Please no doomer responses.
I’ve been playing my guitar a fair bit. Relearning the solo dem another brick in the wall pt 2 because I never learned it right whe I was in high school and really wanna get that 5 fret bend down right. Havent learned a solo in a while, pretty easy reintro to solos.
Been getting my old anet 8 3d printer working again for a project for my girlfriend. Pretty fun iterativeprocess.
Also fucking around with retro games on an old pi I had sitting around. Contra hard corps is hella fun.
So what do you like doing? What have you been having fun with? What do you like?
I’ve been working on my skeleton animatronic. I’ve wanted to do this for years, so I finally am. I have the design pretty well locked down. Printer filament ordered, parts trickling in as deliveries arrive from around the world.
I got the Bottango Solar board to drive the servos. Eyes pan and tilt, jaw jaws, head tilts and swivels, plus two hands that open and close and one arm that extends.
Heeeeey!
This is a very cool doot. More skele-matronics is a good thing.
Do you have a how-to on YouTube? I’d love to see how you did this. Halloween is my favorite.
I won’t make a step-by-step tutorial, but I will document a few steps along the way and publish my design when it’s complete. The only thing I have IRL for now is the thumb I printed and assembled. The hand design is the part I’m least confident in. And, the head is the most complex part, so those have been taking all the time till now.
There are plenty of tutorials online for this sort of thing. From modifying store bought models, to kits people make, to old-school casting plastic parts from self-made molds, to designing and 3D printing. I’m using Blender for the design, because I already know Blender, that’s a lot of previously-earned knowledge. I also have a lot of experience building things myself from previous jobs, and hobbies. I’m watching videos for the details I’m less certain of. The skull and skeleton are free downloads, but require extensive modification on the inside to this purpose.
The parts I can’t make and need to buy are stupid-expensive these days. The universal joint for the neck is only sold in pairs, but I only need one, I suppose to make it worth selling, were $15. The two boards to drive everything were $160 plus the two micro SD cards were another $22, but I went with a purpose designed solution, rather than an Arduino solution. There’s the servos ($45), the struts ($9), the turntable bearing ($7), a ball bearing for the jaw ($7), a box of tiny screws ($8), etc. It all adds up fast. Alibaba Express helps, but not much, buying enough at one store to get free shipping helps. Plus, of course, the 3D printer which I already have, but was $1000 six years ago, for a Prusa.
Yeah, I have a Prusa as well. It’s a Mark 3S+. I think I will be printing something large soon and I’m thinking about getting something bigger and faster, but I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it. I build a lot of stuff too. Good luck with it. Looks like fun.
I’m learning how to drive stick shift cause I already bought an old Jeep LJ. The adrenaline rush from surviving a trip from point A to point B with minimal stalling is nice.
Nice little skill to have. I only drive stick shift. Makes for a good theft deterrent these days.
ive been jerking off a lot
Wrong month bro
He didn’t say he nutted. Bro is just edging for a straight month.
Edging for a month
Bro is a masochist at this point
Just learned that you can make metal press tools with 3D prints. Even just PLA+ works pretty well.
I stamped these in 22 gauge steel with a 20 ton press and the dies looked fine afterwards. The dies are about 3mm deep and the pressing came out just under 3mm. Looks surprisingly professional for my tooling.
Trying to get back into reading daily. The TBR pile on my bookshelf has been languishing in purgatory for too long.
I’ve been acquiring pins and patches and such for my battle jacket
These are both sort of in-progress pics (as if a battle jacket is ever truly finished,) I’ve added a couple more band patches to the front and finished adding the pyramid studs around the bottom edge, and the fish wasn’t sewn on for that pic of the back but is now
It’s at a place where I’m pretty happy with it now, but still on the lookout for more things to add to it.
Man, every last one of those makes me want to give you a high five. Nicely done!
Yah but how many pieces of “flare” do you have lol
If we define flair as just pins & buttons
- Frog (lapel/collar)
- Flying Spaghetti Monster (other lapel)
- Watchmen smiley face
- Fight fascism (anti) Trump/Hitler pin
- No AI
- Eagle Scout medal (I’m not a fan of the scouts giving into the trump admin on some things, so it goes on the vest instead of with the old uniform)
- Makers Mark ambassador medal
And it didn’t make it’s way into this picture but I do have a 8th pin I just recently found in a box of stuff that’s a Warhammer 40k space marine helmet
And somewhere I have a pin from my local orchestra thats going on there if/when I remember where I put the damn thing
So 8, hopefully soon to be 9
And if you want to count all those little black & white pyramid studs, there’s about 200 of them
That is awesome! I love it and thanks for sharing. You could add the sewing merit badge on there if you got that when you were in scouts! I too also received eagle and hate where the scouts ended up after all these years. Anyways, cheers!
Overall, I thought scouts were on a pretty good trajectory, not that there wasn’t plenty of room for improvement, but allowing girls and lgbtq people to participate were solid moves
They still need more accountability for the child abuse issues, but that’s probably as much a failing on our laws and policing as it is on the scout organization
And I wish their ties to organizations like the military and NRA weren’t as strong.
It’s kind of hard to have youth shooting sports without working with the NRA though, since they’re the main organization that will train RSOs and such, and without that training I’m pretty sure there’s no way in their hell lawyers and insurance companies would sign off of it. And I do, overall, support that part of the program.
But really it’s the military ties that I don’t like, since their support and resources were what Trump/Hegseth were able to use as leverage against them.
Would also really like them to ditch the religion requirement as well
But really it’s the military ties that I don’t like, since their support and resources were what Trump/Hegseth were able to use as leverage against them.
Would also really like them to ditch the religion requirement as well
Yah these two right here, you hit the nail on the head, I haven’t been involved since the 90’s but yah, elegantly put. Not sure where they go from here though…i wonder if the military culture and trump coziness dies with an administration change or if just ends up being another pipeline for young kids to get funneled into the military. I also remember that religion was optional. I did the Ad Altare Dei program, but I don’t remember it being mandatory but that was also several decades ago lol.
AFAIK, the religious awards have always been optional. I think only one guy in my troop ever bothered to earn it. Officially as long as you’re willing to say you believe in some sort of higher power that satisfies their religious requirement, but some troops can end up being pretty Bible-thumpy
Unfortunately they’ve always been pretty cozy with the military, being an eagle scout gets you a little bit of a rank or pay bump or something if you enlist, and they lend the scouts some equipment and manpower when needed for big events like the jamboree, so that pipeline has already kind of existed for a long time and it’s sort of on-line with what Baden-Powell Intended the scout movement to be- a tool to help prepare kids for military service.
But of course that’s not really what I took away from scouting, and it just doesn’t really feel like what it should be about in today’s world to me, so I wouldn’t mind seeing that relationship falling apart.
Yah good points, I guess it all depends on where you are physically at in scouting…location makes a difference. I must of been childishly naive at the time as I never put two and two together to connect the dots on the military pipeline…the more I think about it though, it makes sense.
Ahhhh I love it!! The frog lapel pin is very cute - what’s on the other lapel? I can’t quite make it out.
The other one is a flying spaghetti monster
Oh hell yeah, that’s cool.
Is that a Streetlight Manifesto patch?
It is!
Nice! I think I still have a few shirts and hoodies I bought from some of their shows I went to around 2008-2012.
I remember we went to one of their shows at the Fuel Coffee House in Orlando. We had been to some shows before, so we knew what their RV looked like. After the show, there was a parking spot open by it, so we moved our car there and hung out while my friend played their songs on his acoustic.
After a few hours, Chris, Conti, Mike, and Dan came out of the venue and walked over to their RV. On their way over, they heard us playing, so they gave us some swag and a signed poster.
We wanted to wait around for TK, but we also didn’t want to be “those guys” so we headed home.
Cool band. Good times.
Nice, I’ve seen them a good handful of times around Philly, New York, and Jersey, always a great show.
It’s been a few years since I last saw them, before I started putting this vest together so I ended up ordering the patch off their website. They threw in a note apologizing for shipping costs being so high and a couple stickers to make up for it.
Here’s to hoping they finish up that new album soon (and if you weren’t aware they dropped about half of it a couple months ago)
I’ve planted watermelons about six weeks ago. Until now I’ve always failed at these -tomatoes, melons, kiwano… none have survived. So this time I read up on the ideal growing conditions and immunized the buds against common threats (snails and chickens mostly) by building a mini enclosure. So far it seems to work :
That was 3 days ago, the plants have already doubled in size since I took these pictures ! I visit them everyday.
It’s fun when it works
I’ve never managed to get anything to grow, but I think I’m gonna try again. Thanks for the inspiration
gourd family plants grow extremely fast. thats why they can become weedy. seen one grow to several feet within 1-2weeks.
yea my neighbour also planted some kind of pumpkin nearby, and I fully expect both to basically cover the entire hill
aha !! amazing ! let’s go !
I’ve learned all about a lot of open source projects for my new homelab. Immich to replace google photos, homeassistant for a lot of the smart home stuff to control them locally, and the most recent thing is setting my matrix homeserver for my friends to chat on.
I’ve been listening to Laying Down the Lore 40k which goes through the lore of Warhammer 40k on my weekend runs. I just go out, listen to something fun and interesting and feel great because of exercise.
Learning Japanese. The online classes are only once a week so there’s not much pressure, and you can study a bit more during the week on your own if you want.
Wildlife photography; lizards and birds mostly.
Check my profile for the ones I’ve been happy to post so far.
Oh man nice! Gotta love birds
Noice!
Video games. I got back into gaming and honestly my depression and anxiety have gone down. I been playing Boltgun 2 lately and despite how vicious the game is, it honestly does make me feel better.
Going to swimming pool with my kids is the highlight of the week.
That’s really sweet :)
I know it said no doomer responses but I’ve been continually having fun with my xbox right up until last night. It did a “lets look at all your stats wont that be nice” thing. Told me id played for 23,600 hours. Since 2007. This isnt even my first account…
Now I’m gonna look through this thread and see if anything grabs my interest. If I’d spent that long on anything else I’d be a grandmaster by now.
Same thing we do every day, Pinky, listen to music, have fun with the kids, snuggle hot wife, and try new coffee beans.
