You can turn the entire freeway system into a grid and it will still suck - Los Angeles

I treat my persona on the internet like it is an extension of myself. I do not mask my complexity, my identity (if anyone cares to dig), and I hold myself to a universal moral standard that is entirely my own. If someone is rude, I delete my comments, block them, and move on just like I would if I met them elsewhere. I want to be helpful, to engage, but also to just be myself. I’m disabled, and in a lot of pain. I need the chance to think out what I am saying and to do this social engagement in between projects and other tasks. When I feel my limitations, I think about Stephen Hawking and what it must have been like with ALS. While other people’s problems do nothing to help with my own, I still find it helpful to keep in mind that it can always be worse until the day it can’t, and nothing really matters once you’re gone. So you might as well remember today for the glass half full before the rose colored glasses in your future force the perspective on you later. I try not to focus on the negative any more than this.

I just got lucky with the RadioShack unit having been the most convenient option and a 900 series iron. I got into electronics long before 3d printing. The hot knife attachment mixed with Xacto blades has some uses and the attachment is nice for a way to add a longer threaded stud for other custom stuff.

In a pinch, it might be possible to add a single threaded turn to a sharp conical tip, especially if you can find the cheapest copper ones without the hard plating. Before I learned about the 900 series tips from McMaster, I had a couple of conicals that I used a die to cut a single thread into. That thread is enough to save the insert, but the ones from McMaster make the task more precise in a press jig that can pull too. There is a decent chance of getting an insert out methodically and saving a larger print with the threaded removal tips, you’ll just need a larger diameter insert if you can get the old one out cleanly.

You can’t do a lot of things with other irons like you can with a 900 tip, especially with 3d printing. There are hundreds of specialties. Like I have tips for ribbon cables, a Xacto blade holder, common heatset inserts installation tools, but also the specialty threaded removal tools from McMaster. That is in addition to all of my specialty soldering tips.

I’ve been tempted in the past to go to a faster heating setup for my rework station, probably a T12, but instead I made my own circuit boards for mine. I have the old digital soldering station from RadioShack. It is a 900 series clone from Atten that uses a 2 wire element with the thermocouple in series with the element. I mase circuit boards that offset the element to contact one side of the tip and adjusted it to extend closer to the end of the tip bore. I also modified my station to have dual irons so that I do not need to change tips often, I just swap irons with a switch.

I think a case for a different setup can be made for soldering, but for 3d printing, there is no replacement for the number of options available for crafting extras and heatset inserts options. Like I wouldn’t do iterative designs with heatset inserts in many cases if I had no ability to remove them.

Not any more. I use an offline open source LLM first quite a bit now because it is better than their junk. It may only be accurate 80% of the time, but that is a far higher percentage than any present search engine.

People complain about web scrapers, but scraping is the only practical alternative for finding info and sources now that the web crawlers are worse than trash.

Soldering is nothing like welding. Neither task is particularly hard, although welding takes a bit more coordination. Soldering is about as hard as using a hot glue gun or microwaving a meal, or scrubbing a toilet.

When you’ve never done it before, it is easy to build it up in your mind. Here’s the things that matter:

• acid core solder is only for pipes in a home
• flux is important and the mess it makes is not
• for just a small job, any soldering iron is fine, as is any solder
• wet everything you’re joining with flux and the solder will wick into place
• the tip of the iron should be shiny with solder before you start, and this may involve a good bit of solder added to the tip and then removed by a wet sponge or wire ball made for the task

An adjustable iron is nice, and you’ll likely find that eventually you will use it for threaded inserts in prints. There is a lot of marketing about irons and junk, but it is hard to beat the value of one of the Chinese 936 Hakko clone irons. Most of the marketing junk is to try and obfuscate the value and availability of these clones. The Hakko 900 series tips are the defacto standard and there are many extra accessory options available that are only possible with this tip/iron type. Last time I checked a 936 clone is usually under $40. The actual circuit board required to build one is under $5 on AliEx while the iron handle and lead are ~$8. You don’t need this for a basic job, but an adjustable soldering iron is a lifetime useful tool to have on hand.

Good solder makes a big difference on bigger projects when you’re doing this a lot. However, if I was in a zombie apocalypse, I could easily make a single solder connection by heating the tip of a screwdriver in a candle flame, use some resin from a pine tree, and a chip off of the pewter candlestick holder to solder a button to a circuit board.

Buttons can be a bit challenging with 3d printing design. It depends on your goals, but clearances and textures matter a lot more than it may first appear. It is possible to get something that just works, but is loose or crude. Getting a button like the inserts that go into a typical video game controller are quite challenging to clearance and develop a consistent tactile feel. I’ve done this in practice and it took a lot more iterations than I expected.

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Dry with pickled onions and some chicken.

I absolutely hate salads, but that is what I ate 5 days a week when I worked for a chain of bike shops. It’s how I lost my last bit of weight to get under 7% back when I was racing. Going from 350lbs to 220lbs wasn’t super hard while just commuting to work, and training/racing casually. Going from 220lbs to under 190lbs was super hard for me. Eating something I could barely tolerate meant I only ate what I absolutely needed because I was freaking starving… So, to me, while I hate salads, if I’m eating one, it is for a specific reason, and if I’m objective about that reason, I’m going to fit my opinion to what best meets those goals. Therefore, my favorite salad is the one I can only barely tolerate and will eat, but only as much as I absolutely must. Like seriously, I brought my lunch into my office and would eat a few bites over the course of hours. That too is a major aspect of real weight loss. How much you eat at any given point in time is very important.

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Go to war -

He should start with the supreme court if he has an ounce of worth.

Yes, but in a less civil warlike posture. The consequences of the shift to venture capital driving the economy in the 1960’s shifted the need to create more massive scale wars, but unchecked consolidation of wealth destroys the necessary egalitarian framework of a real democracy. All the pieces are in place to enslave the nation, i. e. we all carry tracking devices that can not be turned off, all of our financial means can be controlled, we are surrounded by cameras on most homes and vehicles that are connected to a monitoring system of a few entities. We only have the illusion of autonomy. Real democracies are very rare in history. The blood that bought this one is old money that few value with a thorough understanding. I’d say it was inevitable for unchecked venture capital to destroy the USA, but perhaps it was better than the warhawks destroying the world again in the 1980’s.

Fizisist must test gravity to scritch the fabric of the universe

Go kill 346 people in a careless and culpable way. See if you stay off of death row.

The only way to stop a problem like this is from the top down. If the issue is traced to some low level employees, great, put everyone from the board members all the way down to these low level employees on trial as a whole. This kind of thing is a culture from the top down.

Boeing should be dismantled or nationalized and completely restructured with none of its present management.

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Try not to think like this. Over the last 10 years, between reddit in the past, and here now, I’ve had to use these places as my only external form of human social contact because of disability issues. I’ve noticed certain patterns emerge with the seasons. These places are largely dominated by certain regions of the world. When those regions go through seasons where the majority of people are doing things elsewhere, the comment and interaction quality decline noticeably. I’ve learned to not take it personally and I turn to other outlets to spend more of my time. This is when I do most of my gaming and reading. I’ve finished all of the primary Dune series and most of Asimov’s main series from Robots through Galactic and Foundation. Most recently, someone suggested the FOSS game Cataclysm Darker Days Ahead. While the theme is absolutely counterproductive for me, the game’s complexity and particularly the documentation of the source code and mods is absolutely fascinating to me. I’ve been exploring JSON tools when it comes to stuff with AI, and the game is like a guided masters class in functional use and tools that use JSON.

Many people seem to think I’m an asshole or a “bad person” but most simply can’t understand my needs and interests. I never knew what disability was really like and its challenges prior to the day I got hit by a car. I probably had a stupid attitude and said stupid things that made people feel bad in my exact position now. I can’t blame others for their ignorance when condemning them is condemning myself.

Personalities and functional thought are far more varied in humans than most of us realize in practice. I’ve explored this a whole lot over the last year with AI where it can simulate other contrasting perspectives in very complex ways while answering some really complex questions with relevant sources to back them up. This kind of personality analysis is a major aspect of what LLM’s are designed to understand. The more I’ve explored this topic, the more I have come to realize the binary approach to anything like a good and bad label for a human is completely inadequate. The cause and effect have no simple connections. Most of a person’s “bad” behavior is likely related to cognitive dissonance. If you look up what that really means, it is due to some level of conflict in a person’s life that they are unable to address or have limited/emerging self awareness. If you are noticing such behavior that could be related to cognitive dissonance, work to address the probable causes of underlying conflict in your life if you’d like to address the issue.

My personal primary conflict is social isolation. That is what I am here to address. I don’t use corporate social media because I’m an outlier of their marketing and exploitation designs where they are unable to accommodate my needs. The inconsistencies of this place are not healthy for me, and it can have a very real impact on my life, but over time I’ve tried to pick up on the patterns and withdraw when I need to do so. Anything that shakes up or makes me question the underlying stability of a place like this is the most deeply disturbing to me. I’m also aware that there is a substantial misdirection campaign that happens with all major elections now. Anyone posting or commenting on such subjects are highly suspect to me. I look at their account activities and ignore or block them if they do not show a wide spectrum of activity and complexity. One day it will become public knowledge that conservative asshats have no morality whatsoever, never have, and are paying thousands of people to post, comment, and write bots to maintain their criminal activities and control. Their presence is completely disproportionate to the population and interests the government represents. When those subhuman jackasses could no longer enslave people outright, they simply shift their focus to redefine slavery to put everyone in their chains. Anyone commenting some shitty nonsense with an account that has little history or a lot of history with no depth is some unethical criminal being paid to do so, is not worth my time or thought, and is absolutely the reason I was right in the first place. Look up the Plutonic definition of sophism and keep in mind that there are some people with a love for their own sadism. These places online are full of people that can be fucked with and there are many that love to take advantage of those that are here for their real human needs. Do not hesitate to disregard anyone that evokes a negative emotion to a well intended comment.

Hugging Face has taught us that pickles are unsafe executables. Stab me in the back with safe tensors please

- ru\e

I’ve done a lot of experiments with toner transfer and etching my own boards. The highest accuracy with the smallest clearance I can achieve is with old inkjet photo paper in my old HP laser printer. I have tried several different photo papers. They all act a little differently, but they all take up far more toner powder from the drum roller. I’m not sure why. It can be a pain to get the paper backing off of some of them, but when it comes to etching, it approaches photoresist levels using the typical overhead transparencies.

Just an idea to throw out there. This looks great already.

The back window of a Jeep Grand Cherokee.