Couldn't they make the phosphor on the led's slower?
I'm not a phosphor chemist so I may not be right on this, but it's my understanding that despite the word 'phosphor' the coating that downconverts light in an LED is actually a fluorescent phenomenon, meaning the metastable states have lifetimes on the orders of tens of nanoseconds. Actual phosphorescent phenomena have lifetimes long enough to make a visual difference but because they stay in an excited state a lot longer they have a lot more time to engage in non-radiative relaxation, so their conversion efficiency is like 10x lower.
Buy Crees. I work in LED driver design, and Cree, who I don't work for but I work with, seem to do a good job of making sure their LED's don't get associated with junk. Philips similarly, to a lesser extent.
Weird. My experience has been the opposite. I've tried the Cree bulbs from Home Depot and they suck because they strobe at 120 Hz (verified on a scope). That's not usually noticeable except when you move your eyes quickly (like reading), or if something moves quickly like your kid swinging a baton. The strobe effect really bothers me. I also have 15 of the Philips L-prize bulbs that they discontinued after collecting their prize money, and those do not have any sort of strobe effect and they are more efficient than the Cree bulbs.
Strobing is a huge problem, and the easiest way to fix it is add big output caps to the switcher... which costs money. It's sad to hear they did that. I will chat with someone who gets to make these decisions for them at the end of the month. Strobing's even worse with car taillights because that's when people have the highest saccade rates and cars are moving quickly, so surprisingly high frequencies are clearly visible as strobe flashes.
But yeah, we really DO get what we pay for. So dear consumers who are reading this, please protest by not settling for the crappy stuff. Buy quality and prove to the world that's what we want! I've been 30+ years into electronics (many as a service tech). We've got a heck of a job in front of us, but I honestly believe the public will tire of the crappy products, hopefully NOT before it's too late.
The big open question for our time: how do we tell if stuff is quality? Stuff that has the same manufacturer's SKU number, you open it up and it has all different guts than last year's because they've changed subcontractors. They come out with a new version every four months, so by the time reviews are up on one you can't buy that model anymore. Manufacturers have adopted influenza's tactic: change so fast that the system can't keep up with you and fight your badness. Since us consumers need to buy stuff, we have no choice but to buy what's being offered, with only lemon metrics for judging. Cree is an exception to this (in my experience), and I hope like mad that they stay that way.
...because it doesn't pay very well to sell you something that'll last forever, whether it's an Oled screen or LED bulb.
With LED's, it's a walk in the park for the industry to make them last less, all you need to do for your LED to last less than specified, is to OVERDRIVE them just a little, a little higher current and the LED's will die rapidly, they should be able to make the new LED lamps last just out the warranty period (that in most countries AFAIK is around 3-6 months), or cheap enough to avoid the warranty altogether.
There is nothing wrong with the LED's themselves, (we're talking the components...DIODES...not the whole circuit with drivers and all), I ordered strong RGB leds from China many MANY years ago, they're still glowing on my homemade alarm-systems so strong that I can use them as night-lights, yes...4 years later 24H day use...they still glow enough to lit up an entire room. And I just used Ohms law + 1% resistor values to calculate the right resistor value for my circuits. You can pretty much BET the manufacturers will "miscalculate" these values, or make the drivers for the stronger LED's last MUCH less in order to keep pumping out new ones for the consumers to waste and waste.
I'd rather pay a proper price for my LED lamps - and keep our environment safe from this mad overproduction that now has escalated totally out of hands.:(
Buy Crees. I work in LED driver design, and Cree, who I don't work for but I work with, seem to do a good job of making sure their LED's don't get associated with junk. Philips similarly, to a lesser extent. So, from the inside, it's not that manufacturers generally scrimp on bulbs to make them fail faster so they can sell more. The economics of light bulbs don't support that business model. It's that people are crazy reluctant to pay $15 for a lightbulb when an incandescent costs under $1. So manufacturers engage in heavy-duty Muntzing until the bulb will just barely run, and they've cut the BOM by $1.45... and then it dies quickly. It's called value engineering, which as far as I'm concerned means removing all the value. They use cheap input filter caps, and scrimp on those, and they use cheap heatsinking which is poorly thermally coupled to the LED's, so the LED's operate at a high junction temperature and don't live very long. Incandescents have visual inertia, for lack of a better term: if you pour a 30 hz square wave into one, it'll still look pretty good. LED's react in nanoseconds. Crappy dirty line power combined with dimming makes for a really demanding design, and designers and apps engineers have to work with a huge variation in dimmer designs. Consumers don't see any of that: all they see is "no way I'm paying $25 for a lightbulb" so they buy the crap ones and then get infuriated with them because they're visibly flickering and only last five times as long as an incandescent. I can't really blame them, either. There are really good lightbulbs out there. They're expensive. They should last 50,000 hours. But it's hard to tell what you're getting if you're not in on the design.
We largely agree that it sucks to be stuck drooling in a nursing home. But the reason people are keeping strict diets, exercising, and doing math puzzles is almost certainly not to live longer, but to live better during the time that they have. I want to die the moment living isn't fun anymore, but I want to delay that moment as long as possible. That's why I spend time and effort on keeping healthy: not because I simply want to live forever, but I want to feel like I'm able to have a really good time forever.
A makerspace is definitely the best bet as regards hardware. If you think you're going to pursue this, start playing with modeling software now. It's at least as complicated. (Moreso if you get a 3d printer that already works and you don't have to assemble and tune it.) Sketchup, Autocad's new free 123d or whatever it's called, freecad, are all very usable for graphics-oriented, and openscad is good if you're a programmer. I find freecad the easiest combination of precision, adaptability, and ease of use, but other people have totally different opinions.
What I tell people who are thinking about 3d printing is: if you have a specific project, that needs 3d printing, for which going through shapeways or something is either uneconomical (because you're going to need six tries to get your widget dimensioned correctly) or too slow (you're going to be making a ton of different prototype widgets) then a home 3d printer may be a good idea for you. Otherwise, you'll get it, print an octopus and a tardis, and then it'll gather dust and you'll kick yourself for having spent the money. With that said, if you do have a specific project, and you use the printer for that, you will get enough time on it, and more specifically on using the software to make models, that you will have basically mastered the learning curve, and suddenly you'll be printing a lot of other things, that you didn't ever even think about making. I'm co-owner of a plus-size mendelmax 2. We got it to print prototype circuit board adapters so we could stick x board on y piece of hardware. Once we'd gotten that hammered out, the other guy who owns it has printed a plug for his sewer drain, a rat trap for live-catch, buckets for a tiny pelton wheel generator, and I've printed lathe-holding tools, lcd bezels, automated printed circuit board test fixtures, and most of a fuel injection intake manifold for my car. We use it for everything. But you need to have that first big complicated project that you have to get finished, to get to the point where it is a reliable tool, rather than a gadget.
With all THAT said, you'll always want a larger printer. But if the printer you have can cover 95% of your jobs, that's a whole lot better than none at all. Based on the stuff I've made, this printer could handle 95% of the demands I have, and there's always shapeways for the other 5%.
Is it me or does it sound a bit underwhelming for $1000? I don't mean the price is non-competitive, it just seems like I'd want something more capable if I was going to take the plunge. Burn $1000 and in a week won't you be hankering for a much more capable machine?
Yes. And spending two months debugging bed/head temperatures, print and extruder speed, and layer thickness, so your prints consistently stay solid and adhered to the bed rather than peeling, will be totally invisible to you because that $1K presumably means someone else already did that. There's a lot of value in getting something that's been debugged, and that's particularly the case for extrusion-based FDM 3d printers. It's okay to be hankering for a better machine, particularly if you're already printing. The best 3d printer is the one that's actually building parts for you.
or is there a hidden strategy of increasing the phone sizes of new iphones to deliberately make them unwieldy, and create a problem which can be "solved" with a smart-watch? ie, more crap to sell.
Yes, and it started about five years ago. That's when my wife and several of my other female friends began complaining that phones no longer fit in the pockets of women's clothing that isn't made by Lululemon or something. They got things like the HP Veer precisely because it was still the size of an old flipphone and managed to fit in the roughly six cubic inches that manufacturers have decided is the amount of pocket space they will provide for women's clothes below size 2. Then all those went away as everyone raced to make phones that are really tablets, so now they're buying smartwatches and keeping the cellphone in the purse or in the desk. Sure, it's a big awkward batphone, especially on someone who's a size zero, but it's a lot less ginormous than any cellphone you can buy in the US, as far as we can tell. (If anyone can suggest a cellphone that's roughly the size of a Veer but is still supported, I'd love to know about it.)
>The only ant+ holdouts I can think of are cycling power meters. But those are very expensive bordering on niche sports training products.
I wonder about this. Out of the 20-some people I ride with regularly, only one person has an ANT+ accessory that isn't a power meter. Or, to put that another way, everyone who has ANT+ bits has multiple bits, of which one is a power meter. However, that is likely because of sample bias: they're all racers. But of the non-racers I know, none of them has cadence and if they have HRM they're using watch-based ones like Polar's.
>Speaking of exotic bike stuff. I know the Di2 electronic shifters support ant+.
DI2 supports a shimano-proprietary version of ANT+, apparently: http://bike.shimano.com/publis... We have access to ANT+ hardware at work, since we make it, and we haven't managed to talk to my coworker's DA Di2 yet. It raises some interesting possibilities, of automatic shifting (and of the team manager/coach deciding when you should start your sprint, messaging you, and managing your shifting. Very Triplets-of-Belleville.)
Out of curiosity, what model of Opel? I always wanted an Opel GT...
I've gone through three of those plastic box fans over the last ten years, and whenever one dies I drag out the big heavy steel box fan my parents had in the 1950's. Man does that thing move air, all day long, fairly quietly. It's just terrifying because if it fell out of the window it could kill someone, but whereas the plastic ones jump to their doom every couple of months I think it would take a volcanic eruption to shift the old fan.
Pushbutton hard-wired phones, world war two vintage drillpress, metal lathe, wood lathe, tablesaw, 1970 Triumph as my not-snowing car, 1990 bicycle for my non-race bike, MOO/MUD's that I've been hanging out on since 1992, Commordore Amiga 2000 (okay, I only fire that up about once every two months.) A lot of my wood chisels are from the 1890's. They all work just fine. My race bike is a brand-new marvel of carbon fiber and magnesium, but I bet it won't last another two seasons, whereas the old bike has over 150,000 kilometers on it. I do now design using switching power supplies, rather than LDO's, and I've moved from PIC to AVR, (and I've always programmed in C rather than assembly) but generally, there has to be a really clear advantage for me to change piles of experience and knowledge for something new.
In fact, the Wikipedia page about his group of thugs, in English, now specifically points out that the Italian version has been altered because of Data Protection Laws. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
That means only the most incompetent pedos aren't already randomly tweaking their jpgs - the smart ones are doing it in the EXIF section so it won't even change the picture.
The smart implementations probably hash the image payload excluding EXIF, for exactly that reason - maybe downsample and reduce the colorspace too, so trivial tweaks won't have that effect any more.
This isn't definitive research, but in the early days of G+, some friends posted a lot of porn to see how quickly Google caught and deleted the pictures. What they found was that Google's algorithms, once trained with a picture, could find that picture if it had been resized, flipped along the vertical axis, and cropped. (one was cropped to the point where it was no longer technically porn, since it was just a person's face, and it still disappeared.)
Awesome, thank you. Because I'm that kind of person I'll probably bodge one up on the pcb plotter today, with some available pads for adding resistors later.
The most obvious route for disaster is a compromised cellphone charger, at least for my usage patterns. Since it'd take me about ten minutes to make a pez-candy-sized PCB with USB-micro-M and USB-micro-F connectors with only the power lines connected between them, I'm wondering if an android phone will charge when it's getting power, regardless of whether the USB is connected, or it won't charge until it's had a USB chat. I recall older devices being able to charge at lower-power (150mA?) but having to negotiate for 500mA. I'm perfectly happy to settle for 150mA for right now, until I can program a little AVR to fake the negotiation process and make me an air-gap charger. I don't have a usb traffic sniffer at work, and am about to lose my pcb fabrication equipment for a couple of weeks, so if I could find out today if it's worth making the pcb I'd do it this afternoon. Anyone know?
You don't have to be wildly strabby or exotropic to get some (potential) benefits: if your eyes are struggling to maintain fusion, you may read more slowly and suffer more eyestrain than if you had vision therapy, without knowing that you're fighting your own eye muscles. Simple use is lousy training, it turns out, much like just walking lots doesn't help people with screwed-up knees. It might not do anything for you, but a consult with an optometrist who knows a bit about vision therapy may be worthwhile.
When I took a geography class focussing on the western US, one of the things the teacher mentioned (which I haven't verified independently, but it was his job) was that the Colorado River water rights were allocated based on how much the Colorado River was running in roughly 1920, which happened to be an unusually high flow rate period, so ever since then there hasn't been enough water to satisfy everyone. (Water rights are allocated by time priority: first person who used it gets to take the entire amount that person is entitled to, then second person, and so forth.) So it's 100% spoken for, forever. The shortfall is made up for by pumping out groundwater, and when they allocated the colorado river water rights, they also decided that they were going to make a 100 year plan for water usage, meaning that after 100 years they would have used up pretty much all the available aquifers. Since then we've discovered some more aquifers, and are willing to drill deeper and run more expensive pumps, but that's only somewhat covering the shortage. We're pretty much collecting exactly what we planned 95 years ago. There are still semi-serious proposals to divert and pump chunks of the Columbia River over into the upper Colorado River basin... which is sort of funny, as much of the original water projects in the upper Colorado River basin were, and are, pumping water from it through the Continental Divide over to the eastern slope to fulfill Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming, and Oklahoma water needs.
The same instructor also noted that depending on how you define your terms, the category of western state water rights was by quite a bit the most common lawsuit that ended up in the US Supreme Court, showing up every couple of years in one form or another.
My eyes don't line up in the exact same place when I look at things. I had surgery when I was 15 to correct it, after 20 years, it's coming back a little (although to a much less significant degree). Fortunately, it's small enough that I can use lenses to correct it - I have to wear bifocals now - but that also means that Lasik will never work for me to improve my vision. I could have better than perfect vision in each eye and I'd still need corrective lenses.:|
Consider talking to a vision therapist about if this is something that can be corrected. They can do pretty amazing things to train and strengthen your eyes to track, fuse images, and reduce eyestrain while doing so. A lot of people aren't aware that they're straining constantly to keep images fused, and as a result dislike reading or using computers. Sometimes, some physical therapy for your eye muscles can fix it. My wife regularly gets kids whose eyes are pointing in entirely different directions and have never had 3d vision in their lives and after five months (five very expensive months, it should be mentioned) they have and retain 3d vision. It's life-changing for a lot of them.
She's a sometimes model whose non-modeling job also involves looking very professional. I'm not even allowed to look at the laundry for fear of destroying something by washing it wrong. She bought a... shirt? blouse? I dunno, something you wear on the upper half of your body, the other day, and I was all "that's very pretty!" and she's all "it should be. It cost 800 euros." So, yeah, I don't go anywhere near her clothes. And clothes like that don't have pockets. It ruins the lines/aesthetic. Definitely not something Woz considers, nor would he have any reason to, but there are a whole bunch of people who do. Even her painting-the-house pants have these microminiature pockets that you can fit, like, a credit card and a car key into. Whenever we go out I carry her wallet, because even that doesn't fit. Totally different clothing regime from my ten-pocket dungarees, where I could carry most of a toolkit for doing bicycle maintenance and still be able to sit down comfortably.
There aren't any current cellphones that fit in the pockets of the sort of clothes she wears. Size zero/one fashion clothing often doesn't even have pockets, much less ones that'll fit the half-tablet-sized cellphones these days. She had an HP Veer, the size of a credit card, that she loved, until it died. So now she has the same smartwatch and has what she calls a GIANT cellphone in her purse or stuck in her desk at work, and takes calls using her watch.
Size zero clothing is probably not on Woz's radar, but there are people who want tiny connectivity.
This is currently what I'm struggling to find. The main thing I've established is FreeCAD just isn't ready yet - very buggy and I can not get it to work, but parametric modelling is an interesting concept.
What else are people using for dimensioning parts which need to fit together? (i.e. part design, rather then modelling I guess?)
I've been using freecad, personally. I just did a series of adapters that allow me to attach RC servos to LEGO bricks for some inverse kinematics robots. It worked reasonably well. I've had it crash and do unexpected things, but what I've found is that if I work in the part design toolbar, build sketches that are fully constrained, and then use extrude/pocket operations to build my final parts, it seems pretty robust. Then I can switch to mesh and turn those into exportable meshes individually, and get parts that interact the way I want to. Half the stuff I'm doing I 3d print and the other half I mill on my cnc mill, and when I'm processing stl's I find again that having started from fully constrained sketches means the stl's are more robust and less likely to crash the cam programs I use.
My guess RFID. By one regular pod, cut RFID chip out of it, tape to the bottom of subsequent generic pods.
FWIW we tried that with our Stratasys 3d printer. It remembered the RFID number and remembered that the print cartridge was out of print material, so sticking the rfid tag to a new, third-party, 1/4 the price, filled to the brim container of print material did precisely nothing for us. I have no idea if the keurig will do the same. Oh, it was also a pain in the butt because they'd built it into the side of the cartridge, so when we cut it out it wouldn't simply stick on the new cartridge as it had a flat side and the resultant cartridge+rfid tag wouldn't fit in the printer, so we had to bodge something up by putting it on the front where the door closed and hoping it would be detected. It was, but see above.
Why not simply lower the water pressure by 10% to curb water usage?
I dunno about everywhere else, but where I live -- next door to the local water tower -- there isn't any sort of water pressure regulation mechanism. You pump water into the water tower, and it flows by gravity to all the houses that are lower than it. And, in the summer, when everyone down in the valley is running their sprinklers, my water pressure is low enough it's difficult to take a shower, so even if you did manage to regulate pressure it would have a disproportionately large effect on some of the people and very little on some others.
This is purely anecdotal, but the two indie framemakers I know who have worked with 3d printed lugs have both said the lugs broke very quickly and they only used them for prototypes, didn't consider them safe to ride. One said he thought he could make a 3d printed lug (this was stainless steel, through shapeways, silver-soldered to Reynolds SS tubing) that would be durable but he guessed it would weigh about 4x as much as equivalent forged columbus lugs.
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Couldn't they make the phosphor on the led's slower?
I'm not a phosphor chemist so I may not be right on this, but it's my understanding that despite the word 'phosphor' the coating that downconverts light in an LED is actually a fluorescent phenomenon, meaning the metastable states have lifetimes on the orders of tens of nanoseconds. Actual phosphorescent phenomena have lifetimes long enough to make a visual difference but because they stay in an excited state a lot longer they have a lot more time to engage in non-radiative relaxation, so their conversion efficiency is like 10x lower.
Buy Crees. I work in LED driver design, and Cree, who I don't work for but I work with, seem to do a good job of making sure their LED's don't get associated with junk. Philips similarly, to a lesser extent.
Weird. My experience has been the opposite. I've tried the Cree bulbs from Home Depot and they suck because they strobe at 120 Hz (verified on a scope). That's not usually noticeable except when you move your eyes quickly (like reading), or if something moves quickly like your kid swinging a baton. The strobe effect really bothers me. I also have 15 of the Philips L-prize bulbs that they discontinued after collecting their prize money, and those do not have any sort of strobe effect and they are more efficient than the Cree bulbs.
Strobing is a huge problem, and the easiest way to fix it is add big output caps to the switcher... which costs money.
It's sad to hear they did that. I will chat with someone who gets to make these decisions for them at the end of the month.
Strobing's even worse with car taillights because that's when people have the highest saccade rates and cars are moving quickly, so surprisingly high frequencies are clearly visible as strobe flashes.
But yeah, we really DO get what we pay for. So dear consumers who are reading this, please protest by not settling for the crappy stuff. Buy quality and prove to the world that's what we want! I've been 30+ years into electronics (many as a service tech). We've got a heck of a job in front of us, but I honestly believe the public will tire of the crappy products, hopefully NOT before it's too late.
The big open question for our time: how do we tell if stuff is quality?
Stuff that has the same manufacturer's SKU number, you open it up and it has all different guts than last year's because they've changed subcontractors.
They come out with a new version every four months, so by the time reviews are up on one you can't buy that model anymore.
Manufacturers have adopted influenza's tactic: change so fast that the system can't keep up with you and fight your badness.
Since us consumers need to buy stuff, we have no choice but to buy what's being offered, with only lemon metrics for judging.
Cree is an exception to this (in my experience), and I hope like mad that they stay that way.
...because it doesn't pay very well to sell you something that'll last forever, whether it's an Oled screen or LED bulb.
With LED's, it's a walk in the park for the industry to make them last less, all you need to do for your LED to last less than specified, is to OVERDRIVE them just a little, a little higher current and the LED's will die rapidly, they should be able to make the new LED lamps last just out the warranty period (that in most countries AFAIK is around 3-6 months), or cheap enough to avoid the warranty altogether.
There is nothing wrong with the LED's themselves, (we're talking the components...DIODES...not the whole circuit with drivers and all), I ordered strong RGB leds from China many MANY years ago, they're still glowing on my homemade alarm-systems so strong that I can use them as night-lights, yes...4 years later 24H day use...they still glow enough to lit up an entire room. And I just used Ohms law + 1% resistor values to calculate the right resistor value for my circuits. You can pretty much BET the manufacturers will "miscalculate" these values, or make the drivers for the stronger LED's last MUCH less in order to keep pumping out new ones for the consumers to waste and waste.
I'd rather pay a proper price for my LED lamps - and keep our environment safe from this mad overproduction that now has escalated totally out of hands. :(
Buy Crees. I work in LED driver design, and Cree, who I don't work for but I work with, seem to do a good job of making sure their LED's don't get associated with junk. Philips similarly, to a lesser extent.
So, from the inside, it's not that manufacturers generally scrimp on bulbs to make them fail faster so they can sell more. The economics of light bulbs don't support that business model. It's that people are crazy reluctant to pay $15 for a lightbulb when an incandescent costs under $1. So manufacturers engage in heavy-duty Muntzing until the bulb will just barely run, and they've cut the BOM by $1.45... and then it dies quickly. It's called value engineering, which as far as I'm concerned means removing all the value. They use cheap input filter caps, and scrimp on those, and they use cheap heatsinking which is poorly thermally coupled to the LED's, so the LED's operate at a high junction temperature and don't live very long.
Incandescents have visual inertia, for lack of a better term: if you pour a 30 hz square wave into one, it'll still look pretty good. LED's react in nanoseconds. Crappy dirty line power combined with dimming makes for a really demanding design, and designers and apps engineers have to work with a huge variation in dimmer designs. Consumers don't see any of that: all they see is "no way I'm paying $25 for a lightbulb" so they buy the crap ones and then get infuriated with them because they're visibly flickering and only last five times as long as an incandescent. I can't really blame them, either. There are really good lightbulbs out there. They're expensive. They should last 50,000 hours. But it's hard to tell what you're getting if you're not in on the design.
We largely agree that it sucks to be stuck drooling in a nursing home. But the reason people are keeping strict diets, exercising, and doing math puzzles is almost certainly not to live longer, but to live better during the time that they have. I want to die the moment living isn't fun anymore, but I want to delay that moment as long as possible. That's why I spend time and effort on keeping healthy: not because I simply want to live forever, but I want to feel like I'm able to have a really good time forever.
A makerspace is definitely the best bet as regards hardware. If you think you're going to pursue this, start playing with modeling software now. It's at least as complicated. (Moreso if you get a 3d printer that already works and you don't have to assemble and tune it.) Sketchup, Autocad's new free 123d or whatever it's called, freecad, are all very usable for graphics-oriented, and openscad is good if you're a programmer. I find freecad the easiest combination of precision, adaptability, and ease of use, but other people have totally different opinions.
What I tell people who are thinking about 3d printing is: if you have a specific project, that needs 3d printing, for which going through shapeways or something is either uneconomical (because you're going to need six tries to get your widget dimensioned correctly) or too slow (you're going to be making a ton of different prototype widgets) then a home 3d printer may be a good idea for you. Otherwise, you'll get it, print an octopus and a tardis, and then it'll gather dust and you'll kick yourself for having spent the money.
With that said, if you do have a specific project, and you use the printer for that, you will get enough time on it, and more specifically on using the software to make models, that you will have basically mastered the learning curve, and suddenly you'll be printing a lot of other things, that you didn't ever even think about making.
I'm co-owner of a plus-size mendelmax 2. We got it to print prototype circuit board adapters so we could stick x board on y piece of hardware. Once we'd gotten that hammered out, the other guy who owns it has printed a plug for his sewer drain, a rat trap for live-catch, buckets for a tiny pelton wheel generator, and I've printed lathe-holding tools, lcd bezels, automated printed circuit board test fixtures, and most of a fuel injection intake manifold for my car. We use it for everything.
But you need to have that first big complicated project that you have to get finished, to get to the point where it is a reliable tool, rather than a gadget.
With all THAT said, you'll always want a larger printer. But if the printer you have can cover 95% of your jobs, that's a whole lot better than none at all. Based on the stuff I've made, this printer could handle 95% of the demands I have, and there's always shapeways for the other 5%.
Is it me or does it sound a bit underwhelming for $1000? I don't mean the price is non-competitive, it just seems like I'd want something more capable if I was going to take the plunge. Burn $1000 and in a week won't you be hankering for a much more capable machine?
Yes. And spending two months debugging bed/head temperatures, print and extruder speed, and layer thickness, so your prints consistently stay solid and adhered to the bed rather than peeling, will be totally invisible to you because that $1K presumably means someone else already did that. There's a lot of value in getting something that's been debugged, and that's particularly the case for extrusion-based FDM 3d printers. It's okay to be hankering for a better machine, particularly if you're already printing. The best 3d printer is the one that's actually building parts for you.
or is there a hidden strategy of increasing the phone sizes of new iphones to deliberately make them unwieldy, and create a problem which can be "solved" with a smart-watch? ie, more crap to sell.
Yes, and it started about five years ago. That's when my wife and several of my other female friends began complaining that phones no longer fit in the pockets of women's clothing that isn't made by Lululemon or something. They got things like the HP Veer precisely because it was still the size of an old flipphone and managed to fit in the roughly six cubic inches that manufacturers have decided is the amount of pocket space they will provide for women's clothes below size 2. Then all those went away as everyone raced to make phones that are really tablets, so now they're buying smartwatches and keeping the cellphone in the purse or in the desk. Sure, it's a big awkward batphone, especially on someone who's a size zero, but it's a lot less ginormous than any cellphone you can buy in the US, as far as we can tell. (If anyone can suggest a cellphone that's roughly the size of a Veer but is still supported, I'd love to know about it.)
>The only ant+ holdouts I can think of are cycling power meters. But those are very expensive bordering on niche sports training products.
I wonder about this. Out of the 20-some people I ride with regularly, only one person has an ANT+ accessory that isn't a power meter. Or, to put that another way, everyone who has ANT+ bits has multiple bits, of which one is a power meter. However, that is likely because of sample bias: they're all racers. But of the non-racers I know, none of them has cadence and if they have HRM they're using watch-based ones like Polar's.
>Speaking of exotic bike stuff. I know the Di2 electronic shifters support ant+.
DI2 supports a shimano-proprietary version of ANT+, apparently: http://bike.shimano.com/publis...
We have access to ANT+ hardware at work, since we make it, and we haven't managed to talk to my coworker's DA Di2 yet. It raises some interesting possibilities, of automatic shifting (and of the team manager/coach deciding when you should start your sprint, messaging you, and managing your shifting. Very Triplets-of-Belleville.)
Out of curiosity, what model of Opel? I always wanted an Opel GT...
I've gone through three of those plastic box fans over the last ten years, and whenever one dies I drag out the big heavy steel box fan my parents had in the 1950's. Man does that thing move air, all day long, fairly quietly. It's just terrifying because if it fell out of the window it could kill someone, but whereas the plastic ones jump to their doom every couple of months I think it would take a volcanic eruption to shift the old fan.
Pushbutton hard-wired phones, world war two vintage drillpress, metal lathe, wood lathe, tablesaw, 1970 Triumph as my not-snowing car, 1990 bicycle for my non-race bike, MOO/MUD's that I've been hanging out on since 1992, Commordore Amiga 2000 (okay, I only fire that up about once every two months.) A lot of my wood chisels are from the 1890's. They all work just fine. My race bike is a brand-new marvel of carbon fiber and magnesium, but I bet it won't last another two seasons, whereas the old bike has over 150,000 kilometers on it. I do now design using switching power supplies, rather than LDO's, and I've moved from PIC to AVR, (and I've always programmed in C rather than assembly) but generally, there has to be a really clear advantage for me to change piles of experience and knowledge for something new.
In fact, the Wikipedia page about his group of thugs, in English, now specifically points out that the Italian version has been altered because of Data Protection Laws.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
The smart implementations probably hash the image payload excluding EXIF, for exactly that reason - maybe downsample and reduce the colorspace too, so trivial tweaks won't have that effect any more.
This isn't definitive research, but in the early days of G+, some friends posted a lot of porn to see how quickly Google caught and deleted the pictures. What they found was that Google's algorithms, once trained with a picture, could find that picture if it had been resized, flipped along the vertical axis, and cropped. (one was cropped to the point where it was no longer technically porn, since it was just a person's face, and it still disappeared.)
Awesome, thank you. Because I'm that kind of person I'll probably bodge one up on the pcb plotter today, with some available pads for adding resistors later.
The most obvious route for disaster is a compromised cellphone charger, at least for my usage patterns. Since it'd take me about ten minutes to make a pez-candy-sized PCB with USB-micro-M and USB-micro-F connectors with only the power lines connected between them, I'm wondering if an android phone will charge when it's getting power, regardless of whether the USB is connected, or it won't charge until it's had a USB chat. I recall older devices being able to charge at lower-power (150mA?) but having to negotiate for 500mA. I'm perfectly happy to settle for 150mA for right now, until I can program a little AVR to fake the negotiation process and make me an air-gap charger. I don't have a usb traffic sniffer at work, and am about to lose my pcb fabrication equipment for a couple of weeks, so if I could find out today if it's worth making the pcb I'd do it this afternoon. Anyone know?
You don't have to be wildly strabby or exotropic to get some (potential) benefits: if your eyes are struggling to maintain fusion, you may read more slowly and suffer more eyestrain than if you had vision therapy, without knowing that you're fighting your own eye muscles. Simple use is lousy training, it turns out, much like just walking lots doesn't help people with screwed-up knees.
It might not do anything for you, but a consult with an optometrist who knows a bit about vision therapy may be worthwhile.
When I took a geography class focussing on the western US, one of the things the teacher mentioned (which I haven't verified independently, but it was his job) was that the Colorado River water rights were allocated based on how much the Colorado River was running in roughly 1920, which happened to be an unusually high flow rate period, so ever since then there hasn't been enough water to satisfy everyone. (Water rights are allocated by time priority: first person who used it gets to take the entire amount that person is entitled to, then second person, and so forth.) So it's 100% spoken for, forever. The shortfall is made up for by pumping out groundwater, and when they allocated the colorado river water rights, they also decided that they were going to make a 100 year plan for water usage, meaning that after 100 years they would have used up pretty much all the available aquifers. Since then we've discovered some more aquifers, and are willing to drill deeper and run more expensive pumps, but that's only somewhat covering the shortage. We're pretty much collecting exactly what we planned 95 years ago. There are still semi-serious proposals to divert and pump chunks of the Columbia River over into the upper Colorado River basin... which is sort of funny, as much of the original water projects in the upper Colorado River basin were, and are, pumping water from it through the Continental Divide over to the eastern slope to fulfill Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming, and Oklahoma water needs.
The same instructor also noted that depending on how you define your terms, the category of western state water rights was by quite a bit the most common lawsuit that ended up in the US Supreme Court, showing up every couple of years in one form or another.
My eyes don't line up in the exact same place when I look at things. I had surgery when I was 15 to correct it, after 20 years, it's coming back a little (although to a much less significant degree). Fortunately, it's small enough that I can use lenses to correct it - I have to wear bifocals now - but that also means that Lasik will never work for me to improve my vision. I could have better than perfect vision in each eye and I'd still need corrective lenses. :|
Consider talking to a vision therapist about if this is something that can be corrected. They can do pretty amazing things to train and strengthen your eyes to track, fuse images, and reduce eyestrain while doing so. A lot of people aren't aware that they're straining constantly to keep images fused, and as a result dislike reading or using computers. Sometimes, some physical therapy for your eye muscles can fix it. My wife regularly gets kids whose eyes are pointing in entirely different directions and have never had 3d vision in their lives and after five months (five very expensive months, it should be mentioned) they have and retain 3d vision. It's life-changing for a lot of them.
She's a sometimes model whose non-modeling job also involves looking very professional. I'm not even allowed to look at the laundry for fear of destroying something by washing it wrong. She bought a ... shirt? blouse? I dunno, something you wear on the upper half of your body, the other day, and I was all "that's very pretty!" and she's all "it should be. It cost 800 euros." So, yeah, I don't go anywhere near her clothes. And clothes like that don't have pockets. It ruins the lines/aesthetic. Definitely not something Woz considers, nor would he have any reason to, but there are a whole bunch of people who do.
Even her painting-the-house pants have these microminiature pockets that you can fit, like, a credit card and a car key into. Whenever we go out I carry her wallet, because even that doesn't fit. Totally different clothing regime from my ten-pocket dungarees, where I could carry most of a toolkit for doing bicycle maintenance and still be able to sit down comfortably.
There aren't any current cellphones that fit in the pockets of the sort of clothes she wears. Size zero/one fashion clothing often doesn't even have pockets, much less ones that'll fit the half-tablet-sized cellphones these days. She had an HP Veer, the size of a credit card, that she loved, until it died. So now she has the same smartwatch and has what she calls a GIANT cellphone in her purse or stuck in her desk at work, and takes calls using her watch.
Size zero clothing is probably not on Woz's radar, but there are people who want tiny connectivity.
This is currently what I'm struggling to find. The main thing I've established is FreeCAD just isn't ready yet - very buggy and I can not get it to work, but parametric modelling is an interesting concept.
What else are people using for dimensioning parts which need to fit together? (i.e. part design, rather then modelling I guess?)
I've been using freecad, personally. I just did a series of adapters that allow me to attach RC servos to LEGO bricks for some inverse kinematics robots. It worked reasonably well. I've had it crash and do unexpected things, but what I've found is that if I work in the part design toolbar, build sketches that are fully constrained, and then use extrude/pocket operations to build my final parts, it seems pretty robust. Then I can switch to mesh and turn those into exportable meshes individually, and get parts that interact the way I want to. Half the stuff I'm doing I 3d print and the other half I mill on my cnc mill, and when I'm processing stl's I find again that having started from fully constrained sketches means the stl's are more robust and less likely to crash the cam programs I use.
My guess RFID. By one regular pod, cut RFID chip out of it, tape to the bottom of subsequent generic pods.
FWIW we tried that with our Stratasys 3d printer. It remembered the RFID number and remembered that the print cartridge was out of print material, so sticking the rfid tag to a new, third-party, 1/4 the price, filled to the brim container of print material did precisely nothing for us. I have no idea if the keurig will do the same. Oh, it was also a pain in the butt because they'd built it into the side of the cartridge, so when we cut it out it wouldn't simply stick on the new cartridge as it had a flat side and the resultant cartridge+rfid tag wouldn't fit in the printer, so we had to bodge something up by putting it on the front where the door closed and hoping it would be detected. It was, but see above.
Why not simply lower the water pressure by 10% to curb water usage?
I dunno about everywhere else, but where I live -- next door to the local water tower -- there isn't any sort of water pressure regulation mechanism. You pump water into the water tower, and it flows by gravity to all the houses that are lower than it. And, in the summer, when everyone down in the valley is running their sprinklers, my water pressure is low enough it's difficult to take a shower, so even if you did manage to regulate pressure it would have a disproportionately large effect on some of the people and very little on some others.
This is purely anecdotal, but the two indie framemakers I know who have worked with 3d printed lugs have both said the lugs broke very quickly and they only used them for prototypes, didn't consider them safe to ride. One said he thought he could make a 3d printed lug (this was stainless steel, through shapeways, silver-soldered to Reynolds SS tubing) that would be durable but he guessed it would weigh about 4x as much as equivalent forged columbus lugs.