Random Nonsense – Page 7

Designing Custom TCG Cards and Proxies

This post is basically a bookmark dump so I can locate this information later on. Maybe it will be helpful to you too!

Card Design Websites
- CardConjurer.App. Easily the most comprehensive and feature rich card design option. Lots of formats, borders, etc, for Magic the Gathering related cards. You can download and save your cards in JSON formats.
- MtG.Design. Kinda difficult to navigate, reasonably easy to use, slightly strange saving system. Limited frames. Download cards as images.
- MtGCardSmith.com. Somewhat confusing interface, lots of options, confusing saving features. You have to have artwork before rendering a design.
AI Art Generators
- OpenAI’s ChatGPT. I paid for ChatGPT for a few months, then stopped when I started using some local LLM’s and other free resources for code related projects. You can still generated a limited number of images per day. The paid version which gave a lot of image generations per day was probably the best I’ve used.
- Google’s Gemini. This works pretty well and while I haven’t really I haven’t bumped into the daily limits yet, I haven’t needed to. Decent.
- Playground.com. I used to use this site a lot – until they made a hard pivot to what appears to be a way to integrate their generated images into products that you’d expect to see on Etsy/Amazon. You have to really dig around to get it to give you something useable these days – but it’s free.

I have a semi-regular D&D game with friends. In order to help track initiative / attack order, I had the idea of creating cards for every player. The idea being that we all roll for initiative then hand the DM our stack of cards in the order we’re going – with the DM having a stack of opponent cards he can put in there too. If the cards I create just happen to be TCG / MtG sized and he can find placeholder cards for goblins, trolls, etc, so much the better.

Print On Demand Custom Cards

Inkscape Protractor and Rulers

Over the last week I’d tried making a set of small rulers and straight edges I could keep in notebooks of various sizes. I’ve got a big heavy sketchbook, a thin college rule composition notebook with several DIY augments, and a very small sketchbook about 4″ square.

My idea was to make small credit card / ID card sized rulers, print them on paper, and then laminate them to keep in one or more notebooks. My first attempt a few days ago was serviceable¹ – but lacking in aesthetics and functionality. (I’ll show some pictures below…)

This morning I saw a Mastodon post by @concretedog²³⁴ demonstrating his use of a homebrew lasercut protractor.

@concretedog's lasercut protractor — @concretedog’s lasercut protractor

Inspired by @concretedog’s work, I embarked upon building my own in Inkscape, using some printable ruler I found online. A few design progress pics:

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The basic process I used was:

A few concentric circles for the overall protractor outline and semi-circle cutouts
A longer 10 degree increment rotated 18 times (since it was a line at the top and bottom), a medium 5 degree increment rotated 36 times, and a short 1 degree increment rotated 180 times
- Edit -> Clone -> Create Tiled Clones
  - Symmetry: P1: simple translation
  - Shift: make sure the exponent is “0”
  - Rotation:
    - Angle row/column: 0, 5 degrees
    - Rows/columns: 1 x 18
Then added the rulers minus the numbers (just looked cleaner)
Three clones of the result, printed on paper, cut one out, cut out the semi-circle windows and center, laminated, then cut out the semi-circle windows and center again, ran it through the laminator for good luck

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In an ideal world, I would also have created the ruler marks using @concretedog’s guide … I just hadn’t seen it until I got around to finishing this project. :)

Small Rulers and Protractors

built from PrintableRulers.net [↩]
Someone I’ve been following for years and have come to think of as a parasocial friend [↩]
Is following a fellow maker a parasocial relationship if you interact with them? [↩]
Parasocial could be pre-friendship? [↩]

One Simple Trick Can Save You 30 Minutes…

After mentioning long render times on my machine, @raster suggested switching to the manifold 3D rendering backend. Depending on your OpenSCAD version, you might need to poke around to find how to enable this option. It’s absolutely worth your time and should really be enabled by default.

If you dig into this option a little, and you’re a 3D printing old timer, you might recognize the creator of this library as none other than Emmett Lalish!!! Emmett was an early 3D printing adopter, from back in the MakerBot Thing-O-Matic days, creator of the original heart gears, and just all around incredible engineer. ¹ ²

Emmett’s manifold library dropped the render time for one of my designs from 300 seconds to… under 8 seconds. I literally used to avoid hitting F5 on more complex designs or avoid cranking up the facets so I didn’t have to wait for long renders. A single comment from a friend, telling me about an option written by another friend, has completely and permanently changed how quickly I’m able to iterate and design objects forever.

Here’s how you can instantly save tons of time with your OpenSCAD designs:

"Manifold (new/fast)" — “Manifold (new/fast)”

#OpenSCADClub

Emmett even wrote a guest post on this very blog about… 14 years ago?!?! Time flies, I guess? [↩]
Special thanks to my honorary editor Andrew for catching a typo… [↩]

OpenSCADClub Week 2: Directional Pad

This week’s topic related to @deshipu’s directional keypad designs. The directional pad is clearly the most complicated part of the design. The four buttons are basically just cylinders that can be created in several different ways.

@deshipu's D Pad Design — @deshipu’s D Pad Design

Brian published his designs to Github.

@beerriot's designs — @beerriot’s designs

After staring at the design a little longer, I changed from my original design idea to creating a 2D cross, extruding that, subtracting out the curved area described by a sphere (a homebrew hack I’ll describe below), using the minkowski function to surround the entire surface with a small sphere to give it a rounded look, then cutting the bottom off to ensure it is flat. I didn’t include a flat cylinder as in the original design above, but that’s a trivial addition. The downside? This is a 5 minute render on my machine, largely due to the minkowski function.

//  Settings
    fn = pow(2,5);
//  Measurements
    pad = [10,30,1,3];
    corner = 1;

dpad();

module dpad()
    {
    difference()
        {
        minkowski()
            {
            difference()
                {
                linear_extrude(height=pad[3], center=false)
                    offset(r=-corner/2, $fn=fn)
                    for (i=[0:1])
                        rotate([0,0,90*i])
                        square([pad[0],pad[1]], center=true);
                translate([0,0,pad[3]])
                    scale([pad[1]*1.03,pad[1]*1.03,pad[3]-pad[2]])
                        sphere(r=0.5, $fn=fn);
                }
            sphere(r=corner/2, $fn=pow(2,4));
            }
        mirror([0,0,1])
            cylinder(r=pad[1], h=pad[1], center=false);
        }
    }

Renders to:

MakerBlock's design — MakerBlock’s design

Hacks:

You’ll notice I use “offset” to reduce the size of the directional pad, because I knew I was going to round it all with the minkowski function in a few lines.
The directional pad is actually just a rectangle, run through a for loop once to rotated it by 90 degrees, before being extruded to the specified height.
The last two lines of code are used to create a large cylinder, larger than what I knew the pad would be, then mirrored in the Z axis to cut everything below the XY plane.
As in prior designs, I pre-define “fn” to be a “pow(2,5)” so that I can use a low exponent to iterate designs quickly, then crank it up for a detailed design.
The hack I use the most often here, and the one I’m the most proud of, is where I make a sphere like “sphere(r=0.5)” and then scale it by whatever I need. Since the sphere has a diameter of “0.5” mm, the actual sphere is 1mm in diameter – so when I scale it in the XY by 30 and in the Z by 2 (since the edges of the keypad are 3mm tall and the center is 1mm tall), the diameter is now 30mm and the height is 2mm. This little trick, of being able to scale a sphere to the exact size I need has come in handy countless times.

I’m not the best programmer, not the best at OpenSCAD, but I’m kinda happy that I was able to build this in about 31 lines of code. :)

#OpenSCADClub

OpenSCAD 3D Printed Spring

OpenSCAD spring design by @rasterweb — “I’m trying to come up with a good way of creating this in OpenSCAD… I have something using a bunch of hull’d cylinders but I’m wondering if there is a better/easier way to do it.” @rasterweb

A friend posted a design pondering whether there was a better way to design an object in OpenSCAD. As so often happens when I approach a 3D design, one solution pops up in my head… and is immediately discarded as garbage. That first thought was to create a negative of the interior of the spring, then iterate along the length of a stretched cube.

In the end, I opted for¹ creating a flat version of a single “loop”, made from differenced hulled circles, repeated over the number of desired loops, then trimming alternating ends (so it wouldn’t look like a chain).

Here’s the OpenSCAD code to produce this spring:²

//  Settings
    $fn = pow(2,6);
//  Spring Dimensions
    springH     = 5;
    springOD    = 10;
    springW     = springOD*2;
    springOR    = springOD/2;
    springTh    = 2;
    springIR    = springOR-springTh;
    loops       = 8;

    spring();

module spring()
    {
    linear_extrude(height=springH, center=false)
    for (i=[0:loops])
        {
        translate([0,(springOD-springTh)*i,0])
            difference()
                {
                spring_loop();
                translate([-springOR+(springW+springOD)*(i%2),0,0]) 
                    square(springOD, center=true);
                }
        }
    }
    
module spring_loop()
    {
    difference()
        {
        hull()
            {
            circle(r=springOR);
            translate([springW,0,0])
                circle(r=springOR);
            }
        hull()
            {
            circle(r=springIR);
            translate([springW,0,0])
                circle(r=springIR);
            }
        }
    }

Some notes about my OpenSCAD style:

I like to use OD/ID/OR/IR to mean outer diameter, inner diameter, outer radius, inner radius.
I think the “spring_loop” module could be simplified slightly by calling another module which creates each hulled circle, but weighing the additional module code against just retyping a little code I opted for what got it done faster.
I like to specify the facets on circular objects right at the top of the file. This way, I can adjust the smoothness of the object by just changing just the exponent part of the $fn system variable.
Reasonably parametric. There’s some additional further optimization that could be done in the spring alternate end clipping.

Can’t wait to see what @rasterweb makes with a 3D printed spring!

#OpenSCADClub

And, please forgive the inside-baseball / OpenSCAD-speak [↩]
To display the code above I had to use the WordPress block editor. 🤮 [↩]

First commissioned piece! [Draft 02/22/2010]

[That’s it. Just the title. I have no idea what this piece may have been, how much I was paid, or how long it took! I was just excited that my little 3D printer was making a little bit of money and started to share it with the world… before sitting in my drafts folder for … more than 15 years]

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Rebuilding my extruder [Draft 02/16/2010]

[I put down the title and then did nothing. :) I suspect the other adjacent draft about printing with PLA was related to the need to re-re-re-build my extruder. The way extruders were built back then didn’t involve careful machining of custom nozzles and shaped channels for the plastic to flow. Instead, the PTFE tube went into the extruder and you kinda hoped for the best. If you had heat creep, didn’t cool down properly, etc, you had to disassemble everything and rebuild it all. But, such was the course of the hobbyist 3D printer enthusiast in the winter of 2010!]

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

How are you printing with PLA? [Draft 02/16/2010]

[There were two drafts with this title, one empty, and one with the single sentence below unfinished. Up until about January of 2010 I was printing in ABS which smelled bad and warped like crazy. But, it did print. When I started printing with PLA I found it difficult to work with, temperamental, wouldn’t melt or it would and then clog the extruder. I think at some point I suggested that PLA was only suitable for printing tears. Obviously, printers, PLA, and my maturity have come a long way since.]

I’d like to know, I really would.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

The Lost Blog Posts

A sign in front of a desolate wasteland says "YOU ARE LOST" — But at least you’re here

I’ve got a lot of unpublished draft blog posts here. Like a lot. At the time I’m writing this post, I’ve got 1,134 published posts and 329 drafts. This isn’t versions of drafts. It’s posts that I’ve started and then didn’t publish for some reason or another. On probably 300 different topics. Some are, admittedly, little more than a collection of links and indecipherable shorthand texts from a madman. However, others are filled with research, links, images, code, and were so close to publishing that I can only imagine that something distracted me before I could… squirrel!

The oldest of these dates back to December 2009 and relates to the cutting edge, new to market, MakerBot Cupcake CNC’s plastic extruder, the “plastruder.” I don’t know that anyone would be interested in this kind of content any more, but I kinda like the idea of “Drafts Zero” and spending about 5-15 minutes dusting off an old draft and just publishing it.¹

Let’s see how this goes.

Update:

In just the first few posts, I discovered that I wanted to add some additional comments. Look for these at the top, in italics and in brackets to provide context.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

A take on the “Inbox Zero” productivity / organization strategy [↩]

Goblin Hours, Enabled

I’ve often told my family that if it were not for them, I’d basically work all night, every night, on whatever latest project popped into my brain, and then fall asleep at the workbench/eating plank/soldering station every night/early morning.

The thing is, these tendencies just aren’t very conducive when it comes to trying to live with other people, especially those you’re semi-responsible for.¹ It’s especially challenging to work in a professional environment at DayJob™️when I’m working crazy hours. I don’t want my clients or the other people I work with realizing they’re communicating with the functional equivalent of three meth-addled racoons in a trench coat.²³

I have a few ways of passing for a socially normative respectable professional. Here are some of my coping mechanisms:

I’ve put several buttons into Outlook’s quick access toolbar. The most important are:
- “Delay Delivery” so that I can draft and hit “send” on an email, but not have it go out until a socially acceptable time
- “Signature” so that I can easily send an email with my “mobile” email signature or my full fledged obnoxiously enormous “professional” email signature. Why would I do this, you ask? Well, if I want to get away with a quick reply and not really do a deep dive, I’ll fire off an email as if I were typing from my phone. I’ll even introduce “strategic typos” to really sell the impression. Then again, if I’m typing a really long email into my phone and want to have it appear more impressive, I’ll use the “professional” signature.
- “Work Offline” so that I can work uninterrupted for even a little while. Being able to shut off the firehose that is my daily work email inbox is incredibly helpful.
I addressed strategic typos earlier, but it’s really genuinely a real coping mechanism aside from just an email signature. Adding typos makes it more likely someone will focus on appreciating your responsiveness and less likely they’ll get nitpicky about the content.
My old cell phone using Google Voice as my “personal cell phone” number. I don’t want to talk to people, but it’s basically unavoidable. Then again, a quick text from the phone can handle many situations. Even better, clients feel like they really have access to me. It’s also nice that I can keep Google Voice open on my desktop and be able to “text” from my computer and using my keyboard. In reality, I just leave this secondary phone and just … walk away from it. No one outside my family needs that much access to my life.
I’ve spent a lot of time tracking my productivity and know what days I’m the least productive. Unsurprisingly, it’s Mondays and very especially Fridays. This means I try to avoid meetings on these days as much as possible so that I can lean into unproductivity if I need to. Why flog myself into working ever harder when I already know that however hard I push myself, it’s just not gonna be a productive day?
I really try to avoid all meetings. Mercifully in person meetings are all but extinct. Video meetings are nearly as bad, but at least I don’t have to wear pants. Whenever I have a video meeting (or phone conference), I will make a special effort to ask for an “agenda.” If you don’t have an agenda, or at least some kind of idea about what you want to accomplish at a meeting you’ll never know if you’ve succeeded at the meeting … or when it should end. And, once I have the agenda, I will send an email with as much detail and cover as many points as possible. Sure, no one will read it… but its’ my way of preparing for the meeting and I can keep referring back to it as necessary. I’d say in roughly 40% of situations that email is enough to torpedo the entire meeting.
Recently I created, with the help of ChatGPT⁴ I wrote an Outlook macro which will help me automate when I send emails. Whenever the “Work Offline” button is toggled and I hit “send” on an email, it picks a random time between 7:15 AM and 7:59 AM and schedules the email to go out on the next business day. Sure, this means people will get a flood of emails from me first thing on Monday morning. But, it’s that a lot better than getting a stream of emails from me all weekend?
I hate phone calls, so I will dodge as many as I can get away with. And, when I’m on a long phone call, I will play a recording of someone knocking on my door and asking for my attention in increasingly urgent tones, until I can get off the line.

I don’t know – maybe this all adds up to some kind of antisocial behavior or DSM IV diagnosis? What I do know is that with these various tools I’m able to better work with others in a professional setting.

It’s a little after 4AM right now. I’m not sure how to end this post so I’m just going to publish it. :)

In so far as I can be responsible for other humans [↩]
God, wouldn’t that be an amazing Halloween costume?! Me dressed as three racoons dressed as me?!!? [↩]
Where was I? [↩]
Don’t @ me. I don’t care. [↩]