My very first “design” was cord wrangler that fit the exact number of things I needed to charge and was the exact thickness for my no-name pressboard nightstand with a gap that matched an opening in the back. It was exactly what I needed.

Most unrealistic part of the movie, and by god I’m including TIME TRAVEL, is that Scotty would be both dismissive of and insanely good at keyboarding text entry and use of a 1980s computer. Either he’d be pissed off because because there was no way to use this antique, or he’d be delighted at the chance to use his historical reenactment skills.

Thanks! LOL.

Those specific issues could be changed with software and a keycap puller in about 5 minutes. Obviously I can’t get ESC back exactly where it “should” be, but the idea with this layout was to look and feel a bit like old 8-bit computer keyboards without forcing a drastic departure from modern “ten-key-less” layouts.

Good info. I’ll need to make sure I keep an eye on it. Safety wise, I have a decent fire extinguisher nearby, a camera pointed at the laser, and never leave it unattended for more than a few minutes. Haven’t had any flareups in a while, but I know it can happen if the motors stop and the laser doesn’t. As for damaging the module, not that I want to, but there might be worse things in the world than needing to replace the 5-watt laser.

Open source is not the same as, “you are barred from commercial use,” which is why I hesitate with OnShape. At minimum, these companies need to tighten up their licensing terms to be strict but fair.

to wit, Creators have this:

Trial or Free Versions. Trial and free versions of the Service are made available by Onshape. Trial versions of the Service are intended for evaluation purposes, and may be used for commercial or non-commercial purposes during the evaluation period. Free versions of the Service are intended to support (a) creating and editing intellectual property for non-commercial purposes, and (b) viewing, commenting and import/export for commercial or non-commercial purposes (to the extent the plan offers those features). If you intend to use the Service outside a trial context to create and/or edit intellectual property for commercial purposes (including but not limited to developing designs that are intended to be commercialized and/or used in support of a commercial business), then you agree to upgrade to a paid subscription to the Service. Trial and free versions of the Service are otherwise subject to the terms of this Agreement.

but consumers have this:

For any Public Document owned by a Free Plan User created on or after August 7, 2018, or any Public Document created prior to that date without a LICENSE tab, Customer grants a worldwide, royaltyfree and non-exclusive license to any End User or third party accessing the Public Document to use the intellectual property contained in Customer’s Public Document without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Document, and to permit persons to whom the Document is made available to do the same.

Maybe there’s some nuance I’m missing, but on its face that’s total bullshit. You can use the trial version for commercial purposes as long as you don’t intend to KEEP doing so, but not the free version. Meanwhile, you are automagically granting a license to commercialize your files for literally everybody else. Sloppy at best, exploitative at worst.

So most of the big packages have a cheap or free tier for hobbyist/maker use, and I think they all do for educational use. The rub with most of these is that they are either not for commercial use (OnShape, Solid Edge CE), or they have “gotcha” thresholds ($1000 revenue for F360, $2000 profit for Solidworks).

Now if you wanted to go completely free-as-in-beer and still retain full commercial rights, you really have to go open source. Then there’s also DesignSpark Mechanical, which is Windows only and not truly parametric, but is much more advanced than something like TinkerCad. They’ve got their own issues with feature erosion in the free tier, but because the company’s main business is selling components, they haven’t removed commercial use from it yet.

That’s a more reasonable threshold, and allows some wiggle room if you have an idea that blows up and makes you a few bucks (what is profit? Can you count your PC and printer as capital expenditures? etc etc).

Autodesk is gonna Autodesk, but they should, at a minimum, match that term.

I think SolveSpace and OpenSCAD have trouble with fillets, but FreeCAD should be fine, though as a person with a non-technical background, FreeCAD is still generally miserable to use.

OnShape is free but explicitly non-commercial if you don’t pay, and it requires your models to be publicly available in a potentially weird way where someone else could make money from your stuff but you can’t. It’s a weird AF licensing setup.

My last couple of parts I designed in Designspark Mechanical, which I gather is a nerfed Spaceclaim. Closedf source and Windows only, and I guess that they’ve been pissing off their users too, but by removing features rather than trying to directly extort money. The reason I went with it though, is because despite being full of its own issues, it still allows commercial use with the free subscription/download.

The most likely scenario is that I never make a single dollar from my hobbies, but it’s nice that if I were to somehow stumble into something that a few people wanted to pay for, I wouldn’t owe Autodesk any money. The direct modeling also makes sense for my TinkerCAD/woodworking brain. I have tried FreeCAD and found the learning curve daunting.

My friend, you need to find yourself a lumberyard. The framing lumber is for framing, and the select boards are not worth it unless you need exactly one board. Not that I haven’t done the same thing with “2-by” material, but it’s hard to complain. Those teenaged twigs in Home Depot are plenty strong enough to hold up a house and are way more sustainable than the beauties our ancestors nailed together and hid behind lath and plaster walls. Not quite THIS bad, but sad in its own way.

Also, the trick is to grab a 2x12 and rip it to width. 😉

Chekup.

Tangentially, the DS9 shapeshifter makeup looks EXACTLY like the people who go way too hard on their plastic surgery. You know, the 60yo people who want so badly for me to think they’re thirty that they get enough fillers that they no longer look how humans of any age are supposed to look so my brain resets and I mentally assume they’re seventy.

I’m not even completely opposed to cosmetic procedures. People have different priorities and psychological needs, but you’ve got to accept that you can only shave off so many years and approach your vanity with some strategy. We’re all fighting a rear-guard action here.

Where’s the typo? My horse is glorious, and she is my personal heroin.

REY DAX has no time for this nonsense.
https://i.ibb.co/FK1MgrQ/reydax.png

Neutral Zone Line. I’m not really into Robro Space Country though. More of an Alt-Space-Country/Federana guy.

I left it absolutely invigorated and optimistic for the franchise. I saw it had some flaws, with one sizeable one being that it should have ignored the cliffhanger in TFA and caught up 6-12 months later*; the OT (and less successfully, the PT) got to handwave a LOT of character development by simply letting life happen offscreen. Still, TLJ took a needlessly derivative setup from TFA and set the stage for a much more interesting Episode Nine than we got, and I utterly disagree that he didn’t get or like Star Wars. Shit, Rian Johnson is the only one who was willing to SAY the words “Darth Sidious.”

I thought he gave a thoughtful fan’s perspective on what Star Wars needs to be to remain relevant, the theme of growing from failure being particularly well done for a big popcorn franchise. The scene with Rose’s sister, the Yoda scene, the acting from Adam Driver after the throne room scene? All peak Star Wars IMHO. Then of course TROS came along and was so clumsy and petty in how it blew up Rian Johnson’s new directions, and so generally messy, that it didn’t even please the people who hated TLJ.

TFA was useful as a palate cleanser for the generation who rejected the PT, and it gave us a compelling new batch of heroes and villains (Snoke honestly being the least interesting as a character), but it didn’t really DO much, and its worldbuilding was absolutely retrograde. TLJ was a needed course correction, but Disney not only recoiled from the backlash, but took all the wrong lessons from it even if it did need to affect the direction of Ep9. JJ was, in the end, very wrong for Star Wars, though if TFA was his only one, it might not have been so obvious.

*-Two others being the framing device of the “slow speed chase” and Finn’s arc being such a minor step forward . A few tweaks to the technobabble or moving them to Crait earlier and having it be a bit more of a formidable facility could have helped the first one, and having Finn more explicitly trying to save Rey and Poe at the cost of the Resistance might have better highlighted the additional layer of growth RJ was thought he still needed.

Is that President Ra-ghoratreii under that top hat?!?!?

Between Kai Winn and Nurse Ratched, Louise Fletcher was “gentle menace” personified and a national treasure.

Star Trek must have got annoyed when I repeatedly referred to The Expanse as “the apotheosis of Toronto warehouse sci-fi.”