Links of the Week 5/5

Fourth in my regular (?) series, here’s some things I found this week that I thought were cool and wanted to share:

3D Printing

• E3D Tool-changing 3D Printer: E3D is a company that makes 3D printing accessories - mostly nozzles and extruders, from what I understand. This is an experimental printer they built that has interchangeable tool heads. There’s also a youtube video showing it off. Hackaday also featured a more homebrew solution last year. This is pretty cool from a design perspective - there are some unique problems to 3D printing tool changers that, eg, CNC machines don’t face - most notably, powered tools and the filament feed. 3D printers also benefit from having a much lighter head unit, due to the high accelerations needed for high-speed 3D printing. Designing a 3D printer is a surprisingly unique problem from building a CNC machine, even though at first blush they’re both just XYZ motion platforms.
• Monoprice Select Mini ($200): As Hackaday mentions, the $200 price tag puts it in the “impulse buy” range…
• Monoprice Maker Ultimate ($700): On the other hand, I’ve heard really good things about this printer.

Software

• Void Linux Project Leader Vanishes: Void Linux (which I’d never heard of before this Hacker News article) lost its project leader, which shut down a lot of its stuff. That’s really interesting - how can you ensure that a project can continue in the absence of a central figure, but not allow edit access to unauthorized users? It’s an interesting problem to think about.
• Android vs iOS: I have an Android phone, and generally like it very well. I’ve had to deal with iOS devices when interacting with 2.009’s iPads, which are very pleasant devices mechanically, and they’re very fast, but the OS is very unintuitive for me. The notification system in particular seems archaic compared to Android’s, and this article summarizes a lot of my thoughts on that really well.
• XKCD 1988: Containers: This is hilarious and accurate.
• XKCD 1806: Borrow Your Laptop: Obviously this came out a while ago, but this one popped up again for some reason this week, and I just wanted to share how accurate it is. On my Lenovo laptop, Fn is Ctrl and Ctrl is Fn. On my MBP, Ctrl+Cmd+(uio, jkl, m,.) is used for navigating windows, since OSX has nothing resembling a functional tiling window manager. On both of my laptops, I have super high-res screens and use them at native resolution, which proves impossible for most people to read naturally.
• Adding HTTPS to this site: I just followed this tutorial, which was ridiculously straightforward. I’ve generally had a really good time extending Jekyll and customizing it to my requirements. I should write up a full blog post on the modifications that I’ve done, but they’ve all been like 1-2 line changes and worked like…instantly. No fussing around. Original source (via Hacker News): Bart de Goede’s blog post. Rebecca was the first one to link me to his first article, and I’d put off adding it until now, and then the second article came out with an even easier approach: yay!
• Internet Archive Weather Map: The Internet Archive is really cool. A very useful service and lots of interesting engineering. See also this article on their architecture as well as this article on their replication scheme.
• Custom MOTD: I ought to make a custom MOTD (Message Of The Day, aka: what you see when you ssh into a server) for my fileserver. This one is pretty cool - lots of useful features of things that I would want too (eg, zpool status and filesystem fill stats).

Cooking

• Pastry Chef Makes Kit-Kats: Bon Appetit does youtube videos of a professional chef trying to replicate snacks or candies - it’s really cool, I just wish there were a bit more explanation of the thought processes behind some of the decisions.
• How to make noodles: Just a funny, cute comic. I do this on some recipes that I’ve made a half-dozen times, just to double-check the quantities, temperatures, or cook times.

Other

• On Tidying Up: My room is a mess right now, but I do really like for things to be tidy. This seems like it might be an interesting read.
• Business of Machining Ep 65: I don’t actually ever listen to this podcast, but I follow it to read their descriptions. This was the source of the above book, but also pretty interesting: “if you didn’t document the process, did you even make the pen?” This is an interesting statement about documentation for longevity - how do you distill learnings from doing something once into future attempts if you don’t document it? To some extent, that’s what this blog is for (along with my notebook, documents generated during any project, etc), but I think I can do a better job of this at times. I did make an attempt to document some things for 2.744 the other day, which felt really good. Hopefully that’ll make the job easier for future TAs.

Thanks for reading! I’ll have some recipe posts up soon in relation to the dinner party that I hosted today, which went super smoothly.