Day: July 28, 2010

Should I pace myself?

This blog is as much for me as it is for anyone else. 1  When something occurs to me, I type it up and click “Publish.”  However, this means I’ll go days without a single post and then have a flurry of half a dozen posts.  Some of my posts languish in draft form, half-notes, jottings of ideas, etc. 2

Help me out here.  What’s better – if I pace my posts – say one a day – or just have them published as they occur to me with random gaps?

As a loyal reader, what do you prefer?  Come now, both of you can chime in.  <crickets>  Bueller?

  1. Well, the ads for other people.  I’m not allowed to click on them. [↩]
  2. Seriously, though – how in the hell did I write more than 100 posts in February??? [↩]

A MakerBot Cart – like this!

Now, THIS is a MakerBot Cart
Now, THIS is a MakerBot Cart

This is a picture of Mattpr’s setup. 1  This is an incredibly great setup for a MakerBot Cart.  Indeed, it’s the sort of thing I dream about.

FYI, Matt – it took me longer than I care to admit to get your “my all Rush mix tape” joke.  Me, a guy who named his MakerBot “Bender.”  I may have to bite my own shiny metal ass.2

  1. Dude – you’ve got an all rights reserved license on your Flickr page.  If you wish, I’ll take out the picture – just let me know. [↩]
  2. Interesting side note about my ‘bot in case anyone is keeping score at home – I painted the underside of my MakerBot silver.  This way it has a shiny metal assplate. [↩]

ADD and TLDR

This post could easily have been titled “inverse relationship.”1

I tend to think I’ve got a form of ADD.  It’s better than saying I’m impulsive, excitable, or impatient, right?  In any case, I read and blogged about Capolight’s post on creating models from images without reading the entire thing.

The Google Sketchup instructional video he included in his post was great.  Basically, it helps one create an object from a photo with some kinda fancy Google UI stuff.  I wish I had known about that a lot earlier. :)  What a cool feature!

I suppose I could have titled this “RTFM” too…

  1. As in when you have ADD you won’t read anything and everything is TLDR… [↩]

Creating models from photos

I thought this recent post from my new favorite materials science and RepRap/MakerBot blog, Capolight, was great.  He summed up in one succinct post what I wanted to convey and probably didn’t convey with my verbose diatribe about my process for approximating facsimiles of props by tracing photographs in Sketchup.1234

((I’ve mentioned the Case of The Purloined Pig before, one of my favorite origami anecdotes.  Basically, contemporaneous invention is the result of funny little quirks in the universe.))

Capolight’s method is essentially the same as the one I described recently (only, as I mention, he does a much better job of it):

  1. Import a photo into Sketchup
  2. Trace image
  3. I spun my tracery and Capolight extruded5
  4. Scale newly created object to measurements
  5. ???
  6. Profit!
  1. You may officially now refer to me as an “insufferable word stretcher.” [↩]
  2. To quote River Song, “Spoilers!” [↩]
  3. Hey!  Remember that one post where I didn’t make any references to Doctor Who at all???  Yeah.  Me neither. [↩]
  4. Crap.  One of my favorite actors, Maury Chaykin just passed away.  I really liked that guy. [↩]
  5. Which is OH so much more appropriate, given our intended media. [↩]
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