing any development for it, I’d still probably emulate and transfer files to it. But I never did anything more than play games on it as a kid, so there would be a time sink and learning curve if I wanted to do more with it.

I’ve been showing it off in my makerspace to the college students who weren’t alive in the 80s (or 90s). All the new features are welcome additions — USB, HDMI, WiFi, etc. And there are some modern chiptune applications included.

I’ve vindicated my childhood by discovering that the games that were difficult and confusing back then still are, and maybe some of them were just poorly designed in the first place.

I still love the soundtrack to Rock N Bolt and a good playthrough of River Raid though.

Not anti SA per se, but I learned to type on a Commodore 64 as a kid and recently got the C64 Ultimate, so the clunkiness of the experience is just fresh. This is a lower profile than the Commodore 64 though, so probably not as bad.

Do we celebrate with wrist braces or some other therapy for repetitive cramped typing injuries?

I do this probably once a day at my makerspace. Sometimes it is the manufacturer’s fault and sometimes it’s just that the roll has gotten a tangle while being moved from machine to machine or machine to rack.

I don’t put my finger on the tangle, but usually the tangle isn’t obvious in the spool so you can’t even if you wanted to.

It’s really just a matter of spinning the filament around the roll enough to get some slack, then you pull it over the side and sort it out. Usually the fix involves pushing the filament around the spool to unbind it.

This is another one of those issues that you typically detect by hearing an abnormal sound since you’re not watching every print all the time across multiple printers.

Definitely consider if you’ll use it enough to justify the purchase, but buying a new one and spending the effort that you would have used trying to mod the old one could be better used on the new machine getting functional prints and advancing your skills.

The same amount of fiddling, accompanied with the uncertainty of the success or practicality of the mod, could be spent assembling a new printer and then printing and assembling new mods for the new printer that aren’t as essential or structural. The appeal just depends on how much focus and patience you have.

Yeah, that makes sense for your frustration. I get stabbed under my fingernails trying to take PETG remnants off the textured beds. I typically just deal with it because the solutions I’ve found are more time-consuming, but I guess it might depend on how much.

I’ve had people suggest heating the bed as high as it will go. PETG’s glass transition temperature is usually less than 90° C. I’ve seen some people print over bits to try to merge them to make them pull up easier, but that just seems like a waste of material to me. I generally don’t care for solutions that involve applying liquids or gels to the bed.

What material and what kind of plate? PEI textured plate or smooth plate? PLA, PETG, something else?

Not what you’re asking for, but I’d recommend using a laser cutter with a sheet of acrylic if you can get access to one since you’ll get a better quality stencil than 3D printing one. A vinyl cutter like a Cricut or Silhouette machine might also be able to do a better job of it on something like chipboard if you don’t have access to a laser cutter.

“I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”

But, you’re just one person. You won’t be present for 99.9999%+ of newer usages of terms, so you’ll be impotent to effect much change on the matter. With the level of illiteracy and the anti-intellectualism that seems rampant these days, even having a widely read column on a popular platform might be insufficient to turn such a tide. Maybe at best you’d be a screenwriter for a Hollywood blockbuster that a decent portion of the population watches and you could hope for the best, but even that seems weak considering we collectively don’t even remember movie lines accurately ten or twenty years later.

You should literally literally when a literally flies straight for your face because those feathered fowl can be as aggressive as gooses.

But the disputes occur because people use the newer, less common meaning until it becomes more common. If you discourage people from using the word “incorrectly” but it eventually evolves in meaning through usage because people ignore your encouragement to return to the original meaning, then you’d just be on the losing side of the battle historically.

I feel like it should be much more nuanced as to whether you encourage or discourage change. People reclaiming or usurping derogatory terms as a big FU to bigotry? Awesome. People twisting words for the purposes of oppressive, deceptive, or marketing purposes? Nope.

The reason behind the change should be preferably be intentional, backed by goodwill, and done in order to increase ease of communication because the old meaning/usage wasn’t sufficient.

But language is a shared medium and a lot of intention falls by the wayside because of random quirks as much by intentional campaigns.

This is where marketing creates special kinds of linguistic nightmares. Effectively, marketing is bullshit that becomes standard usage because it’s so pervasive and people unfamiliar with the field don’t know any better.

Hence LLMs are called AI. Two wheeled electric fire hazards are called hoverboards. 3G, 4G, 4G LTE, 5G, cell services usually aren’t up to the standards they claim.

Les Québécois sont entrés dans la conversation.

Seems like a variant of hypercorrection.

Yeah, I’m prone to go down rabbit holes looking at the etymology and origin of related words for hours. Latin was one of my favorite classes in high school. It’s great for world building and stylizing prose when writing fiction.

Sometimes the etymology is just weird because the current meaning is from an abbreviation of a phrase and the roots don’t make sense in isolation, such as perfidious, from the roots per fidem “through faith” but its meaning is from the larger phrase “deceiving through faith.”

My usual example is manufacture — to make by hand, but it’s more commonly used now to mean machine manufactured and made by hand is called handmade.

In my makerspace, we’ve printed using the ends of rolls just to make random multicolor prints. I also recently bought a cheap 3D printing pen for repairing prints or other random purposes, so that’s also a good use for the ends of a roll.