MakerBlock

The Patents for disc shooters [12/10/2010]

[There’s no secret I’ve always loved the old “disc shooters” that could be picked up in a grocery store aisle. These were called the “Rayline Tracer Gun“, sold from the 1960’s to 1980’s, and then kind of disappeared. Much more recently, someone started selling replicas on Amazon. Once I had a 3D printer, this was one of my ideal prints. It was easy to blow through a pile of the discs and lose them all in an afternoon. But, the little discs look very printable.

A year after the below post, I’d go on to post about a contest for a design of a disc shooter. I started building some of the components for the disc shooter and the disc cartridge, but never end up building a reasonably functional shooter.

This is a project I’d still like to come back to and resurrect. ¹ I’m confident with enough trial and error, I could design something that would work in a similar fashion. Anyhow, below are links to the patents for these toys which I’d found as part of my research into building one for myself.]

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Get in line! [↩]

Skein them all and let ‘Bot sort them all out [11/24/2010]

[Just a bit of silliness that was left at the bottom of my drafts bin :) This was in response to a blog post on Thingiverse asking about user’s printing anxiety.]

I think I’m finding these questions to be funnier than perhaps they were intended to be.

“Broad Flat Bottoms”? Sign me up!

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Printed Pink Panther Person [11/22/2010]

[This is a funny bit of MakerBot / Thingiverse / 3D printing lore. One of the earliest uploads to Thingiverse, #1216 uploaded on 11/01/2009, was the mysterious “Pink Panther Woman!!!” by “januario.” Whoever januario was, they uploaded this model, provided zero context, and never, ever came back. The original model was listed with a “no derivatives” license, but people still created lots of variations. This was in my PLA printing days and on a MakerBot Cupcake CNC at that, so the print quality is not up to what you’d expect today. The layer lines were around 0.28 – 0.3mm and the PLA was … a little goopy. Even so, it was a fantastic looking model.]

"The Pink Panther Lady" — “The Pink Panther Lady”

This print turned out really well. In preparation I made sure I had enough vertical clearance by raising the Z platform up 11.5cm (100 mm for the print, 15 mm extra for the Z platform raise at the end of the print). I was a little nervous about the print since I had been having tangles in my filament spindle all day long. Fortunately, that didn’t prove to be a problem. I printed in PLA at 200 degrees, 1% plastic infill, with an extra shell all the way around. Since nearly every cross section was fairly large, printing in PLA went very well. In any case, I wanted to print this to see if I could. I can, indeed, print it – and quite well at that.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Going for a Record

I’ll go months and not post anything on this blog – and then post a ton as I work through a project or just need to get something off my chest. There’s usually an uptick around the time Maker Faire applications are opened and most years I have a few dozen posts with the notable exception of 2020.¹

Publishing my old blog posts might get me in striking distance of a personal best from February of 2010 of 106 posts. ² They weren’t all bangers. Here’s the last one from that month – a haiku:

Clear PLA sits
Mendel languishes alone
Plastruder hates corn

MakerBlock – 02/28/2010

Beating 106 blog posts this month seems entirely possible. Even if I try to beat my record and fail, I’m already way ahead of my usual blog post count. MakerFaire is coming up, the kids are out of school, and, as always, I’m working on a bunch of random projects. Right now I’m at 28 posts for the month of June 2026. I’ve got 20 more days in the month to go, 293 unpublished draft posts of varying degree and quality, fresh page in my notebook, a strong internet connection, a quarter tank of gas, and a credit card.

Let’s fucking go.

Just the one! I can’t imagine what was going on in the world back then… [↩]
With so many posts during that month, it’s almost unbelievable that 8 of my unpublished posts were from February 2010! [↩]

The nuances of time travel [10/31/2010]

[Ah, Botacon! You can watch the introduction from Bre here and catch the listing of the talks here. Mine wasn’t listed in that post, but the presentation was about being a dad and making stuff for his family, getting kids involved in the process. There were several blog posts on the MakerBot blog at the time discussing some of these items. :) ]

As I plan out my travel to Brooklyn, I have to take into account the impact of traveling through time. I live on the west coast, so there is a 3 hour “time difference” to be taken into account when traveling to New York. The plan is to fly out on Thursday, arrive Friday morning, duck the restraining order, hang out at the Botcave for the day, go to Botacon the next day, and fly out on Sunday morning.

Given the

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Dream jobs [10/29/2010]

[Yet another entirely blank blog post. I just started it and then abandoned it, I guess? I’m not sure what my dream jobs would have been back then. Pizza and ice cream taste tester, science communicator / science museum enthusiast, naptime commentator?]

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Halloween costume too [10/27/2010]

[Just a bit of Halloween silliness. In recent years my go-to Halloween costume has been “mad scientist” since I can wear a comfortable white lab coat and LED goggles over my regular clothes.]

In all likelihood, I’ll probably wear the same costume I’ve worn for the last several years. It consists of two small horns I sculpted out of modeling clay and painted to look like bone. I use spirit gum to affix them to my forehead and try to slightly obscure them with my hair. I then print off a page long contract that starts off at 20pt font and gradually shrinks to 4pt font, entitled, “Contract for the Sale of Intangible Goods.” The contract has a large blank space in the middle where the person can specify anything they want and a spot at the bottom for them to sign. I dress in a suit and carry a small black satchel with a red pen¹ , a stack of those contracts, some candy, some play money, some stickers and other minor knickknacks. When someone asks me who I am, I insist that I’m a broker for a party that wishes to remain anonymous but who is nonetheless still interested in purchasing any spare intangible goods they may have. When they ask about the horns I simply say that they’re a birth defect I’m very self-conscious about and politely change topic. When they ask about the nature of the intangible goods, I assure them that it’s nothing required for their day-to-day existence and that most people get along quite happily without such baggage.

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Blood? No, of course not. That’s just silly. Red just shows up better on my photocopier. It’s more of a symbolic thing anyhow. [↩]

Printing with PLA again! [10/18/2010]

[I’ve been printing in PLA pretty much exclusively for several years now since it’s got way less particulates and VOC’s compared to ABS. However, back in the early days of MakerBot, printing with PLA was fraught with problems. It printed inconsistently, it was hard to dial in temperature and speed settings, and it caused constant extruder clogs. I think a large part of this was probably due to the design of early extruder nozzles. You had to very carefully build and wrap your own extruders back then and if heat creeped up the nozzle into the filament, it was easy to create a blockage. Modern nozzles have huge heat sinks which help prevent these issues.]

Yesterday I printed with PLA until my MK5 Plastruder jammed. I could print off a single pawn piece from Cliff Biffle’s brilliant chess set, but when I tried 9 at a time it stopped extruding. ¹

I had the Skeinforge settings all fouled up. I thought I was testing print quality starting at 200 degrees Celsius and decreasing at 5 degree increments. Instead, when I stopped

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

When using Skeinforge’s multiple feature, it’s easier to create an array of 3×3 pawns to fit on the platform than it is to create an array of 2×4 to get exactly 8 pieces [↩]

An open letter to Ms. Word [10/18/2010]

[So this post isn’t taken as pure misogyny, “Ms. Word” and “Ms. Outlook” aren’t real people, this was my referring to a personification of “Microsoft Word” and “Microsoft Outlook”, playing on the similarity between the initials for Microsoft as “MS” and the greeting/title. Chances are I was having a frustrating day, being frustrated with having to use Microsoft Word at work. I have been using LibreOffice and OpenOffice before that for years and do everything I can to actively avoid using MS products. Many of the blog posts I’m dusting off have no tags, no categories, even when they’re basically fully formed posts. This one has the tag “ms word is bad for you”. :) ]

Dear Ms. Word,

I’ve done everything in my power to sever our relationship. I gave up on you years ago. I know this sounds harsh, but I just need to get it off my chest. You are a bloated hog. When you’re around nothing else works. You are more a hindrance than help. ¹

I don’t want to see you at work and especially not at home. I’ve moved on and I wish you could see that.

Believe me, I only put up with your good friend Ms. Outlook because my work requires it of me. But why Ms. Outlook thinks I need to have you around every few minutes is totally beyond me.

There’s no need to reply, just go.

Most sincerely,

MakerBlock

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Oh, and tell your yappy dog to quiet down. I’m tired of hearing of him too. [↩]

Weird new kind of spam [09/19/2010]

[Many years ago Phooky had mentioned seeing an odd kind of behavior online. I can’t recall if this was a phenomena on Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter… but I think it may have been on Facebook. What he saw was some accounts going into an insular online group, starting an argument, and then taking those replies, sending them to the ideologically-opposite group, taking those replies and sending them to the first group, then lather, rinse, repeating. This was a very long time ago – perhaps in 2010 or 2011? In any case, at the time I assumed it was juvenile hijinks. With the benefit of hindsight, now I think it was something far more nefarious. I think it was likely the initial testing grounds for the influencing of online groups. This was around the time of the rise of the Tea Party Movement around 2009, then the Occupy Wallstret Movement in 2011. Maybe this is all just conspiracy mongering. Or, perhaps there were online experiments, sharpening the science of influencing online movements put into practice in 4Chan, QAnon, and other groups originating in online forums. Anyhow, my guess this weird spam was designed to pick a fight – either to mine the replies for data or get authorized to post comments for spam, or perhaps… all of the above.]

I noticed a few months ago a new kind of spam that sometimes wasn’t picked up by my spam filter. People (or their ‘bots) were leaving highly politically/religiously charged comments. The comments read as if they were written by real people – but they didn’t make much sense in the context of the post.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts