Kyle – If we had a Marriage, These Would be its Thoughts

3D Prints June 2024

June 30, 2024 11:10 am

My skills with SolveSpace continue to improve. Also, my pull request to implement text kerning was merged, so I'm officially a contributor to that project.

In June I designed these battery organizers. A lot of battery organizers already exist, but almost all of them are tall whereas I wanted something to fit in the drawer in the kitchen (where we previously organized our batteries in a cardboard box). They're not perfect, but they're good enough. The angle they sit on probably needs to be steeper to encourage them to roll forward better.

The labeling on the front of each was completed in Bambu Studio after designing the rest in SolveSpace.

Combined Battery Holder (SolveSpace)Download

Combined Battery Holder (STL)Download

Combined Battery Holder - Full (3MF)Download

Combined Battery Holder - Empty (3MF)Download

The fabric on one of my speakers has been coming off one side for a long time now. It's under tension so I'm not sure how I could glue it back on effectively, but I designed and printed some clips that are doing a pretty good job of holding it in place.

Speaker fabric clip (SolveSpace)Download

Speaker fabric clip (STL)Download

At some point I realized we were missing out on a great home-customization possibility: light-switch plates! I found existing plate models someone shared and started putting designs on them. It's fun. The girls picked out some dragons for their rooms. I made a tree for the living room, a butterfly near the front door, and a lighthouse in the kitchen.

The multi-color ones take some work because you have to put each color in separate SVGs and then align them correctly on the model.

I also discovered that the switch box in the living room is not aligned with the plane of the drywall, so to get my switch plate to sit flush against the wall I had to make it deeper and then cut the back off (in the model, not physically) at an angle to match so that it didn't leave noticeable gaps on one side.

I think these are super fun.

Games June 2024

10:15 am

With new games for my birthday we had to get to playing!

Made Mom & Dad play Turing Machine, Camel Up, and The Guild of Merchant Explorers while they were here. I lost Turing Machine, won one and lost one of Camel Up, and won The Guild of Merchant Explorers.

Turing Machine is an interesting little game. I received it for my birthday. A set of punch cards is used to define the behavior of each scenario. The coolness of that implementation isn't really relevant to the actual gameplay mechanics, but it's a triumph of design. The gameplay is like an advanced form of Mastermind/Wordle/Clue. You propose a hypothesis of the solution and then obtain information about how much of your hypothesis is correct which you then integrate with your existing information using deductive reasoning to arrive at the correct solution first.

There's no story or narrative behind the game, the theme is "Punch card 'computer'!". A straightforward mechanic which also means it plays quickly. For players familiar with the rules the 20-minute play time is accurate--and the rules are not complicated.

Camel Up I've covered previously. Still silly fun running camels around the track.

I'm still enjoying The Guild of Merchant Explorers, which is good as I received a copy for my birthday. I've been working on designing a 3D-printable organizer. I think it's done, but I'm letting the design sit a bit before I print it so I can look at it again with fresh eyes. Also it's 100+F here all week and I'm avoiding adding even more heat to the house that needs to be removed.

Played again with Jess and I won then too.

Went to a board game meet up and played another round of Faraway (previously discussed), then Call to Adventure, and Turing Machine. I won Faraway and lost both Call to Adventure and Turing Machine.

Call to Adventure is a simple and fairly quick story-telling game. I like to call it "short-story generator." The idea is that you're developing the narrative of an epic-story character. On your turn you attempt to advance your story in some particular way and to do so you consult the soothsayers and cast the bones in the air and read the result to determine whether you are successful in that endeavor.

The rulebook has one major omission that would ease learning the game, though, which is a simple diagram of card anatomy. Instead you have to read a bunch of text and then attempt to match what it's talking about to the cards you play with. A picture would resolve all the common questions that come up when learning it. I guess I should just make one and stash it in the box.

The family finally advanced our Mechs vs Minions campaign by successfully completing mission 4 with a flawless victory. Our mechs arrived at the target location without a single minion alive to tell the tale. But boy was it an emotional rollercoaster for some members of the family--I guess that made the victory even sweeter.

And to finish the month Jess and I continued our Kinfire Chronicles: Night's Fall story by successfully completing Quest 7, "Red Sky at Night". We escaped the fire, defeated a foe who we thought was a friend, and gained access to the next part of the city. I'm still mostly happy with the organizer I designed. I'm starting to think that were I to do it over I'd just have the cards sit vertically instead of angled. Room is a bit tight. Or maybe go through the effort of making adjustable dividers.

Books June 2024

9:20 am

Books I finished reading in June 2024. Another short list this month, but one of them was _long_.

The Rain by Joseph Turkot

Kind of a generic post-apocalyptic story, but told as a first-person narrative and was enjoyable.

Something happened and it started raining and then just never stopped. We're going to set aside even where all the water would have to be coming from to raise the ocean levels as high as described, but fine.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Stephenson is known for his fairly-hard sci-fi. He does a great job of including solid math and physics and then going beyond in a fun way. His work is definitely more challenging to read than much other sci-fi stuff, but that often is because of the richness of his worlds and the accuracy of the science.

I had little information about Anathem before diving in, which I think made it more enjoyable. It's 1000+ pages though, and without the reputation of the author behind it I may have given up after the first couple hundred pages. For a novice author it could easily have been an rambling mess with no coherent story thread, but for Stephenson it tells an interesting story--he just takes his time doing so. He could easily have published it as a trilogy instead but I think that may have made the story inflection points feel more arbitrary.

Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot and it didn't feel like I was slogging through 1000+ pages, it felt like I was walking the path of the story and enjoying the journey.

Kyle's Birthday 2024

June 10, 2024 4:19 pm

We went out to the Chabot Space & Science Center on my birthday as we'd never been and it seemed interesting.

We got to sit in the actual-size Mercury capsule (smaller than I thought!), the girls made and launched paper rockets, we saw a show in the planetarium, and built a cart.

And then it was time to head to Martinez because....this year Mom & Dad were in the midst of one of their around-the-country trips and they arrived by train on my birthday.

So we picked them up from the station and drove back to Livermore to have dinner at a Chinese restaurant and then home for cake and presents. Lots of games to add to my oversized collection. Going to need to start pruning them really soon.

3D Prints May 2024

May 31, 2024 9:35 pm

With a 3D printer, I feel I should catalog the things I've designed and printed this month. I imagine there will be fewer in general in the future.

Sliding-door latch cover

First was a cover for the sliding-door latch. The original one came off many years ago now. I think we found it but didn't know what it was. So it sat on the kitchen counter for months until we gave up and threw it away. Of course, it was only then that we realized it had probably been for the sliding door--which was now just a bit of bare metal. But not anymore!

Designed in Bambu Studio. I would export to an STL, but it fails due to self-intersections in the mesh. But it prints fine.

Sliding Door Latch Cover Download

Curtain-rod hook cowl

The little cowl that holds the curtain rod in place snapped off many years ago and the rod has sat lying on the window sill since then. But, less than 1 cent later, it's back up and working again.

Designed in Bambu Studio.

Blinds twist-rod holder Download

Kinfire Chronicles: Night's Fall organizers

My most ambitious project so far, I designed a set of organizers for the Kinfire Chronicles game. They stack in the box where the riser, loot box, and spacer foam originally sit.

Tan would work better for the color scheme than the yellow I used, but I didn't have any tan filament.

I designed this entirely in Bambu Studio and again had issues trying to export STL files. I started recreating it again in SolveSpace as a way to learn that program, but I haven't finished yet.

I had to take a detour to implement text kerning in the SolveSpace code base. I have an open pull request on that project to get the new feature merged into the application.

The cardbox models came out ridiculously large (96 and 10 MB each) when I converted them as much to meshes as I could. Hoping that won't be problem when I finish re-implementing them.

Kinfire Chronicles Box Organizers Download

R/C Car Part

I bought an R/C car from RadioShack when I was in middle school and it's followed me around since then. Several years ago I pulled it out and let Heather drive it around. She ran it into a curb and a bracket that attaches the front-left wheel to the chassis snapped. Not really her fault, the plastic was just old and brittle.

So it went back on a shelf in the garage waiting for me to figure out a way to repair it. I tried a number of things, but nothing functional. It needs to hold a smooth cylinder for the wheel joint to pivot in, so I couldn't just glue stuff together.

I took this as another opportunity to learn how to effectively use SolveSpace and carefully measured all the parts and recreated the bracket. I printed two, making adjustments each time, before realizing that was a dumb way to fine-tune it. Especially since I couldn't actually see what the problems were. Instead I took a picture and overlaid it on the part I was designing to make the final adjustments (which were down to tenths of a millimeter).

That worked great, the part fit, and the car is back in business.