• 7 Posts
  • 119 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Far be it from me to dissuade anyone from applying the solution of 3D printing to any problem, but why not just buy one of those universal suction-cup-type flag car flag pole mounts and sticking it to the hatch itself?

    Or maybe get a trailer hitch installed and use one of those flag poles that connect to a trailer hitch.

    Mind you, those things I’m talking about tend to be made of steel. Definitely wouldn’t want your flagpole coming off on the highway or atop a bridge and impaling someone in another vehicle.

    And, I’m not sure what legal considerations there might be for this venture, so it might be best to do your research. I know in my area, if anything sticks out too far out the back of your vehicle, you’re legally required to add a red piece of cloth or something. There are probably maximum lengths you may be allowed for a flag on your car.

    If you insist on a 3D printed solution:

    • I imagine you’d have to design it yourself. Even if you got help from a professional CAD kind of person, I’d have to think they’d have to be able to measure and work with your car in person.
    • Mount it at multiple places. Trailer hitch and have the hatch hold it in place and connect it to roof rack bars, for instance.
    • Use strong materials (straps, carabiners, steel, wood) for most of it and try to avoid having the 3D-printed parts take the brunt of the weight and/or stress.
    • Take into account things like gradual warping due to stress and material fatigue.
    • I know I’m harping on mechanical strength, bur make it bulkier than you think it needs to be and use 100% infill.
    • Test it a lot for potential failures as best yoi can before taking your car out with the flag mounted on it. Maybe try some drives with only the pole and no flag first, then with a smaller flag before moving on to the real deal. Start on back roads and move up to larger streets and then to highways. Check for any signs of stress or warping between every test.
    • Be willing to give up before endangering anyone. Better to live your life with an off-the-shelf solution or no solution than to be responsible for injuring someone.
    • Be willing to scale down a little. Settle for a smaller flag, maybe.
    • Consider how much this will affect your own visibility as the driver.

    You know. Just… be careful about the whole endeavor.


  • I suppose you could take it off the bed, measure very precisely the height, print just the remainder (by altering the model and re-slicing) on the bed, and glue it to what’s already printed. It would almost definitely still have a visible seam and aside from that, I can’t think of a way to save it.






  • I’ve got my caps lock key remapped to escape.

    I use my left pinky for ctrl, shift, a, and my remapped caps lock/escape key.

    I use my right pinky for shift, enter, and I’m pretty sure that’s all.

    I use my ring fingers for backspace, tilde, tab, q, backslash, quote, and that probably isn’t a comprehensive list.

    I use my middle finger for semicolon/colon! I never realized that before. Wild.



  • FizzyOrange got it right. “Screen grab” is nicely asking a graphical system (X11/xorg-server or a Wayland compositor or whatever) via an api to give you an image of either the whole desktop or some particular rectangular part of it. And you can do it 30 times every second (or more) to get a video. OBS uses such APIs to get video from the screen for saving to a file or streaming to Twitch or whatever. Various tools can be used to get screenshots and save them to files. Etc.

    Heck. On my work machine, because they require us to meticulously log the time we spend on individual tasks, I’ve got a script running that uses ImageMagick’s import command to grab screenshots of my desktop and save them to files once every 5 minutes so I can refer back to them while logging my time.

    And as FizzyOrange said, various Wayland compositors have workarounds for the fact that there isn’t (or rather wasn’t until recently) a way to do screen grab in a standard way that would work across all compositors which properly and comprehensively implement the Wayland protocol. I use Sway on my personal machines and it’s based on something called wlroots which has built-in a nonstandard extension to the Wayland protocol that allows screen grab. But once wlroots adopts the new standard way of doing screen grabbing, the nonstandard extension will be unneeded/obsolete.


  • Oh shit! I hadn’t heard they’d finally added that. That’s awesome.

    Maybe that means FFMPEG and Zoom will start supporting it soon.

    On my personal systems, I use Sway (a Wayland compositor). And I sometimes wish I could do screen grab with FFMPEG, but so far I haven’t wanted that enough to actually switch to X11 or use wl-screenrec.

    On my work machine, I’m on Ubuntu and I have to use Zoom and screen sharing is kindof a non-negotiable thing. (Plus, FFMPEG screen grab is nice to have on my work machine as well.) So I use i3-gaps on xorg-server. Except for those two things, I’d rather use Sway.