melt ceramic

If you’re melting crockery in your microwave, I assure you whatever it is you’re using is not ceramic. Even the earthenware stuff that cheap coffee mugs are made out of has to be heated to upwards of 1000° C just as part of its hardening process, never mind melting.

You can absolutely get silica gel beads hot enough in a microwave to melt and deform plastic containers, though, including those faux stoneware textured ones. Beware if what you have is not actually Pyrex or ceramic.

I cook the shit out of my silica gel beads in the microwave in an old ceramic pie dish I have no other use for. There isn’t a mark on it. Although I will say, you probably want to microwave your beads gently anyway because at high power levels the moisture flash boils out of them fast enough to cause them to split and shatter, or occasionally leap out of the dish like popcorn.

I don’t print TPU on a textured bed. I use the flat side of my build plate, which I also have coated with a giant sheet of Kapton/polyamide tape. Peeling the completed parts off of the smooth surface has never been an issue.

A word to the wise: Always run with a sheet of polyamide tape if you have a flat build plate. This will go a long way towards protecting the finish and flatness of your plate, and I have definitely saved myself a couple of times when having a Z offset that was too low and thusly crashing the nozzle only into the tape and not the surface of the expensive plate itself. You can apply adhesive and clean the tape’s surface just the same as the PEI surface of your plate, but once it gets worn out or chewed up or otherwise no longer produces parts with a pretty underside, you can just peel it off and reapply. If you’ve already fucked up the surface on your plate you can also paper over this with a layer of tape which will smooth out small scratches, pock marks, and other imperfections.

And if you really need to employ the nuclear option to get a stuck part off of your bed (i.e. if you’ve printed something with a sticky filament such as TPU or PETG and happened to have your Z offset way too low) you can peel the tape off along with the part. The tape is unlikely to survive this process, but a pack of 12 sheets is only $20 or so.

That is a mighty chunky thread!

I can tell you from experience that the strength of your part is not likely to be due to the design or pitch of the threads but rather down to the layer adhesion strength of your print and whatever material you’re using. Even a dinky 1.0mm thread pitch is perfectly capable of ripping the layer lines of a print apart, and your point of failure will be the layer immediately below where your countersunk head contacts the base of your nut and/or part it’s screwed into, the exact moment you overtorque it.

I have a bit of experience with this sort of thing. Actually, these days, probably rather a lot.

Your thread creation approach is similar to mine but I prefer to use an additive helix on the male thread, and then a matching subtractive one on the nut or female side. I find this makes it a little easier to tune for good engagement. If you need to make multiples in a single assembly you can draft clone your sketches to make them all the same. Change one, change them all. You can just use triangles to create both the male and female helices, unless you want to make the tips of the threads flat in which case you can draw a trapezoid.

There are various threaded fastener workbenches and plugins available, as others have mentioned, but I prefer to do things the hard way since I came up using FreeCAD in not only the pre-1.0 era, but even pre-0.21 back when the hard way was the only way to do anything and there was no path forward except to Git Gud. If you have specific design parameters in mind I find that building screws manually provides much more flexibility. That, and not having your file explode in your face if you happen to open it on a machine that doesn’t have your full selection of plugins installed is always nice.

They even made us memorize this one in grade school:

1. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Note that this says nothing about having to be a citizen for this to apply to you, either. And while we’re at it, see also this.

That’s remotely possible, and I would be inclined to agree if the circumstances around this weren’t so fishy to begin with.

E.g. why is the police report heavily redacted? Why has the suspect not been named? This is highly unusual, and suggests there’s something more going on. I’d doubt very highly the grand jury were given the full picture.

It’s pretty much a done deal that we’ll never know more. Someone is making an effort to bury this.

Highly unlikely. Even in bumpus old corners of Texas, the state is absolutely obsessed with doing anything to take away any citizen’s gun rights and will do so by nailing them with some kind of felony, and a negligent discharge scenario that results in somebody getting killed in normal circumstances would definitely qualify.

People in Texas may love their guns, but the cops in Texas are the same as cops everywhere and if they had their way nobody would have the guns except them.

This points to me that someone involved in law enforcement, someone involved with the government, or someone with very high level connections and/or a lot of money was the one responsible for this and that’s why it was swept under the carpet. If it were just a regular Joe there’s no way.

Before anyone gets too excited, this still requires sintering to finish your part, i.e. it has to be baked to a metal-fusing temperature in a special purpose kiln that is so expensive that it’ll require a mortgage to buy one, or you’ll have to send all of your parts away to get processed and wait for them to get sent back.

The headline here is that this stuff requires less postprocessing in that regard, but it is still absolutely not for hobbyists or home printers.

Chattel slavery is illegal. It’s true that you can be enslaved, or at least enslaved in all but name and forced to work, as punishment for a crime. I.e. as part of your incarceration. This is per the 13th amendment.

I’m not enough of a legal eagle to explain what would happen or what your recourse would (or would not) be if you refused, though.

He posted it on Juneteenth, i.e. the federal holiday that commemorates the end of slavery.

Well, the one in the headline is so hilariously far out of scale that it could probably fire actual life-sized F-35’s like missiles from its wing hardpoints.

I personally do not trust ISP provided routers to be secure and up to date, nor free of purposefully built in back doors for either tech support or surveillance purposes (or both). You can expect patches and updates on those somewhere on the timescale between late and never.

Therefore I always put those straight into bridge mode and serve my network with my own router, which I can trust and control. Bad actors (or David from the ISP help desk) may be able to have their way with my ISP router, but all that will let them do is talk to my own router, which will then summarily invite them to fuck off.

Likewise, I would not be keen on using an ISP provided router’s inbuilt VPN capability, which is probably limited to plain old PTPP – it has been on all of the examples I’ve touched so far – and thus should not be treated as secure.

You can configure an OpenWRT based router to act as an L2TP/IPSec gateway to provide VPN access on your network without the need for any additional hardware. It’s kind of a faff at the moment and requires manually installing packages and editing config files, but it can be done.

Just yesterday I created !printmything@lemmy.world for this very purpose, so I’ll plug it again. Well, not miniatures specifically, but rather a place for people who haven’t got printers to ask for help from people who do.

I’m not in Oz so I figure shipping to you would be quite prohibitive. But you might be able to connect with someone in your country, who can ship printed stuff to you more cheaply and – importantly – without having to fuck around with customs.

The go-to wisdom is that detailed miniatures are best printed with a resin printer. You can do it with a traditional FDM (filament) printer but it’s harder to get the small details reproduced, and FDM printers can’t print in midair so you either have to be very careful to take that into account with your design or do a lot of work with removing and doing the finish work around printed supports. So you probably want to find somebody with a resin machine.

That may be a good idea.

I’m sure we’ll figure out what so the other good ideas are as we go along…

Not that I can find.

I was about to say something monumentally stupid, along the lines of, “somebody ought to make it.”

The hell with it. I just made it.

!printmything@lemmy.world

Yes, that part specifically is a bit braindead.

It’s probably because they can’t be arsed to figure out who has the rights and who doesn’t, so they just loaded up the ban shotgun.

There are oodles of commercial 3D printing services that will run off whatever you send them for a price. Craftcloud, Shapeways, Xometry, etc.

Or printathing.com, if you’d like to get hooked up with a private(ish) person to do it for you.

Or just ask at any of the innumerable online spaces where people talk about 3D printing (like right here) and someone can probably do it for you, too.

My exception is not to people printing things for others for a specific purpose if asked to. It’s against stealing other people’s work and cynically trying to turn it around for a profit, without putting any effort into it and probably implicitly passing it off as if it were your own work in the process. Likewise, I don’t object to someone designing their own thing and selling their own thing on Etsy. But just to put it into perspective I imagine most people would also rank it as Not Cool to go on Etsy and start trying to sell, say, just printouts random stuff you downloaded from DeviantArt.

Send me the file or a link and I’ll print it for you. I’m sure plenty of other nerds would do the same.

There are also commercial print services, but local nerds are always a great first resort.

Awesome. I fully approve of this. If you want to sell 3D printed stuff, sell it on an appropriate platform and for fuck’s sake, sell things that you actually have the rights to print and sell.

Next, let’s crack down on the hordes of losers on Etsy who just drop-ship crap from Alibaba for a 6000% markup while boldfadedly claiming it’s “hand made” in the hopes that everyone is too stupid to notice. (But people must be, because apparently that’s still working.)

Yeah, print out that fuckin’ telephone because we called it. Sometimes it sucks to be right.

I think most users don’t care about support and will happily run an outdated OS.

This is precisely what happened every time a previous edition of Windows met end of support, with most users only moving to the current version by way of buying a new name-brand PC because their old one either finally broke or, more likely, because it became so loaded down with malware that it was subsequently unusable.

The majority of home users are non-nerds who only barely tolerate their computer at the best of times, click off error messages without reading them, and are quite likely to ignore any pleas from Microsoft to upgrade or buy a new computer as long as the prompts are dismissable and don’t go as far as fully locking them out of using their machine.

These users will overwhelmingly have a “go to the store and buy it” mentality; they will not migrate to Linux. Rather, they will march to Best Buy or go to Amazon and buy a new PC with Windows 11 already on it, or maybe a small subset of them will work themselves up to being angry enough to switch to a Mac.