dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️ @ dual_sport_dork @lemmy.world

Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is "column" the rig

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2 yr. ago

Idiots will absolutely drop a dollar chasing a nickel, but still believe they were so clever that they came out ahead. I wouldn't put any amount of stupidity past them at this point.

I sure am. (Also, that is a fuckton of fake Swiss Army Knives. I kind of approve, especially including the loose busted off scale on the platter, there.)

Story time. In fact, I have told this story before. It's got two acts.

Act 1: Our local farmer's market/flea market had a stall that sold, among other sundry low grade imported Chinese crap, a wide variety of low grade Chinese knives. I bought a few from them over the years for the sheer novelty value -- you know how it is -- but one day I noticed their stall was completely barren of knives. I asked the owner what was up.

He told me he (or rather, his son) got busted via some kind of sting operation by the local cops selling a knife to a minor, so they'd been banned from selling knives and weapons altogether. What was he to do, he told me, with all of the crap he had left over he couldn't sell.

"I'll give you a hundred bucks for it," I said. And I did.

I wound up with a Samsonite suitcase half filled with bargain basement knives. It took me years to get rid of them via giving them all away, and then breaking the rest. Me and my friends would go camping with bandoliers of 20 identical knives each. We'd use cheap folders for throwing knives, baton firewood with fake Swiss Armies, and lashed brass-and-plastic bejeweled Arabian daggers to the ends of sticks to use as fishing spears. The whole lot. It was a riot.

Act 2: At that time I was working in IT at this engineering firm. This is relevant because one day we had a prolonged power outage, and I can tell you there's very little in this world that's as useless as a bunch of engineers who can't use their computers. While we were waiting around in the semi-darkness waiting for the lights to come back on, I was hanging out in our accountant's office chatting (because we got along, and also not least of which because her office had a big window in it whereas my IT dungeon had none), and idly flipping my balisong/butterfly knife around. As you do.

Well, as I do, anyway. It's not like I'm not a known quantity in that regard. Both here and there.

Some background on this, we had a new accountant in training who nobody liked because she was a little proto-Karen and also not very competent at anything. We suspect her CV was rather embellished. Even the boss didn't like her and he was the one who made the decision to hire her in the first place. She came in to ask our head accountant some question or other, damned if I was paying attention to what it was, and left. No incident, didn't speak to me, didn't even look at me.

Well, here comes the next day and I get a calling on the carpet from the boss because this nutty woman complained that I was "brandishing a knife in a threatening manner and she felt unsafe," or some shit.

I told my boss two things in no uncertain terms, the first of which was I was standing behind our head accountant's desk while this chick came no nearer than the doorframe, so I'm like 20 feet away with a significant quantity of office furniture between us. And more to the point, we're all adults here. All you gotta do is say, "Hey. Why don't you put that fuckin' blade away, man?" No problem. But she didn't say anything about it to me.

Nothing really came of this and she got fired a couple of weeks later for gross incompetence and, I suspect, getting on the boss' nerves.

The punch line: This announcement came at our weekly meeting where every single individual in our little office was crammed in the conference room. "Awesome," says I, "To celebrate I have some party favors for everyone."

Among my suitcase of shitty knives I had a ridiculous bevy of crappy balisongs, which I'd dutifully sorted out and completely filled an empty box from an Allen Bradley contactor assembly with them. I must have had fifty of the damn things. I plonked it on the conference room table and told everyone in the company to take one. Hell, our outgoing employee can have two, for good luck.

Now we had a level playing field -- everyone has a butterfly knife. (Glassdoor did not exist at the time, and in retrospect it's probably a good thing that it didn't.)

Anyway, I can now tell you there are in fact two contenders for the most useless thing in the world. The second one is a building full of engineers, all armed with balisong knives, none of whom really know how to use them.

I'm well into considering the build a car avenue myself. Since new cars are all bullshit now, I'm seriously tempted to just remove the drivetrain from my truck when it finally conks out and stick a kit built aftermarket EV powertrain in it instead.

For reference, my truck is so dumb it has crank windows. I'd like to keep it that way.

Also, one of the biggest killers of 3D printed parts is heat, and the other is ultraviolet exposure. If OP is putting this in his fridge I think it's in the one place it's going to encounter very little of both.

20 is a funny way to spell 40.

Watertight and waterproof are not quite the same thing.

Almost all 3D printable materials are waterproof, in that they will not dissolve in water. (With the exception of, e.g., PVA which is sometimes used as a dissolvable support material.) I realize this is not the intent of your question, but a lot of people seem to get it twisted about various polymers absorbing moisture/being hygroscopic/becoming "wet" and therefore believe that they literally melt or soften in water over time or something. This is not the case.

3D prints can be made watertight but it does not necessarily follow that all of them are by default. This will be dependent on your print settings and, to a certain extent, your print material. Some materials are more isotropic than others and the layer lines stick together more readily without gaps. TPU leaps to mind, which can be made extremely watertight very easily.

Use a lot of walls -- another poster recommended 4, that's probably a good place to start. Don't forget to increase your top and bottom layer counts as well. You may need more top or bottom layers than walls, because your layers are probably thinner in the Z axis than your nozzle extrudes in X and Y. If dimensional clearance is not an issue and in your case it seems it isn't, consider increasing your extrusion multiplier slightly in the walls as well, to ensure that material is squished into any potential gaps. Avoid sharp corners or tiny points on your model, which upon slicing may be incompletely filled. Avoid long unsupported bridges as well, because the couple of layers where these inevitably sag will wind up non-solid. If possible, make the outer shell of your model an exact multiple of your wall extrusion thickness so your slicer will not have to guess at any areas and try to fill them with tiny points or similar. If you play back your slicer's preview of a single layer you'll see what I mean.

If you really want to employ the nuclear option, instruct your slicer to iron every single layer. This will make your print take forever, but each individual later will be extremely authoritatively bonded together in the X and Y axes, with no gaps.

If failure is not an option, coat your object after completion with Flex Seal or Plasti-Dip or something.

But then what will they make Pringles out of?

And it wants permissions to:

• Camera
• Microphone
• Location
• Media
• Contacts
• Call History
• Read SMS Messages
• Make and Receive Calls

...And will throw an absolute hissy fit and refuse to load without explanation if you deny any of them.

For instance, just wait until you get a load of what astronomers consider to be metals.

Ensuring that the Starfleet admiralty suffered... transporter accidents... and got replaced by somebody -- anybody -- with some kind of clue would be a good start.

I took a look at OP's machine and it appears to be one of those deals with one big central hinge cover with upper and lower clamshell halves. So, we're both sunk. It's symmetrical in this case, but there is nothing to mirror. They will need to have an existing one (or all the bits and pieces of their busted one, maybe) to measure up and clone.

But yes, I have also seen laptops where the left and right hinges and/or their covers are different from each other.

Or if the parts are mirror images of each other for the left and right hinges, carefully measure the remaining intact one and flip it.

Uh... Has anyone checked to make sure this one isn't explosive, too?

I imagine Musk is far too big of a pussy to actually abolish all Federal regulations. And if he does I'm installing an auto sear, a suppressor, a short barrel, and a pistol brace all on my gun at once. It'll only take a couple of us doing that for you to see the fastest U-turn on that idea in history.

I can only imagine that the intent is to leave all of the regulations that restrict personal individual freedom in place and just gut all the ones preventing big businesses from exploiting you however they want. Or maybe just specifically the ones that are holding Musk's own enterprises back, which is even more plausible.

You're in the same boat as me, except swap 70's for 1920's. I have to tear down all the plaster -- not drywall, actual literal plaster, on lath -- to get at the ground floor wiring. I decided it's fine where it is for now.

As your attorney, I advise you to buy a motorcycle.

As if it could be so easy. I'll take the mountains of skulls and roaring plains of gore over whatever the fuck it is that's going on now. Mere demons are simple, and are vulnerable to your shotgun.

Or Federal firearm restrictions?

Dakka-dakka-dakka-dakka.

Just sayin'.

What a useless pile of words spent moaning about ad clicks, specifically to gain ad clicks.

Don't talk, "organize."

Okay, how? How do we effectively organize to fight against an enemy who has already for all intents and purposes won, in a way that won't get us rounded up and shot by the Gestapo? Please tell us.

"We don't know, that's your problem. Just 'organize.'"

You used the magic word, "modern."

Lots of houses in this world are not modern, and some of them are old enough that they were retrofitted to have electricity, as mine was, rather than even being built with it to begin with. And done so in a haphazard manner when electrical codes were either much more lax than now or didn't exist. And further when the expected power draw for a household was considerably lower, because basically all of it in the 1920's or whatever was only used for lighting and we didn't have all of our current appliances, TV's, computers, 3D printers, or even indoor space heaters.

So moaning about what ought to be rather than what is really doesn't accomplish anything, especially in OP's case.

My small house has basically the entire ground floor wired to only two 15 amp circuits.