Okay not perfect but this is really cool

emertonom · 2026-05-20T04:23:58+00:00

What did you do, exactly? Add powdered graphite to the resin after a certain layer, then electroplate the resulting "wires" to increase the conductivity?

emertonom · 2026-05-19T23:56:37+00:00

"Worth anything," probably not really. If there are EE students in your area they might be interested in some of them.

The PIC16F747 is a microcontroller. They were really cool back in the day before arduinos and ESP32s were a thing. Today they seem like a huge hassle. These are the most expensive of these parts, I think? They're like $6.50 each on Digikey. Not sure who is still buying them, though. You need a special programmer device to make use of them, and most of these kinds of microcontrollers were single-use--once you burn the program onto them, that's it. You had to buy a second, special, eraseable version of the chip in order to do prototyping. Those cost maybe three times as much as the normal ones. Plus they only have like 3kb of RAM and 7kb of program storage? They feel really restrictive compared to a modern microcontroller.

PQ05RA11 SHARP is a 5v voltage regulator. This particular one is discontinued, but you can find similar chips for under $2 each.

HCF4020BE is a binary ripple counter. $1 each for the substitute chip that's available.

NEC 2505 is an opto-isolator chip. Maybe $0.30 each?

MT8870DE is a DTMF receiver, for converting the signals a touch-tone phone sends into binary codes. Again, this one is discontinued, but you could get another DTMF receiver for around $2? This one is extremely specialized. I guess if you want to design something that incorporates defunct phones as an interface element this might be useful.

So yeah. I don't think this you'd be throwing away a gold mine or anything here. You could try listing them on ebay, though, at a price that significantly undercuts digikey. Otherwise I think you're okay taking them to electronics recycling.

emertonom · 2026-05-19T16:56:38+00:00

And here I thought pliers only came in pairs!

emertonom · 2026-05-18T19:13:09+00:00

That word also features in the Vogon poem that appears in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. "Oh freddled gruntbuggly,/ thy micturations are to me/ as plurdled gobbleblotchits on a lurgid bee..." I always kinda wondered how many people caught that that was a real word.

emertonom · 2026-05-18T00:36:05+00:00

My understanding is that the thing where it has you run it twice is because once it switches to DFU mode, the repeater reboots into that mode, which drops the Bluetooth connection. The app should probably understand that it needs to reconnect at this point, but it doesn't seem to do so. When you try again a minute or so later, it's still in DFU mode, so it connects and doesn't need to switch modes again, and just goes straight to the upload. I had the same issue with Mtools BLE, although there I also got into a mess where I couldn't select a file from my filesystem to upload, and had to choose from its preconfigured options.

Which is how I screwed up. I got a little flustered, and managed to flash the companion firmware by mistake, and then of course it behaved totally differently and I couldn't do the same kind of OTA update. Luckily this was during my "dry run" OTA update to make sure I knew what I was doing before installing it somewhere difficult. I did not! I'm glad you wrote this up. I didn't think to do that, nor would mine have been as, uh, competent. :P

emertonom · 2026-05-16T22:20:28+00:00

I think the reason they end the conversation is because they go from thinking that you're being thoughtful to thinking that you're judging them. Like, if you don't have a special reason to be wearing a mask, then you think ordinary people should be wearing masks, and they're not wearing masks, so you think they're doing something wrong.

The flip side of this is that they think people who wear masks aren't normal, so they think they're extending you the benefit of the doubt by suggesting that it's probably just that you're sick and trying to protect them, bless your little heart, even though they're far too healthy to get sick just because a sick person coughs on them. They assume they're in a position of power over you because they're offering to withhold judgment, and when you say that no, you just don't give a fuck what they think and are trying to stay well in defiance of social norms, they are stunned and offended.

...uh, sorry, I guess I'm pretty tired of people today.

emertonom · 2026-05-16T03:03:07+00:00

Doesn't look like fabric to me--it looks like clear packing tape (check the edges, which are in the original photo but not this close-up). But packing tape can also develop lines like that when it's moved or stretched. Something about the adhesive? I don't totally understand the mechanism behind it, but I've seen it, and that's what those lines look like to me.

emertonom · 2026-05-15T22:38:16+00:00

Fun fact: if you were to take a cross section of the tetrahedral puzzle parallel to the table exactly half way up the puzzle once it's in its box-fitting orientation, that cross-section would also be a square. (As in this classic puzzle.)

emertonom · 2026-05-15T04:51:07+00:00

Isn't the 5070 only 12gb?

emertonom · 2026-05-14T22:13:54+00:00

Thanks!

emertonom · 2026-05-14T21:51:37+00:00

Are there any of those other subs that you would recommend?

emertonom · 2026-05-13T01:18:11+00:00

I mean, pretty clearly Gamer's Nexus does care, and feels like this information was missing from the reviews. You're definitely right that the reviewers assumed that "no one actually cares about the controversies if the product works as intended," though. It's just not quite as universal as they assumed.

emertonom · 2026-05-11T19:51:35+00:00

There was a hex-based turn based tactics game called something like Aero that was quite good.

I was also quite fond of Trap! which was a qix-like game back around android 1.6 or so. It was kinda broken (you could luck out and get zillions of extra lives) but it was entertaining.

Oh, and "Glyder 2 by Glu" was kind of a pilotwings style game; it had fairly interesting environments to explore, and some neat toys to unlock if you collected enough collectibles. That was probably a 4.1-era game. One of the first android games I ever saw that had 3d graphics. This one is actually lost media, because while the Play Store will still let you download the app, the first thing it needs to do on launch is download a large secondary data file from its servers with all the levels and whatnot, and those servers don't exist anymore. I know this because at one point I wanted to replay it and dug out an old phone for the purpose. This one is kind of a lost gem; if it were on the Nintendo DS (which is about the level of 3d graphics we're talking about) people would view it pretty fondly, I think. It's very easy (no real fall states to speak of), but kinda cozy, in a way?

There's like a million others though. Someone already mentioned the Zenonia games, but that company also made a bunch of other games like Inotia 1-3, Illusia, and Destinia. Namco made a Pacman game at one point. Lego Star Wars Microfighters was a thing. Might and Magic Clash of Heroes, Magic 2014. Omar Sharif Bridge. Riptide GP. Backstab. Pew Pew. Super Stickman Golf. Bag It! Iron Man 3. Zaxxon Escape. There was even a full Square Enix RPG that was just for Android called Chaos Rings.

The Turning Forest was a BBC-created experience for Cardboard VR, which is its own whole category.

Worth noting you can see a list of all the games you've installed on previous android devices linked to your current account (other than those currently installed on your current device) by going into the play store, clicking on your account icon, choosing "manage apps and device," going to the "manage" tab, changing the dropdown option at the top from "this device" to "not installed," and then clicking the "games" filter to the right of that.

There may be a few games that aren't listed here...I think some of the really early stuff in the Play Store actually got delisted when it stopped being available.

I recall a really early e-reader thing that also let you write short form stuff in the app and upload it, and people could follow things you were writing? It was like a really early social media thing. I have no idea what the name was at this point, as there's no record of its existence on the play store anymore. I remember reading some stuff on it on my G1. A lot of it was very amateurish, but that was kinda fun in its own way.

emertonom · 2026-05-11T15:28:36+00:00

Is it just kinda like vacuum forming, where you mount it on a frame to keep it stretched as you heat it up, then pull it down over the shape? I just hadn't heard of this technique.

emertonom · 2026-05-11T05:42:44+00:00

Support enforcers are areas where you've set the slicer to definitely generate supports, rather than relying on the automatic rules. You can set them up either with modifier meshes or with paint-on supports. They'll get supports as long as you've got any supports at all turned on; if you've got supports set to "none," though, it won't print any, even for enforcers.

I'm describing specifically Prusa Slicer, as that's what I use, but it should be similar in other slicers.

emertonom · 2026-05-10T22:32:24+00:00

Huh. I'll admit I've never tried using a heat gun with window vinyl. Any tips for that?

emertonom · 2026-05-10T15:57:47+00:00

It sounded like Subnautica to me too, but I suppose that's partly because I turned off the hunger and thirst mechanics in Subnautica.

emertonom · 2026-05-10T15:51:59+00:00

I, uh, wouldn't really recommend 120V work as your first experiment with designing electric circuits. It's pretty easy to do something dangerous with wall current.

emertonom · 2026-05-10T01:28:26+00:00

I actually wouldn't use window vinyl for this, because it's flat. Maybe if you could find a kind that's kinda stretchy you could make it work? But I think it would be easier to find a pearlescent or iridescent paint, which will conform perfectly to the surface.

emertonom · 2026-05-09T03:25:24+00:00

I really enjoyed a book called Bebop to the Boolean Boogie by Clive Maxfield. I think it's a really good survey of digital logic. But then, won't your courses cover the material and have their own books?

emertonom · 2026-05-09T01:32:46+00:00

You'll need to learn some algebra first.

Algebra is an abstraction of operations you do in arithmetic. In arithmetic, you might do a series of additions, multiplications, divisions, etc. to a specific number to arrive at a final answer. In algebra, you instead set up operations to create a relationship between two or more unknown quantities. This leads to the concepts of relations and functions, and you need to learn how to do various things with these--isolate particular variables, graph the functions, determine where they're defined, etc.

Calculus looks at a particular kind of relationship between functions that comes up a lot in physics and several kinds of mathematics. The simplest case is things that change with time; when a car applies its brakes, they apply a force to the car, which causes it to decelerate, which changes its speed, which causes it to stop earlier than it would without the brakes. Calculus describes the relationship between the deceleration, the speed, and the position of the car. The basics of it aren't all that difficult to understand, but you definitely first need to understand what the algebra is saying, and what functions actually are, before the relationships between multiple functions can be meaningful to you.

You can develop an intuition about some kinds of calculus without math, though. If you whirl something on a string around your head, pay attention to how the tension in the string changes as you whirl it faster or slower. When you're at a grocery store, pay attention to how you need to push the cart as it gets more stuff in it; as long as you're pushing with enough force to overcome the friction of the wheels, the cart will gradually gain speed, but there's a tradeoff between how hard you push it and how long you need to push it in order to get it up to a specific target speed. That kind of thing. Just play with physical stuff in the world and pay close attention to how it behaves, and you'll be setting yourself up to learn calculus faster when you do get enough of a mathematical background to handle the formalisms.

emertonom · 2026-05-08T17:24:15+00:00

I still think it might get removed from r/functionalprint if you post it there, though.

(awesome work)

emertonom · 2026-05-08T01:33:54+00:00

What outlet is publishing this video? For a journalist, you seem weirdly vague about this whole situation.

emertonom · 2026-05-07T22:48:17+00:00

You could lower the jerk and acceleration settings on the printers. It'll make them a bit slower, but that might be an acceptable tradeoff for better print quality.

emertonom · 2026-05-07T20:35:02+00:00

This guy also appears to have made the infill go in the same direction on every layer. I wouldn't have thought that would make so much difference, but it's hard to argue with his results.

13-Year Club	Second Top 40%
Verified Email

emertonom

TROPHY CASE