Thank you for the music, Scott. This is how I’ll remember you, lighting up the crowd on a warm Toronto evening:

Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison: a songwriter who found humanity in our flaws
Thank you for the music, Scott. This is how I’ll remember you, lighting up the crowd on a warm Toronto evening:

Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison: a songwriter who found humanity in our flaws

Yup, lots of circles, intersections, differences and offsets went into this attempt at the logo of my favourite museum.
For the determined/demented, here’s the source. It’s probably not that useful for learning OpenSCAD, as it’s written in my typical “carve away all the bits that don’t look like an elephant†style:
// akm logo - why yes this *is* a good tool to use ...
// constants for octagon maths
r1 = 1 - sqrt(2) / 2; // ~0.292893
r2 = sqrt(r1); // ~0.541196
x1 = (sqrt(2) - 1) / 2; // ~0.207107
sc = 100; // size factor
t = 4; // line thickness
bigt = 7; // strapwork gap thickness
$fn = 256; // OpenSCAD circle smoothness
module petal() {
intersection() {
translate([ sc * x1, sc * x1])circle(r = sc * r2);
translate([-sc * x1, sc * x1])circle(r = sc * r2);
}
}
module hollow_petal() {
difference() {
offset(r = t / 2)petal();
offset(r = -t / 2)petal();
}
}
module inner_lobe() {
difference() {
for (i = [0:3]) {
rotate(i * 90 + 45)offset(r = t / 2)petal();
}
for (i = [0:3]) {
rotate(i * 90 + 45)offset(r = -t / 2)petal();
}
}
}
module ring() {
for (i = [0:3]) {
rotate(i * 90)difference() {
intersection() {
inner_lobe();
union() {
offset(r = -bigt / 2)petal();
rotate(45)offset(r = t / 2)petal();
}
}
rotate(90)offset(r = bigt / 2)petal();
}
}
}
module logo() {
union() {
ring();
for (i = [0:3]) {
rotate(90 * i)union() {
intersection() {
hollow_petal();
rotate(-90)offset(r = -bigt / 2)petal();
}
difference() {
intersection() {
hollow_petal();
rotate(45)offset(r = -bigt / 2)petal();
}
rotate(-90)offset(r = bigt / 2)petal();
}
difference() {
hollow_petal();
offset(r = bigt / 2)union() {
rotate(-90)petal();
rotate(45)petal();
}
}
}
}
}
}
logo();
I use a FlashForge Creator Pro 3D printer for work. It’s okay, but I wouldn’t recommend it: you have to manually level the print bed (ಠ_ಠ), you can’t print via USB, it pretends to be a knock-off MakerBot (same USB ID: naughty naughty) and its slicing software is a mishmash of GPL and other code all bundled up in one proprietary lump. It also doesn’t used g-code, which is a bit poo.

I have been having endless trouble will tall prints losing adhesion, falling over, and leaving a noodly mess everywhere. I’ve fixed it by making some manual changes to the config file, the process as described here: Flashprint advanced print settings by editing the default.cfg configuration file. What I changed was:
[brim] enable = true # valid range {true, false}, default is false # CHANGED extruderId = 0 # valid range {0, 1}, default is 0 margin = 10.0 # valid range [1.0, 10.0], default is 5.0 # CHANGED layerCnt = 2 # valid range [1, 5], default is 1 # CHANGED speed = 60 # valid range [10, 200], default is 60 excludeInterior = true # valid range {true, false}, default is false # CHANGED
This makes a colossal double-width, double thickness brim around the prints so that they will not topple. I’m very happy with the results so far.
Rather than mucking about with config files, if you enable “Expert Mode” in Flashprint’s preferences:
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Then you can make a brim that stops prints coming off the print bed.

And lo, there was much rejoicing …


Eugene “thirtytwoteeth” Andruszczenko (of Game Boy Zero – Handheld Edition fame) posted a neat idea to help your Raspberry Pi Zero take jumper wires without soldering. He threaded fishing line through the 40 hole header, making an interference fit for header pins. I tried it with 0.38 mm Trilene, which worked rather well.

It seems that Princess telephones — like the one I have — were notorious for having their connectors break. The connectors are made of brittle thermoset resin, and sit just where they’d hit the ground if you dropped the phone. This is definitely what happened here:

For the handset, you want a 616P connector. If your wall connector has gone too, you’ll need the 623P connector for that. These are fairly readily available on eBay.
These instructions really only apply to the 2702BMG model of the Princess phone. There are many variants, and the 2702BMG was one of the last Princess models made.
So via mefi I find this: What A Life! | cakeordeathsite.
I love it when people discover this book. It’s been a minor obsession of mine for nearly 30 years. I first put it on the web in March 2000 and updated it to then-current web standards in 2003: What a Life!: an autobiography. Over the years I’ve received a bunch of interesting notes from fans and even a couple from relatives of the authors. I marked it up the old, hard way: by scanning pages then re-keying the text. OCR wasn’t that great back in the day.
So I get kind of irked that this cakeordeath fella lifts my pictures and markup wholesale. Shame he didn’t understand how to copy CSS, ‘cos his formatting comes out worse than mine:


Crack open View Source on his https://cakeordeathsite.wordpress.com/2017/10/20/what-a-life/ and f’rinstance my Chapter 1, http://scruss.com/wal/chapter1.html:
mine:
<div> <p><span class="smallcaps">I</span> was born very near the end of the year. <img src="Images/wal009a.jpg" width="112" height="104" alt="calendar showing 29 December" class="right" /></p> </div> <p>The grange where I was born was situated in a secluded corner of the Chiltern Hills. Rumour had it that Queen Elizabeth had slept there.</p> <div class="centre"><img src="Images/wal009b.jpg" width="160" height="232" alt="doll's house" /></div>
cakeordeath’s:
<div> <p><span class="smallcaps">I</span> was born very near the end of the year.<img class="right" src="https://i1.wp.com/scruss.com/wal/Images/wal009a.jpg" alt="calendar showing 29 December" width="112" height="104"></p> </div> <p>The grange where I was born was situated in a secluded corner of the Chiltern Hills. Rumour had it that Queen Elizabeth had slept there.</p> <div class="centre"><img src="https://i2.wp.com/scruss.com/wal/Images/wal009b.jpg" alt="doll's house" width="160" height="232"></div>
I mean, come on … including my domain and image path scruss.com/wal in his image urls? Otherwise, it’s whitespace difference. I dunno, these kids today: lift anything without credit, so they would. Seems this dude is a semi-popular blogger, and I’d be vastly annoyed if he were getting ad revenue for this, while I did this for fun and it’s cost me to host it all these years.
There’s a further uncredited lift from Chris Mullen’s oldweb classic, Visual Telling of Stories. cakeordeath’s banner page scan is straight out of Chris’s Collage Pioneers: E.V.Lucas and George Morrow, What a Life! 1911 with the same file name. Was there credit? Was there shite …