Category: Random Nonsense

Sometimes I just feel compelled to share nonsense, random thoughts, and sometimes just stuff I want to save

Hello Coffee my old friend

In an effort to get out the door for work on time yesterday and then to a meeting a little later I skipped out on getting coffee, which left me caffeine deficient until about 30 minutes ago.

Why this sometimes seems like a good idea is totally beyond me.  I’m addicted and I should really just come to terms with that.  I’m just a nicer, better person when properly caffeinated. 1 2 3

At the local coffee spot I stood in a line of zero people while waiting my turn, still with my sunglasses on from being exposed to the harsh bright light of a Bay Area sunny morning.  The barrista beckoned me forward and I handed him my empty travel mug and credit card.  “A lot of coffee please.”  He filled the mug, charged my card, and asked if I needed the receipt, which I declined.  At least, that’s how it was supposed to go down.

Small coffee?

Huh?  What?  Um, n…

Well, I’ll fill it up, and charge you for a small coffee.

Oh, okay… thank you.

Do you want me to rinse it out?

Uh, wha… no…

Room for cream?

Um, yeah, thanks.

Okay, great!  Credit card?  Do you want the receipt?

No, thanks.

The above is actually a very normal transaction, but in my drug dependent state it was terribly confusing and disorienting.  I felt like a kid left a train station as an engineer asks me questions about where my mommy and daddy were as I try to answer with my mind trying to work out the discrepancies between my current dilemma and the directive to not speak to strangers.45

  1. And a grumpier, surlier person when under-caffeinated. [↩]
  2. And a frenzied frantic inspired person when over-caffeinated. [↩]
  3. It’s a fine line. [↩]
  4. Mom, dad, if you read this…   please come back!  I promise to eat my veggies.  I miss you! [↩]
  5. The train station wifi is terrible! [↩]

Son, I am disappoint

Tron: Legacy.

Really?  I must be missing something.  They really could have had a decent movie without a bunch of “meaning of life” BS.  Why couldn’t it just have been a movie about a kid rescuing his dad?  The mystical junk just got in the way and made it confusing.  The effects were pretty good and there were only a few uncanny valley moments, but’s not going to save a movie.

Confluence

With my MK6 disassembled1 and work projects stacking up, I tend to become more prolific in writing and designing. 2

Whenever my ‘bot is in need of repair, my mind goes back to all of the projects and things I keep meaning to print…  but never find the time for.  I also think back to design problems I was having… and sometimes come up with solutions!

Take, for instance, the puzzle box from The Mummy.  I’ve been meaning to get back to this for more than six months.  Well, an idea for a way to make it spring open just occurred to me.  I could put another octagon shaped box inside of the puzzle box and a flatish spring underneath it, squished between the two boxes.  If the top of the box is released, the spring would force the inner box up – and against the lid components and the entire lid open.  It would also potentially work well with little spring loaded pins just under each of the lid pieces.  I’m thinking something like a piece of filament forced upwards by the spring from a retractable ball point pen.  Or, if your spring was good enough, the spring could be under just one of the lid pieces – with the other lid pieces laying on top of it.  As that one pieces is forced up, it could force the others out.

Without the benefit of my printer running, I’m also putting a few extra brain cells3 on my clockwork spider project.  I was inspired by several things recently.  First is the video of how a mechanical clock works I had posted earlier.  As you’ll recall from Skimbal’s Rubber Band Gear Mechanism/Engine, a wound spring engine will want to expend all of its energy all at once.

That video describing the inner workings of a clock demonstrates a little regular that only lets it unwind a little bit at a time, so it can expend its energy over a longer time period.  Secondly was Erik’s pick-n-place tape feeder.  This design uses an interesting spring/gear/ratchet wheel.  Skip to 1:25 for a demonstration of the mechanism in question.

Now, in the instance of Erik’s device, it is the ratchet that moves back and forth – rather than the wheel turning at a constant rate.  However, this gave me an idea.  It should be feasible to create a similar spring/ratchet combination to prevent a wound device from expelling it’s energy at once.  Last, but by no means least, is Dna’s rubber band ratchet engine designed to power a clockwork spider.

In pondering my attempt at an open source disc launcher, I’ve been trying to think of the best way to pull back the spring.  If the firing pin/slider is going to be powered by a rubber band, it’s going to need to be a decently sturdy mechanism.  I keep thinking back to a rack and pinion set up.  There could be a notch in the bottom of the firing pin/slider, a peg in the flat side of a rack, and a small gear run off of a big gear, with the trigger on the big gear.

What else?  Um, I think the tank by mraiser could make a good platform for a larger clockwork spider.  Also, I would like to see a version of the tank that’s run off of clockwork/gears/regulators/rubber band/springs.

  1. More on this later [↩]
  2. I didn’t say better, mind. [↩]
  3. Both of them! [↩]

Oh Adobe, you so silly

I just updated my Adobe Reader.  The only reason I do it is to patch vulnerabilities in their crappy ubiquitous system.

And, with the update it installs a shortcut to Adobe Reader on my desktop.

Seriously, now, why the hell would I want that?  How could this possibly be useful to anyone?  If I click on a PDF, it opens with Adobe.  If I click on the Adobe link, I still have to go find the PDF that I need to open.  Has anyone, ever, found a use for opening Adobe Reader directly and often enough to justify a shortcut on the desktop?!

It’s the little things in life

I’ve got a funny day job.  Some days I’m out and about at meetings.  That’s where I was for the last three days.  Some days I sit at a desk.  Today was one of those days.

I spent basically the entire day wrestling with a HUGE spreadsheet made by someone else who just doesn’t understand the concept of elegance.  Seriously?  A spreadsheet of 400,000 rows to perform one calculation?  That’s just insane.  In the time it took for me to understand what they had done, I am pretty sure I could have mocked up about 85% of a PHP script to knock the answer right out of the park.

I don’t do these kinds of calculations often.  I’d say that on average most people in my industry never do a single calculation like this – leaving to others who are more interested in doing so. 1  There were several false starts with me basically finishing the calculations, doing a write up… and then realizing that I had forgotten something.  It’s taken me about two days worth of work to iron this thing out.  And, quite frankly, I loved every minute of it.  Of the very few people in my industry who actually bother to run these numbers, most just shoot for an approximation. 2  And of those very few people, no one really runs these calculations all that often.

Having just experienced the WORST way to run these calculations, I’m ready to build the best way to run these calculations.

  1. Such as, yours truly [↩]
  2. Approximately???  What do you mean “Approximately”? [↩]

This is #650

This is the 650th post on this blog in the 18 or so months since its launch.  As of this moment, very early on Monday morning, there’s 283 posts over at the MakerBot blog authored by yours truly.  That’s 933 posts in the 497 days since I started blogging here on 11/23/2009.  That’s about 1.88 posts a day, every day, on average.  Some of it is even about 3D printing stuff.  ;)

I wonder what a pie chart of this website’s content would look like?  Probably something like:

[pdrpiechart data=”Random nonsense=68|Doctor Who, sonic screwdrivers, and daleks =18|DIY 3D Printing=27″]

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