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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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • I’m adding a parallel comment rather than editing my existing comment because that adds one to the count and that sort of thing probably boosts engagementtm.

    It may be too late for this now if you’ve significantly warped either of the pivot screws. But the trick for getting these headless screws undone on a balisong is to crank them with the knife latched. The idea is that the force going down the handles will bind the sides of the screw posts against their holes in the blade and/or the handle, holding the female end tightly enough that you can undo the male end. This works frequently enough that I’ll classify it as “often.”

    You can perform a similar trick on a single pivoted knife, i.e. a normal one, by clamping it in two blocks of wood in a vise such that you’re pressing down on the spine of the blade right over the pivot.












  • You had a beagle who was immune to chocolate, too? So did I, when I was a kid. Mine ate an entire gift box of Godiva chocolates, after snatching it right out from under the Christmas tree in the middle of the night. Insofar as I can tell they had no effect on the little bastard whatsoever.

    We found the wrappers for each chocolate glued to the floor in the morning, because he’s licked them nearly geometrically flat against the floorboards.


  • Every dipshit with a freshly minted MBA thinks they’re going to go and disrupt the appliance industry by putting it online and snatching it out from under all those antiquated local dealerships run by out of touch old men who can barely operate a computer. They think they’re going to go from zero to nationwide tomorrow, and they’re so smart because nobody’s thought of it before.

    It turns out that dealing with the final mile with appliances is killer, and extremely difficult logistically. That makes the entire operation much more expensive than anyone thinks at first glance. Not just in terms of raw dollars and cents paid to disinterested common carriers to move your product from A to B (who also won’t install the stuff or even bring it inside your customer’s house) but also in damaged and returned products and angry screaming customers who will be initiating credit card chargebacks all the time whenever anything goes wrong.

    All of those little local dealerships have had decades to figure out how to move a refrigerator from their warehouse to your kitchen and how to remediate the situation if it all goes pear shaped on delivery day, and all of them only service their local territory for a reason. The further you stretch without some physical presence in where you’re stretching to, the more impossible it becomes to control the logistics.

    So yeah, that’s probably in no small part why your fridge would have been so expensive. Amazon is among the latest figuring this out the hard way, and you can’t just slap a refrigerator or a stove in a bubble mailer and dump it on somebody’s front porch.



  • I want to play flat games like Elden Ring same as always in third person, but have the world surrounding me in VR. Maybe there are motion sickness issues that would make that hard.

    If you haven’t played any of the Lucky’s Tale games, this is basically exactly how it works. I found that when I was just starting off with VR, this type of third person thing was significantly less motion sickness inducing than first person movement, for whatever it’s worth.

    Trover Saves The Universe is another similar take on that idea, if you can stand a shitload of Justin Roiland voice acting. The framework is certainly there for a fully 3D third person VR game. I agree with you that this idea really ought to have legs, and somehow it still doesn’t.


  • This is quite possibly the dumbest thing I’ve read in my entire life.

    If for some reason I am forced in the future to be immersed fully in some manner of dystopian metaverse in order to interact with others, I absolutely do not want my face in the virtual world to be my real face. As a matter of fact, I don’t want anyone’s face to be their real face.

    I want to be sitting around that boardroom table with three anime girls, Skeletor, a guy in a samurai mask, and somebody with a horse for a head. For fuck’s sake, get creative.

    Also, apparently no one is expected to have a problem with giving goddamn Google an accurate enough scan of your own face that they can use it to produce and animate a photorealistic simulacrum of you and, more likely than not, also shove this data irrevocably into their perpetually hallucinating bullshit generation machine. Has anyone fully read the fine print on this?

    I’m good. Miss me with this shit by several miles, please.


  • The goal of your offset is not to be zero. Actually, in a perfectly ideal world that would be impossible because it would result in your nozzle touching and dragging along the surface on the first layer. Your actual final Z offset figure will be arbitrary based on the vagarities of your particular machine including the total overall length of the nozzle and thickness of the build plate, etc.

    The actual goal is to achieve an accurate first layer which results in a thickness of 0.2mm or whatever your first layer’s height is, with minimal inaccuracy. You have to set the offset of the nozzle from the plate via Z axis adjustment such that there is a (literally) paper-thin gap between the tip of the nozzle and the plate. That doesn’t mean just setting it to zero. If setting it to zero actually worked, there would not actually be any reason to calibrate it…



  • I think you have it slightly twisted. If you’re mowing your own lawn on your own property as a dude and showing a bare chest, you will find that there are no laws on the books in your locale prohibiting this. If you dare to show boobs while doing so, however, you are certain to cop an indecent exposure charge (or at least the threat of the same) if anyone sees you.

    There are some exceptions where being out and about topless as a woman isn’t illegal, but these are indeed exceptions in specific states and municipalities, which is kind of the point of this entire thread. Nobody’s going to say anything to a guy doing this, even if he’s ugly.