Thingiverse® controversies aside, I like rubber band guns. I just saw this one the other day made by Plumb B. I’ve never played Gears of War, but this appears to be a very faithful replica from the images I have seen. Aside from it’s faithfulness, I admire the way it uses a magazine to hold several1 rubber bands. I also appreciate the way the maker shows all of the inner workings and mechanisms.
Hat tip to Boingboing for the link.
“Mathematics? Pfff. I’m going to invent Meta-Mathematics. Like a BOSS.”
Courtesy of Vi Hart.
Spacexula is selling his RepRap on ebay.
It’s one thing to buy a kit and it’s another thing altogether to buy a fully assembled fully operational machine. This machine was built and operated by one of the most vocal RepRap champions and prolific RepRap bloggers around. So, it’s not insignificant that this machine comes backed his promise of helping you getting this machine running. If I recall correctly, his last machine sold for a little over $1400. At the time of this post, this RepRap Prusa Mendel one is going for $510.00.
Also, here’s my favorite video from Spacexula:
I’m sure others have a similar rule, but this is my formulation. The 80/20 rule is a pretty decent formulation of it. Per Wikipedia:
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
I’d take it one step further. If there’s a solution that covers 85% of situations, I figure I can improvise the remaining 15% of the time. Case in point – there’s my swiss army pocket knife. I wanted a knife with features that would be useful to me 85% of the time. I chose one that had scissors, bottle opener, wire stripper, flathead screwdriver, a philips head screwdriver, a magnet, blade, and a few minor other features. I didn’t get the one with the pliers, corkscrew, saw, or other wacky features. Applying this rule, I chose a knife that fairly cheap, but had features I would use 85% of the time. 1
I applied this rule in creating ProfileMaker. 2 3 I wanted something that would help people in about 85% of the situations they would face. I also applied this rule when choosing my new laptop. I didn’t need a workhorse for playing games, video editing, or large number crunching, so I got an economical laptop with plenty of hard drive space and long battery life. Tonight I was asking my little laptop to crunch some big numbers – namely render a big OpenSCAD design composed of a number of smaller STL’s. Waiting for things to render, now that’s when I sometimes look back and wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off getting that last 15% worth of computing power. :)
Why in the world did they change the user interface? Now it’s much more akin to what you would see in a touch-screen. I use a laptop or desktop with a touchpad or mouse.
I just wish they’d stop trying to fix things that aren’t broken.
Netflix recently split their services into DVD shipping and internet streaming, while increasing prices. Back in July this change was announced and today Reed Hastings has issued what he describes as an apology. Only, it isn’t.
The price increase and service reduction announced back in July1 was met with public outcry. Reed Hastings and Netflix responded with interviews and press releases, but never a change in their policy. In one of these interviews Hastings made a comment that the price increase was “just a latte,” which struck the wrong chord with some. Yes, it shows he’s out of touch with his customer base, but that’s hardly breaking news on the heels of a 60% price hike.
To make matters more interesting, on September 1, 2011 Netflix lost one of the biggest draws to it’s streaming service – the deal it had cut with Sony and the premium cable channel Starz. So, not only does the Netflix price increase promise lower service and higher prices, but they’re also going to be offering 100,000 fewer titles. And, these aren’t just old titles – Starz was contributing recently released movies and lots of Disney titles.
Now Hastings publishes a post entitled, “An Explanation and Some Reflections.” In a nutshell, he’s saying:
Hastings, let me respond to help you put things in perspective. And, I have a feeling I speak for some of the 12,000 people who responded to your morning’s post when I say this:
Why isn’t anyone at Netflix paying attention? Your customers are not alienated because Reed Hastings isn’t talking enough. Your customers are alientated becuase prices and hassle are going up while services and selection are going down.
On a slightly wistful note, Kathleen Jennings’ simple, elegant, and evocative sketches make me miss sketching. Once upon a time, a long long time ago, I would carry an analog notebook everywhere and sketch in pen and ink, my favorite media.
I still sketch occasionally, my most amusing sketches are now done at the behest of my daughter.
Ah! But, now the mood has struck! I also find that my sketches that I appreciate the most are ones that are totally off the cuff. Just pen, paper, and 30 seconds to draw something before my daughter’s attention fades. 1 We have a few of these little sketches framed around our home.
One of my favorites that is not framed was also inspired by my daughter. I think I was teasing her about something, suggesting she was too good smelling to do something or other. She insisted she was smelly. I insisted she was not. She said, again, she was and that she was rolling with the pigs. You see, when you’re 3 years old the smelliest dirtiest thing you can conceive of is a pig rolling in mud. The resulting sketch is of my daughter in what appears to be a sedan/SUV with several pigs, all of them wearing sunglasses, with her driving – as she rolls with the pigs.
I like to think she gets her artistic tendencies from me. She probably colors something on the order of 20 sheets of paper a day in drawings. Markers, crayons, and color pencils. It’s pretty amazing to come home and find pages and pages of new artwork every day. What’s more, there’s always a story to go with each picture.
I tend to sketch a lot more on vacation. I’ll actually dust off a sketchbook to take with me and sketch things I see while out and about. I have several pages devoted to the grad school road trip out to Las Vegas and New Mexico with my roommate. It features the Grand Canyon, random exit signs, people we met, scenes and sunsets. I have more pages devoted to a Mexican cruise from about six years ago filled with funny inside jokes and bits about the funny people we met.
Almost totally off topic, but while I’m in a sharing mood – tonight I kept my daughter entertained for about 15 solid minutes with several dozen variations of card tricks based on three slight of hand maneuvers. The best part is she really and truly believes I taught her magic. 2 I put the deck in front of her and let her knock on it with her hand and tell me where the Ace of Spaces was supposed to be – the top, middle, or bottom of the deck. And, wherever she said, that’s where it always was.
The Dalek Game just makes me all kinds of happy.
Kathleen Jennings has started a little game where she inserts the word “Dalek” into literary titles and then draws an accompanying picture. It is the best thing the internet has brought me all day.1
In case you’re ever interested, there’s a really great piece of open source software called YouURLS available at Yourls.org. It is a LAMP1 architecture URL shortening software. It’s about as easy to install as WordPress and reasonably barebones. But, once installed, “it just works.” A few weeks ago I became enamored with the idea of having my own URL shortener, so I went out on the hunt for possible cool names. A lot of the good short names are already taken, prohibitively expensive2 , or are reserved/unavailable since many TLD’s3 don’t allow 1 and 2 letter domains. 4
There are some potential problems with running your own short URL service. First, if you don’t intend to keep it around forever it isn’t that much use to people in general. Second, the market space is pretty well packed already. Third, anyone can have their very own URL service for the price of a domain name5 , some hosting6 , and an installation of YOURLS7 . Fourth, some spammers/scammers/phishers are always on the lookout for legitimate but unknown URL shorteners so they can obfuscate their spammy/scammy URL’s – and you don’t want to be associated with that kinda mess anyhow.
But, if you just want one because you really like the idea and aren’t going to make it public to anyone else… why not do it? Want to know the short URL domain name I chose? Well, I’m going to tell you anyhow.
Cool, huh? It fit all of my criteria. It wasn’t too expensive8 , is very short at just 7 characters for the entire URL910 , and is memorable/clever. It’s not public, because I don’t want to deal with spammers and whatnot, but I can think of a number of cool uses for such a service. And, of course, I’d welcome any of your suggestions.
