dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.

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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • I briefly touched on this in a lengthy comment when this scheme was originally floated a few months ago. Your prediction, which granted is something that Youtube/Google absolutely would try if they thought they could get away with it, would only work on viewers that remained within the confines of Youtube’s native player.

    Any third party app capable of bullying or tricking Youtube into handing them the video data is free to do whatever it wants to with it afterwards, even if this ultimately means impeccably pretending to be the official Youtube player in order to get the server to fork over the data. Furthermore, video playback is buffered so a hypothetical pirate client would have several seconds worth of upcoming video to analyze and determine what it wants to do with it.

    Youtube could certainly make this process rather difficult by including some kind of end-to-end DRM or something, but at the end of the day you need to make a playable video stream arrive on the client’s device or computer somehow, and if you can’t guarantee full control of the entire environment in which that happens, dedicated nerds will find a away to screw with that data.


  • I’ve had much the opposite experience, in my case coming from using a variety of Razer peripherals and having them all die early deaths, and then Razer themselves to be completely useless in regards to support even well within their warranty period. I gave up and switched to basically all Logitech stuff, which has been flawless for me for many many years.

    If everything from all major brands is going to require Yet Another Fucking Account (thus far Logitech does not appear to, or at least not the stuff from them I have) I will just be forced to switch to buying generic brandless Chinese garbage and deal with replacing it regularly. Generic Chinese crap never has an app or an account requirement.


  • PLA is a poor choice for this application. PLA will permanently deform under constant load (creep) even at room temperature. Hanging things on a hook is definitely a constant load – especially up to 45 pounds worth of something. These may not fail under short term static testing at that weight but I can tell you they absolutely will not withstand that type of load for an extended period. They’re probably fine for very light duty hanging, however. I have a variety of PLA pegs and hooks around the place that are at most holding a couple of ounces in some cases for 2+ years and they have not appreciably deformed, or at least not to the extent that I’ve noticed enough to care.

    But to avoid the inevitable customer complaints of this ilk, I advise you to either lower your advertised load rating or print these out of ABS or ASA, or at the very least PETG if your machine can’t handle the higher temperatures required for ABS reliably. Polycarb would be even better but it is extremely difficult to print with consumer printers and is probably more trouble than it’s worth. Out of the “normal” non-exotic, non-super-high-temp filaments readily commercially available, ABS has the best creep resistance.


  • I’ve been using those integrated flat LED fixtures in my place lately. I don’t find them too difficult to install, and at least one of my rooms has a rather low ceiling so I’d rather not have stuff dangling down where I can bonk myself on the head with it.

    I haven’t had a single problem but if they die they’re trivially easy – for me – to replace. They’re just held onto the ceiling electrical box with two screws, and the electrical connection is two wire nuts. It’ll take me longer to find and lug my stepladder into position than it will for me to replace one. Light fixtures are dead easy, you don’t even have to find and turn off the breaker. Just turn it off at the switch before you mess with it.

    The example you linked is suspiciously expensive. I’m getting these for around $15 each.

    If you are going to go the socket-and-bulbs route for any of the reasons raised by the other comments here, make absolutely certain that you don’t get a fixture that is enclosed in any way. Enclosed fixtures will kill LED bulbs quickly, and in extreme cases you’ll go through them faster than filament bulbs.




  • “It’s good. You’ve got the swing and everything.”

    Tʜᴀɴᴋ ʏᴏᴜ, ᴍɪss Fʟɪᴛᴡᴏʀᴛʜ.

    “But why one blade of grass at a time?”

    Bill Door regarded the neat row of stalks for some while.

    Tʜᴇʀᴇ ɪs ᴀɴᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ᴡᴀʏ?

    “You can do lots in one go, you know.”

    Nᴏ. Nᴏ. Oɴᴇ ʙʟᴀᴅᴇ ᴀᴛ ᴀ ᴛɪᴍᴇ. Oɴᴇ ᴛɪᴍᴇ, ᴏɴᴇ ʙʟᴀᴅᴇ.

    “You won’t cut many that way,” said Miss Flitworth.

    Eᴠᴇʀʏ ʟᴀsᴛ ᴏɴᴇ, Mɪss Fʟɪᴛᴡᴏʀᴛʜ.

    “Yes?”

    Tʀᴜsᴛ ᴍᴇ ᴏɴ ᴛʜɪs.







  • Typically it’s not the emitters – the LED’s themselves – that fail. If driven correctly, those have lifetimes of tens of thousands of hours.

    LED “bulbs,” the type that replace filament bulbs in consumer fixtures, typically fail in their driver hardware. LED’s run off of low voltage DC and in the base of all of those LED conversion bulbs is a power conversion assembly that steps down and rectifies 120v/240c AC to whatever DC voltage the LED array in there expects. These are inevitably made out of whatever the cheapest passives and semiconductor components the manufacturer thinks they can get away with.

    The main killer for all semiconductor electronics, which includes both LED’s themselves and their driver circuitry, is heat. This is often exacerbated by the fact that LED replacement modules are usually stuck in enclosed light fixtures designed for filament bulbs that have insufficient ventilation to get rid of the waste heat from the components in an LED module. The insides of those enclosed ceiling light fixtures, the ubiquitous “boob light,” gets hot, even with only LED modules installed. Filament bulbs don’t care because they don’t have any electronics in them and how they work is literally by getting so hot the glow. But LED modules in that kind of environment will invariably suffer an early failure.


  • The efficiency of Peltiers in regards to heat moved per watts spent is actually kind of crap. And the hotter their hot side gets, the worse that efficiency becomes. Overclockers attempting (often in vain) to use them for sub-ambient-temperature cooling for computer components have known this for a long time.

    Even a dinky compressor based refrigerant system is more efficient at moving heat than a Peltier of equivalent-ish total wattage.

    That’s before getting into the details specific to the crappy tiny Peltier cooler in the video, which runs at 100% of its duty cycle all the time and has functionally zero insulation, unlike an actual refrigerator.

    I have a Peltier based car cooler, and that’s basically the only use case for these things that makes sense: Short term storage of things where the actual temperature achieved isn’t that critical, and which needs to remain light enough that you can easily carry it. Basically, just treat it as a regular cooler that if you play your cards right you won’t have to add any ice to.



  • The annoying thing is, the problem with this from a design perspective was well known and there were already some efforts to improve upon matters as early as the SNES era. Both Chrono Trigger and Earthbound leap to mind. It’s just that following this, most developers forgot to learn a lesson from these for another decade or two.

    In Earthbound, all non-story, non-boss encounters are visible on the overworld and you can either:

    • Avoid them entirely with some foresight and skill
    • Get a backstab advantage if you manage to maneuver yourself behind the enemy, or
    • Instantly win the battle if your level significantly exceeds that of the enemy
    • Battles can be auto-fought with the computer controlling your party if you are e.g. trying to eat a sandwich at the same time or something

    In Chrono Trigger, most trivial encounters can be avoided, with some scripted exceptions that always initiate when you cross a certain area presumably to prevent players from completely avoiding all combat entirely and subsequently getting their asses stomped by the bosses. Chrono Trigger’s overworld map also features no random encounters whatsoever. You can wander the world freely and will only encounter monsters if you actually enter a location.

    I harp on this a lot, but only because it’s true. Despite its faults, some of which it definitely has, Chrono Trigger had some incredible design innovations and was easily the high water mark for JRPG design not only for its time, but even compared to subsequent games for a long time – maybe even still to this day.

    • Many trash mob encounters can simply be avoided if you can’t be bothered or are low on resources
    • Those that can’t can usually be wiped in a single move if the enemy is far beneath you via double/triple techs
    • Encounters happen on the screen you’re already on, so you don’t get disoriented after the battle ends
    • Positioning on the battlefield matters for techs, making fights more interesting than the usual you line up on one side/they line up on the other side method…
    • …However, positioning on the battlefield absolutely does not matter for single magic spells or melee attacks, meaning you never get completely screwed by how the chessboard is laid out
    • You can walk diagonally (seriously, the inability in even much later games to do this bugs me to no end – Pokémon, I’m lookin’ at you)
    • If a non-story-critical NPC is yammering at you and you can’t be bothered, you can just walk away even when the text box is still open
    • Not only can you rearrange your party however you want including not putting the protagonist at the head of the conga line (and even being able to remove him fully, after a certain plot event), but which combination of party members you have actually matters for techs and not just a perpetual case of, “I need one tank, one caster, and one healer” like prior/later games
    • The entire concept of the New Game+ is called what it is and works how it does because of how Chrono Trigger did it
    • You can fight the final boss pretty much any time as soon as you learn about him, and if you get your ass whooped trying that’s on you

    Etc.

    Apparently the Chrono Trigger devs originally planned to give the player even more freedom but several additional concepts such as being able to freely position your fighters on the field were cut due to time constraints and not being able to figure out a sufficiently elegant way to do it on the SNES hardware and controller.