CADmonkey

Its a balmy 273° today

“When he stops busting in my ass”

When I was younger and more invincible around 2005, I bought one of these crappy Ebay engine kits for a bicycle. One thing I noticed is that it wasn’t really any slower from home to work than a car, because I could go around traffic. An E-bike would have been great. A lot of them get around on 500 watt or 750 watt motors, which is considerably smaller than an electric car’s motor.

I’d have one now, but it’s hard to ride one when I have to carry a kid with me most places.

And you can make PLA from something other than oil.

She thought that the computer was doing everything for me. Which is possible now, but 30 years ago when CD-ROM and 256-color graphics were a cool new thing, not so much.

This happens in the world of CNC machines too. I used to run a two million dollar Mazak 300 Fabrigear that was made in 2008. When I started the machine up, Windows 98 booted up before starting the FANUC control program that actually ran the machine.

Wood seems like a good choice for a satellite - it’s lightweight, easy to machine into different shapes, it’s cheap and readily available. It also doesn’t conduct heat as well as aluminum or steel, but I don’t know enough about building satellites to know if that’s a problem.

Im so glad I grew up with computer savvy parents.

I had a 3rd grade teacher who had an absolute meltdown because I was handing in homework that was “done on a computer”. This was a long time ago, the space-age super-intelligent computer that was apparently doing all my homework for me was a 12MHz 286 with 1024 kb of memory and a 40 mb hard drive.

Matters escalated to the point where there was a meeting with the principal, then the teacher and the principal, and finally my parents and the principal, where this dumb old woman had to explain why she wouldn’t accept the homework I was actually doing. She eneded up being told “More kids will be doing this every single year, he’s just the first, you need to get over it.”

I have an entire kit for tinkering with phones, and this is one of the tools it includes.

I have been enjoying Watch Wes Work. He’s a guy running a repair shop in Illinois, he works on everything from tractors to Toyotas. Lots of dry fun comments about vehicles, the people who designed them, having to fix old things from Illinois which usually comes down to rust.