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Still Blogging!

Bloggy

I guess I’m blogging less. Or more. Or something. I don’t know. I am one of those people who tell others they should blog, and I often get depressed when I see some people quit. I’ve been at this since 1997, and yeah, I’m one of those people who can’t not do it.

Jon Udell (who I’ve known online forever) and Tim Bray (who I’ve known online forever) and this Scott guy (who I’ve never heard of, but hey, he’s a blogger) have all been talking about people blogging less.

Am I blogging less? Maybe. It goes it waves. Sometimes I blog more. Sometimes I blog less. Lately I’ve been doing a lot non-web related projects (which is in contrast to a few years ago) and so I spend more time in front of physical thing being assembled instead of in front of a screen and keyboard. Some of the results can be seen on my Projects page.

As for Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, yeah, I use them all, but I’m somewhat selective. All three get my blog posts pushed out to them, and I do it manually, customizing the message to each. (I’m against the “blasting” out to other networks, as I often don’t when others do it.)

Google+ gets more of my attention, mainly because I’ve found a great community of RepRap users there, and without sounding insulting, there’s a higher level of conversation there than there is on Facebook. I still check Facebook pretty often, but don’t publish quite as much there. I’m still using Twitter, but I think I tweet a bit less than I used to. (At least with my own personal account.) Of course I also write for a few other blogs too…

In the end though, I’m not too worried about blogging less, as I’m one of those people who can’t not do it.

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Make. Better.

Make Blog

I’m a fan of the Make Blog, and I’m also a user of a 13″ MacBook Pro, and those two things conflict a little bit.

Just take a look at the screen shot above, it’s what I see with a maximized browser window…

Make Blog

I prefer this view, where the footer is hidden, because 98% of the time I’m on the Make site, I don’t need to know whatever the footer has to tell me, and since the footer is locked in place when you scroll, that’s 22 pixels that are always blocking the content. (On an 800 pixel high screen, even losing 22 pixels can hurt.)

I’m using Mozilla Firefox with the Stylish Plugin to do this.

And here’s the code: 

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("blog.makezine.com")
{
        div.new-footer {
                display: none !important;
        }

}

You can do a lot more with Stylish, as it lets you edit any CSS that gets loaded into your browser. Check out userstyles.org for more examples, but if you’re handy with CSS you can write your own little snippets like this for all the web sites that you’d like to improve upon in your daily browsing.

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Birthdays, Anniversaries, Updates

Robot Plate!

Well, we’ve been busy! In fact, we’ve been so busy we missed our own anniversary. That’s right kids, on August 5th, 2012 we celebrated 15 years of blogging. I suppose that’s pretty good. I probably should have planned some sort of celebration. Oh well, I guess I have (almost) 5 years to plan for the next milestone.

Speaking of milestones, and birthdays, and August 5th, I now have a child that can legally drive a car. That seems crazy. Crazy but true… I look forward to being a passenger more often. Except…

MM Racing
Concept art

…when I drive in the Power Racing Series next year. I mean, assuming there is a next year. I ended up going to Maker Faire Detroit and got pulled into the Milwaukee Makerspace Racing Team. It was a lot of fun, and now I’d like to do it again next year. Yeah, sweet.

Marco2

What else have I been doing? Well, I made this sweet video of the building of Red Lotus with Time Lapse Bot as well as other posts, and I continue to hack at my RepRap and 20 other projects. (Including at least one with lasers.)

RED BTN
Amusing, if you know my making activities

I’m also still selling buttons, and doing other things, like planning the next 3D Printing Meetup happening August 12th, 2012. Oh, I’m also hoping to be awarded $25,000 this year. I’ll let you know if that happens or not.

J33P
This may be my new car

There’s more, but I can’t think of it right now because I got interrupted 10 times while writing this post…

So what have you been up to?

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3D Printed Guns for Everyone!

Glock (from Thingiverse)

The media is up in arms about Have Blue’s “3D printed gun” (which he brought to the Milwaukee 3D Printing Meetup last month, by the way…)

And yeah, I put “3D printed gun” in quotes because it’s just one part of a gun. But you’ll see headlines like Hobbyist builds working assault rifle using 3D printer, Functioning 3D-printed rifle you can make at home, The world’s first 3D-printed gun is a terrifying thing, and A Working Assault Rifle Made With a 3-D Printer.

Those are all great headlines, and if you read the articles, they might explain things a bit more, but the short version is, Have Blue printed a part of a gun. He didn’t print an entire gun, and he didn’t print ammunition. The next headline might be “Guy with tools makes a gun” because the only new thing here is the 3D printed part. People have been making guns at home with machine tools for years, and as I understand it, it’s legal in the United States.

Saying he printed a working gun is akin to saying I printed a house because my RepRap made a coat hook, and I just, you know, assembled all the other parts around it to complete the house.

So before you think I’m some gun-toting lunatic building weapons in my basement, well… I’m not. (I do have a few Art Robots I’m working on, but the headline “Man builds working Art Robot with 3D Printer” is not very exciting.)

Anyway, I figured that everyone needed a gun, so I grabbed this Glock from Thingiverse. I printed it out in 30 seconds. Well, in an hour, but the time lapse below is 30 seconds long.

So here’s a nice photo showing my 3D printed gun. It’s orange because I’m running low on black filament and haven’t got any nice silver filament yet.

3D Printed Gun

I wanted my 3D printed gun to be a little smaller so it would fit in a mint tin. Oh, did I mention it’s not fully functional yet? Yeah, I should have mentioned that…

I’ve been thinking a lot about guns lately, and if you can forgive me this (slightly) humorous post, I’ll expand upon my gun-related thoughts in a future post.

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A Maker’s Perspective

Laser-cut wood

I was at Milwaukee Makerspace, using the laser cutter (that I adore so much) and another maker asked me some questions, and then offered their thoughts. This was nothing new, and it’s a welcomed thing. Often you’ll get suggestions or ideas for future projects (or the one you’re currently working on.)

The maker was looking at what I was doing (making a laser-cut spool) and said he would probably use a band saw to cut the wood, and find a large dowel to put in the middle. That’s definitely one way to do it.

He guessed about how much time I spent on my method, and if you count the file-diddling his estimate was probably low, and I’m fine with that.

Testing...

But hey, it’s all about perspective, right? I’m comfortable with software, and I like learning and designing things, so I don’t mind picking up new skills in solid-modeling and file conversions. These are skills I’d like to improve, as I plan to use them again and again. If I was just picking up a piece of wood and going at it with a saw… that’s not very enjoyable to me. I’m also not very good at it.

Spool

So instead of just finding a piece of wood and making it work with a saw, I prefer the process I took. I found something close enough to what I wanted, modified it to be exactly what I wanted (and along the way got help from another maker (Gary) and learned more about OpenSCAD) and after some tweaks I should have a repeatable process that will allow me to make as many spools as I want with relative ease. Since I’ll be sharing my files, it also means that others can make the exact same thing. To me this is powerful stuff, and while dumb power tools have their place, the smart tools (design software + CNC machines) offer so much more.

I’m also contributing to a community of makers who share their work, make derivatives, suggestions, and mashups of their work, and allow anyone else to do the same. I’m into that stuff, so yeah, that’s my perspective.