Whet neoteny is breaking the lemernet, but the ole Barred is one of us.

I felt that way about many cars. They can be a part of your life and define you in odd ways. There are other cool versions of you out there when you are ready though. Don’t be scared to go find them.

I’m weird I guess, in that I have never really owned a normal car. Everything I got was cool and everything I owned I sold for more money than what I paid. Like my 71’ FJ40 over doubled its value over the years that I owned it. My last Camaro was like a totally different car with a different interior, motor, rear end, suspension, and supercharger. I started riding a bicycle everywhere to justify building that one for higher compression than pump gas supports and running a water injection setup on a street car. I was a real car nut that learned to paint cars and owned a body shop just because that is the one aspect of car culture that the fewest people are capable of doing.

Once upon a time I fell on hard times in a recession and had to leave said Camaro with a friend and move back across the country for awhile. It had a cracked block and I had no way to fix that on the fly. I got a job at a machine shop, built a new motor, got a $400 Fiero, fixed it, replaced the passenger seat with my motor and drove 2k miles to toss the motor in the Camaro without a cherry picker or anything but basic tools. I sold the Fiero and then drove the Camaro back 2k miles across the country while troubleshooting and tuning a fresh motor in a beast of a hotrod. That was an epic journey. I even had a ridiculous clutch issue where a stupidly designed plastic ring broke and wiped the disk in the middle of a native American reservation in New Mexico and I had to wait a week to get shipped a replacement, then pulled a trans on the side of the freeway and tossed in the clutch.

Cars that can be owned will be worth a lot more in the future based on the present trajectory of the world. Even if we start swapping engines for motors and batteries that is more valuable than anything new. New cars running proprietary software that is connected to the manufacturer cannot be owned completely and are not reparable. New cars are worthless long term and are already destroying the independent used car market. We still haven’t seen this end game but it is only a matter of time before cars become the new HP inkjet printers. It is already a situation where only the manufacturer’s dealer can service the car so when that stops, so does the car. There is no longer a possibility to buy something cheap or repairing it yourself. I can repair anything including reverse engineering electrical hardware, but not the entire software stack.

In that sense, keeping anything you can actually own is an investment in yourself and your future. Citizens in a democracy are never asked to trust others and sign away their autonomy. Not owning tools and property while trusting others is feudalism. In the present way the world is changing, your old car has far more value than you may realize right now.

The problem is that the infill layers are not well fused and the lack of alignment means they will only cross at angles. This post design can be made solid and turned into cubic with no anchor. That might work with a softer material, but there are still overhangs and the infill pattern is likely to create non linear twist to the bending. At least on my headphones, the tightest part of the bend needs to obfuscate around 60% of the vertical distance on the other side. In other (poor) words, for ever 10mm of vertical height, 6mm is folded out of the way. That is a lot of bulk to push out of the way. Even in this instance I posted, the back side has sections with thinner walls in some areas to make the flex work in such a tight bend without buckling.

Can it be self hosted on a local network safely. I have no chops in internet stuff or servers beyond spinning up Mainsail/Klipper, a basic OpenWRT router, and Gradio mods to Oobabooga Textgen. I have a PC I want to use for network attached storage and a basic LLM, so if Photon can run like that, it would be a good time for me to try it. I’m just not in a position to pay for internet services like a domain and all that. It is also intimidating when I’ve got no one to really help me learn IRL and have never found the ideal entry point I can wrap my head around. That’s why I just whitelist. At least I can’t write a script wrong and nmap the internet or some sketchy download can’t dial out.

I would love to mod the code of a front end to make down votes a toggled option where I only use them for modded communities.

Unless you’ve got a way to mathematically generate the change in infill, don’t bother. Lining up infill patterns and logarithmic strategies are hard. The solid parts are just as important as the flex. Keeping things straight is a challenge.

This is a major curiosity of mine too. Just the shell seems to be pushing the amount of flexibility of this material in my present design. I’m not using any infill. I can alter the shape a lot. I have a cheap pair of thermal cycling bib shorts that were way too small and I never sent back. Those may become a covered print experiment. That material is thick, dense, and still conforms a lot.

I’m most interested in exploring wave shaping. It would be trivial to add more complex shaping in the center cavity. I can imagine making a print support that sits inside the tube and enables me to create some more complex voids in places.

My main goal right now is to com up with an integrated clip that allows one end to open and close easily while looking pretty. Then I can move on to more audio quality tuning.

I haven’t tried a lot of flex materials. I’ve only used them for things like a few seals. Compliant mechanisms have been a curiosity of mine for a long time, but I haven’t had the intuition to establish an entry point project worth trying on my own.

Like as a totally random aside, if this TPU is super dry like how the one test print that looks super crisp with sharp edges, it appears to be air tight. I see a lot of potential for building cheap pneumatic, cable, or passive force driven actuators while playing around with my thumbs sealing each end.

I intuit that this level of usefulness in mechanisms would be hampered by the low quality of the first bridging layers. Absolutely any moisture in the TPU causes random gaps to form as the steam escapes at the nozzle tip in small bursts. Any larger bridging is going to have some amount of dropped passes as a result. I don’t think this is a real issue if the TPU is very dry on a totally enclosed dry feed path to the extruder, but I don’t like the properties of this material when it is super dry. Overall, my design method in this case is likely oriented in the best way for the properties of TPU and the mechanical best case for compliant design. The layer deposition steps and top/bottom layer properties of FDM are not optimal for compliance in most cases. This particular design is capable of compliance both for the bending form to create the headphones pad, and as a pad against the ear after it is installed.

It is also ~$10-$15 for replacement headphone pads, so making and sharing such a design should be limited to materials most people already have on hand. I’m very tempted to try this with a 98A TPE, but it is just too expensive of a material to justify for this project when I’ve had 3 rolls of TPU banging around for years unused and only got them because they were dirt cheap clearance sale materials. I would do a lot more if I had an IDEX, but I don’t need that rabbit hole money bonfire.

If anything, a dirt cheap foaming TPU could be interesting if such a thing existed. It might be possible to create something functionally similar if TPU could somehow be exposed to a humidity controlled environment at a specific percentage, but I have no idea how moisture saturation works on a deep level, like if the saturation would remain regulated by the humidity percentage or if the exposure would allow the filament to always wick all available moisture where a much more complicated setup would be required to ensure consistent properties. Anyways, my point here is that the best properties for me are not from the super dried TPU needed for bridging and bridging is itself a poor mechanism with FDM. It is best if it can be avoided at the design level like I have done here.

The vinyl of all headphones is plastic. I’m not concerned at all. The fear of plastic is mostly paranoia. The vast majority of micro plastics are from car tires yet that is not what people freak out about.

I painted cars for a long time and worked in heavy industry for awhile. I’ve been exposed to truly nasty stuff. Other than my horns, and third arm, I’m mostly fine so long as a full moon doesn’t happen on a Thursday.

Plastics like this are generally stable. TPU is used in the interior of your car and the grips on power tools. There may be some in your sports clothing. You are likely eating food that is packaged in PLA and PET. There is ABS is everything. These are all around you and come in printable forms. The colors made in the modern world are not arsenic, mercury, chromium, and lead based, like was common 200 years ago.

Mostly, the design is motivated by the aesthetics, but also TPU sucks at bridging and supports.

Testing the loudness really needs two sides and a later stage prototype. It is also very subjective without a repeatable testing technique. I personally loath the subjective nature of opinions people have about anything audio related and avoid saying anything about such myself to the best of my ability.

The overlapping joint insert was just a first idea for a design. There is a section at the top of this joint that I didn’t bother to optimise for vase mode but the rest of the print is possible. It would take some tuning to get vase mode fully dialed. I would probably need to use some helix trickery to get the exact stiffness where I need it. Vase mode was and is still likely in the cards.

I also have a design in CAD that I made today. It has an exposed infill pattern and solid shell in places. I used the pictured design to conceptualize how the infill would behave and how much movement to expect. I may never print that one. I still don’t have a way to connect it that I like.

I’m also playing with the idea of covering a print in textile materials and or altering pockets and chambers.

You don’t find many printed headphone pads and the ones that do exist are very ugly IMO. Prototyping in yellow is only just that. I have other colors of TPU on hand.

Overall, this has the potential to dial in many properties from fit to audio properties. The orientation is ideal for the properties of TPU. The abstract concept is broadly universal where this will technically work for the majority of headphones. As is, it doesn’t look terrible in person and I can make this much prettier if I choose.

The pictured setup is an early alpha phase prototype and it is not glued while it is close to the right size so just the friction is holding it together in the pic. I could glue this and it would likely work fine.

Who else has the Alexandrite front end working? It is the only one I have found that just works and doesn’t show down votes. I’d rather have the option to ignore them entirely. The Photon front end doesn’t work for me, likely due to JS or some other aspect that is not straightforward in a white list firewall. I don’t use any apps for anything that can be done in a browser. I have tried a couple of other front ends and have accounts on some other instances, but something about this setup on a-dot-world is the only doom scroll I actually enjoy. The way block fails to actually block and delete doesn’t delete are both major factors pushing me away from Lemmy too after what seems to be a major uptick in negativity here lately.

K LDE

No such thing as real news outlets any more. The only thing I care about is someone that is a hero for taking out someone that oppressed me in a corrupt dystopian system.

I return to my zygote phase and renegotiate some CGTA’s for BDE turned up to 11

Xi openly said and made no secret that China was investing in RESEACH and DEVELOPMENT in 2014. There was no surprise. It isn’t due to Chinese subsidies either. It is simply R&D instead of corporate criminals fluffing quarterly earnings with absolutely no commitment to even the company itself, and certainly not customers, neighbors, country, the world ecosystem, or humanity as a species. The USA gave GM 6 billion dollars for EV R&D in 2017. The corporate criminals used it to do a stock buy back to fluff their short term earnings. We should not be getting punished with tariffs to subsidize criminals. Let these shits fail and fall apart first. Then build something new from the ashes. Their inability to fail is the primary reason that they are failing. We really do need a league of c-sweet assassin heroes, or a dark knight of the real Gotham.

Each brand and color are technically different. Drying PETG is very important and the cause of most issues with it. The ooze caused by moisture expansion then causes stringing, except PETG is much more sticky than other filaments. This stickiness causes more and thicker strings and wisps than other filaments. These cause more material to get pulled from the tip and they tend to ground themselves harder to whatever they come in contact with. Ultimately these effects lead to inconsistent starts and ends for your perimeter seams and it is this issue that causes ugliness, bad tolerances, and print failures. You can mitigate with drying but if you are not able to print from a dry box, you can lessen the issues by manually placing all of your seams on the inside surfaces of some prints. Indeed I only use PETG when I am designing for it in the CAD phase and I choose PETG only when I can hide the seams manually.

That human rights really matter in the coming upheaval. The doomsday glacier is probably insurmountable for civ to overcome and that level of change in sea level within a decade to century and a half is going to change everything. Most of the worlds cities are not viable. From what I have seen, the long estimates are all biased and unreliable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yEj9JVRhjA

On the bright side, speculative long term land investments might yield a large sum of money. Shallow keel ferry and airboat operators stand to make a fortune.

Psyops

You’re not an adult in cognitive development until 25. Children are easily manipulated even at late stages. The only reason it is 18 is for child soldiers.

Apple is doing insane stuff with iMessage making SMS useless with Android. It is intentional manipulation. I’ve only seen it on some Apple kernels with the latest iPhone. My old man’s phone absolutely will not send or receive an SMS unless I message is manually turned off and then it won’t get iMessages. Apple has always been a shitty company, but this is next level insane. Just get and use the Signal app and ditch all the proprietary garbage and manipulative bs IMO.