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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I don’t disagree with the need for local, on-demand production for some oddball parts in some cases, but I do think that 3d printing is the wrong technology for it in this case

    This seems like a perfect use for some sort of CNC lathe to me. Pipes are cylinders, and lathes are pretty much the perfect tool to create cylindrical objects. Chuck a piece of metal (or whatever material you need to make the part out of), turn it down to the correct inner and outer diameters, cut the right threads on either end, and you’re good to go. Need to be able to pet a wrench on it? Start with hex stock.

    I’d have a lot more confidence that a part isn’t going to start leaking if it’s carved out of a solid piece of material than if it’s made out of many layers of material deposited on top of each other.

    The only thing a lathe would struggle with is things like elbows and tees, but with a little know-how you can get around that by just making adapters to more readily available standard elbows and such, using flexible tubing, tube benders, etc.

    The idea of 3d printing these parts really feels like a “when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail” situation.


  • Slipknot puts on a pretty damn good show.

    They’re not a band that’s in my usual listening rotation, I don’t dislike them, they’re just not my usual kind of music. When I saw them it was a situation where someone I knew ended up with extra tickets somehow and I was more interested in the other bands they were touring with

    I’d say they stole the show but I think they were actually the headliner, so I don’t know who they would’ve stolen it from.

    I’m admittedly a sucker for a spectacle, and let’s be real, that’s kind of slipknot’s whole schtick.


  • Yeah, malls in the US at least are really dying in a lot of places.

    I stopped into one of the smaller ones near me a few months back, I had maybe an hour to kill before I had to meet someone for dinner and it was close by so I figured I’d walk around for a bit, and it was downright eerie.

    There were probably as many vacant spaces as actual stores, and half of the occupied stores were closed at like 5:00 on a weekday. Parts of the mall actually seemed like they only had some of the lights on, half of the escalators were turned off or out of service and there were maybe a couple dozen other people walking around the mall.

    There was one part of the mall with no open stores, dim lights, and I didn’t see anyone else around and for a minute it almost felt like I had noclipped into the backrooms.


  • Can’t speak for OP’s situation, but I live near one of the largest malls in the country, and there’s maybe about a half dozen smaller malls scattered around within about an hour or so.

    The big mall is still doing pretty alright, but if you were around maybe about 10-20 years ago, it’s pretty obvious that the crowds are way smaller than they used to be.

    The mall used to pretty much be the place to go meet up with friends, spend time walking around hanging out, a lot of times there would be different events going on at the malls, they were always packed Friday nights and weekends, etc.

    Now except for maybe a few key days during the holiday season, they’re just not busy.

    The smaller malls are almost deserted, lots of empty stores, and some of the spaces are being rented out for kind of weird purposes (I think one of our local politicians- a state representative something, has their office space in a mall) a few of them have closed down entirely.




  • I’ve always thought that most toilet paper holders are over engineered. You don’t need a little springy rod between 2 posts, you just need an L-shaped bar with the short end screwed to the wall and maybe a little knob on the end of the long side to keep the roll from sliding off. And it’s not that the spring style is especially difficult to use or prone to failure or anything, it just seems like a no-brainer to me to use a one-piece holder with no moving parts instead of one that has at least 4 parts (the base, 2 halves of the roller, and a spring) I’m seeing more of that style around these days, which I appreciate.

    Stove vent hoods that don’t actually vent outside are fucking stupid. My over the range microwave basically just takes smoke from my stove and blows it back out over my head almost directly at the smoke detector.

    I’ve frequently run into shelves, mounting brackets, etc. that seem to totally disregard stud spacing. We got one of those fancy Samsung frame TV’s a while back, to get it to sit so flush to the wall it has its own special mounting brackets, 2 little plates with sort of a modified keyhole slot that you slot 2 little knobs on the back of the TV into. It’s actually not a half bad way to mount a TV, probably one of the easier TV wall mounts I’ve ever personally used, the tv itself is actually pretty damn lightweight (because they moved all the heavy electronics into a separate box you need to hide somewhere) but still I wanted to make sure my fancy TV wouldn’t fall off the wall, so I wanted to mount it to the studs, but of course the spacing of the brackets doesn’t allow that option. I was able to bolt one side a stud but I had to get some toggle bolts for the other side. I’m pretty sure the whole TV is well within the rated weight capacity of one of those toggle bolts in drywall, let alone 2 in drywall and 2 in a stud, but still, it feels like a dumb design choice. (It’s possible that other sizes or newer models do allow for mounting entirely to studs, the size and model I got didn’t)

    I helped a friend replace the wax ring on his toilet recently with one of the newer style rubber gaskets, which as it turns out made the toilet sit imperceptibly higher, which meant that the bolts holding it down were no longer quite long enough to screw the nut onto to tighten it down. With a quick trip to ace hardware and a minute perusing my options, I settled on some Danco zero cut bolts, and I definitely think that is a far superior design to the standard bolts that are probably holding down damn-near every toilet you’ve ever used.

    On the subject of toilets, I can’t think of any particularly good reason for the tank to be a separate piece from the rest of the throne like on most toilets. The gasket and bolts there just add more places for something to start leaking. It’s probably an ease of manufacturing thing, but we have the technology to make one piece toilets now, the two piece style should be obsolete.


  • You got some misinformation here

    The current Post Exposure rabies Prophylaxis (PEP) regimen is definitely not “a shot a day” for 20 days

    First day you get a dose of vaccine and a dose of human rabies immune globulin (HRIG)

    Then you get an additional vaccine dose on days 3, 7, 14, and if you’re immunocompromised you get an additional dose on day 28

    And if you’ve previously received the rabies vaccine (for either pre- or post- exposure) you only need a booster on days 0 and 3.

    And the incubation period varies, like you said location and viral load plays into it, in humans it can be as little as a week, but more commonly it’s a couple months, and even up to a year. There are a lot of variables at play, and the sooner you can start PEP the better of course, but generally speaking it’s usually not a “rush immediately to the hospital in an ambulance or you will die” situation. If it comes to it, you usually have at least a couple days of wiggle room to start PEP.

    And no, bats don’t always bite the neck. Head and neck are pretty common, they’re usually pretty exposed, and bats fly so it would be kind of weird for them to bite you on the leg for example, but it’s not like they’re magically drawn to act out the plot of a vampire movie. It is true though that a lot of people don’t recognize a bat bite for what it is.



  • Yeah, overall the policies where I am are pretty damn sensible. Technically we’re not supposed to, but unless you do something stupid like show up to work high, I’d have a hard time thinking of a way you’d get in trouble for it.

    Of course if you ended up getting in trouble somehow on your own time, since it’s still illegal here it would probably lead to some sort of disciplinary action, revoked certifications, termination, etc. which I suppose is understandable

    It’s always interesting to me how different some of these policies are from one agency to another. I see a lot of dispatchers in other places talking about how intense their background checks were, and they had to do a polygraph test and all of that. My background check process was all pretty out-of-sight/out-of-mind. Filled out some paperwork, I don’t even think they called any of my references (although to be fair, I was able to list a few firefighters and such as references, and got a friend of a friend who works here to vouch for me, which I’m sure helped) no polygraph, did have to go to the county detectives to get fingerprinted during training, but technically I was already hired at that point, and that was about the extent of it.


  • I once played a warlock with a kraken for a patron.

    My character had been a sailor, shipwrecked in a storm, saved by the kraken in exchange for my service.

    I washed up on an island full of kuo toa. Started up a little cargo cult to direct their worship towards the kraken, so that he could ascend to full godhood with the help of the psychic energy bullshit.

    Of course things went a bit sideways, the kuo toa kind of fixated on me a little bit since I was the one sitting on a throne in front of them and not the kraken itself.

    I also kind of figured that whatever the kraken wanted with godhood was probably bad for the world in general.

    So I ran the fuck away from that island before the start of the campaign.

    And so I constantly had a bunch of koa toa trying to track me down to drag me back to the island, or maybe to eat me, kind of hard to say. The kraken felt he had invested too much time and energy with me to just let me go so he kept pointing the little fish monsters in my direction to try to get me back on track with his plans.

    Sometimes when they showed up I could leverage my position as the object of their worship to bend them to my will. Other times not so much.


  • Fondots@lemmy.worldto3DPrinting@lemmy.worldRecreate old chess pieces
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    12 days ago

    I don’t have any specific recommendations for software or services, but I do have a couple general thoughts on this problem

    How many pieces are missing and how ornate is the set?

    If you have at least one of every piece the easiest course of action is probably to 3d scan them. A scanner is probably a bit pricey to buy just for this one project, but if you ask around you can probably find a hobbyist or makerspace that will let you use theirs.

    If you can’t find a scanner, as long as your set isn’t too ornate, most chest sets are probably pretty easy to model for the most part. Except for the knights which are of course horses which are a weird irregular shape, most chess pieces are essentially cylinders and cones of various sizes stacked on top of each other. With a little quality time taking measurements with some calipers and some youtube how-to videos, you could probably learn enough to make a pretty decent model pretty quickly.

    You might even be able to carefully trace your pieces onto a piece of paper or maybe use a contour gauge to do the same, scan that tracing into your computer, and create a 3d model from that profile. Heck, you might even be able to just take a picture of the pieces then trace them on your computer.

    It’s been a long time since I’ve done any 3d modeling personally, but something like that is a feature in a lot of software I’ve used.

    Then you’d just need to add some details- a slot cut into the bishops hat, some crenulations at the top of the rook, a cross on top of the king, etc. which should all also be pretty straightforward to model

    Again, if you ask around at makerspaces and such you can probably find someone willing to take up the challenge or help you figure out how to do that.

    Of course if your set has a lot of textures and details you wouldn’t be able to capture them that way, like if your pieces have a face or otherwise aren’t rotationally symmetrical, or the rook has a brick pattern, etc.

    And if you need to model the knight, that’s going to take some more advanced modeling skills unless it’s a really simple and kind of abstract horse.

    If you are missing pieces entirely, unless you can track down another set to use as a reference, you’re going to have to recreate them from scratch. You can take some styling cues from the other pieces- like the bases are probably all pretty much the same, but beyond that you’d kind of have to work off of memory and eyeballing them.

    EDIT: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I was thinking about good ways to recreate your missing pieces by 3D printing so I kind of forgot to consider other techniques

    Again, assuming you have at least one of each of the pieces you need, make a mold and cast new ones out of epoxy or something.

    Also, again assuming no detailed textures, except for the knights, most chess pieces are almost perfect lathe projects. There’s some really cheap tiny lathes to be had on Amazon that would probably be up to the task of turning a chunk of plastic into a chess piece.



  • Current 911 dispatcher here, same kind of experience.

    Recreational is not legal in our state. FWIW, I don’t smoke myself.

    Seen our officers give plenty of warnings for weed, but really the only time anyone gets cited for it is when the person is already getting taken in on multiple charges and being a massive dick about it so the officers are really throwing the book at them.

    I know at least one of the sergeants in my county used to smoke a lot because he went to high school with me. I’ve occasionally seen him enter some colorful notes into calls, like that he gave someone a “warning for the electric lettuce”

    I know a handful of my fellow dispatchers smoke, and I’m pretty sure at least one of my supervisors does, and even more of my coworkers admit to smoking in the past (as long as you can pass the drug test to get hired, past drug use is not a disqualifier for our agency, though lying about it could be if something about it comes up on your background check, and unless they have reason to think that you’re under the influence on the job we’re not subject to testing otherwise)

    We pretty much all roll our eyes when we get a call where the main complaint is “someone’s smoking marijuana”

    We have to enter something about it, we can’t just ignore a 911 call for liability reasons. But we all know it’s a waste of everyone’s time and resources. We don’t really have a specific code to enter it as so unfortunately we usually have to enter it as something like “suspicious activity” which is a fairly high-priority call, but when we can we’ll try to bury it in something trivial like a noise complaint because cops don’t really need to be going out lights & sirens to tell someone to be more discreet with their smoking.


  • Something you may want to consider is a cell signal booster, cell phones are a bit limited in the size of antenna and how much power they can transmit at because everything has to fit in a neat little rectangle.

    But you can get a device to hook up to your car that will retransmit your signal at a higher power. With that you "might* be able to get a signal further out than you normally would.

    It would be useful for stuff like this of course but probably also just in general if you’re in an area with spotty service.

    I don’t have any particular brand recommendations or anything like that, I think WeBoost caught my eye as a pretty decent-looking option at first glance but I don’t know if they’re actually any good. They’re mostly a product I’m aware exists and I intend to look into more when I have some spare time and money because I camp and hike in areas with spotty reception a lot, but it’s pretty far down my to-do list, so you’re on your own for research right now.


  • Went to a nudist resort with a couple friend last year, it was a great time.

    We camped out, I got there first and started setting up camp. I didn’t exactly have a solid plan but I was kind of figuring I’d set up my tent first so I’d have somewhere to leave my clothes, but it was one of those hot muggy days where the second you step outside your clothes are drenched in sweat, so after about a minute of feeling gross and sweaty unloading my car I decided screw it and ditched my clothes and immediately felt so much better.

    Also I’m pretty sure that literally everyone hates doing laundry. If you’re not wearing clothes you don’t have anything to wash and put away. It was pretty nice being away for a few days and having basically no laundry to do when I got home except the clothes I wore for the drive.

    Also all-around just a very positive experience. A lot of nudists aren’t exactly the kinds of people you’d necessarily want to see naked, I can pretty much guarantee that whatever you don’t like about your body someone there has the same thing or worse on full display. And once you get over the initial sensory overload you pretty quickly set noticing people’s bodies or the fact that they’re naked.


  • The average hamster lifespan in captivity is usually only something like 1-2 years, this guy lived for like 4.

    He was in rough shape towards the end, his fur was falling out, he’d pretty much set up camp in one corner of his cage and rarely left.

    Eventually my mom decided to take him to have him put down. I strongly suspect that we may be the only people to ever request that at the local SPCA


  • I’d like some PC support for HDMI CEC

    My use case is a bit niche, my PC is hooked up to my TV and AV receiver.

    My tv, av receiver, and even certain game consoles all talk to each other well enough through CEC controls that I can do a lot from a single remote, and not even a fancy pants universal remote, just the one that came out of the box with my tv. It was a little mind-blowing when I realized I can more or less navigate the menus on my PS4 with my TV remote. The TV remote turns up the volume on the AV receiver, most of the inputs on the receiver, depending on what’s hooked up to them, will come up on my TVs input menu, the TV will wake up the PlayStation when I go to that input, etc.

    I’m aware that CEC is a bit of a mess with how different companies implement it, but personally I’ve been lucky and a lot of it has worked pretty much out of the box for me.

    Mostly I just want the volume controls on my keyboard to control the volume on my AV receiver.

    I recently got a pulse eight dongle that I think in theory will let me do that, but it’s not exactly the most intuitive thing to configure.


  • We need the old timers running the party to step aside. Give up the reigns, retire when they’re able and let younger blood fill their seats, or give their blessings to 3rd parties and choose not to run against them (and preferably without outright endorsing them either so the Republicans have a harder time making the claim that they’re just the same Democrats wearing a different hat, just step aside, choose not to run a candidate, and let the new parties do their thing)

    We need younger people to step up. Run for office, call and write to your elected officials, show up to vote, demonstrate in the streets, etc. pay attention to politics (no one like politics except fucking sociopaths, but they’re part of how the world works, trying to ignore them because it’s boring or it makes you mad or whatever has the same kind of energy as pretending gravity doesn’t exist because you don’t like it when you fall and scrape your knees- you’re just going to get hurt even worse if you don’t take those basic forces of the world into account.)

    We need to take a step back and agree on a list of priorities. Ask 100 liberals/leftists/democrats what the most important issues are to them and you’re probably going to get 100 different lists. Climate change, LGBTQ rights, wealth inequality, healthcare, police reform, Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, homelessness, drug abuse, legalizing marijuana, raising the minimum wage, foreign policy, domestic surveillance, free speech, corruption, term limits, etc. just to name a few off the very top of my head

    And frankly, we need to pare that down to a handful of solid issues that appeal to as broad of an audience as possible and that we can agree that these issues are the most pressing and we must make real progress on right now because there won’t be a later, and we need to agree to suck it up on some of the other issues that need to go on the back-burner for now, especially since those issues don’t have as broad support yet and so trying to bundle them in with our overall policy is just torpedoing our efforts to make any sort of progress at all.

    LGBTQ rights for instance, they’re human rights, and they should be a goal that we’re striving for. We also don’t really have the popular support needed to get much done there, often even within our own “liberal” parties the numbers aren’t looking great. We should be proud of what we’ve accomplished and fight tooth and nail to hold onto whatever gains we’ve made, but we may need to walk this back from being a top-of-the-ballot issue and accept that maybe we need to deal with, for example, the climate catastrophe that is happening right fucking now and do whatever we can to prevent world war fucking 3 from breaking out in Europe first.

    And we can also claim some pretty significant victories for LGBTQ people if we just avoid framing them as an LGBTQ issue. If you slap an LGBTQ sticker on a law, CHUDs will come out of the woodwork to make up excuses about why it’s bad. But if you play your cards right and avoid their trigger words you might just be able to slip some healthcare, wealth inequality, education, and police reforms through that will both help LGBTQ people now (because a rising tide raises all ships) and pave the way for further advancements down the line (because a better educated populace with less issues of their own won’t feel as much need to make LGBTQ people their scapegoat for every minor inconvenience)

    Or if you don’t have the patience or will to do that, the other two options are

    1. Accept defeat. You live in maga world now, live by their rules or risk the consequences.

    2. Full-on revolution, no half measures, organize fast, hit them hard before they have a chance to do anything about it and rebuild the world better.

    I have no desire to live in maga world. I also don’t have any desire to live through what would surely be bloody revolution with no guarantees that the right people will come out on top, so I am really hoping people get the hell on board with plan A.