Tag: Kyle

Books August 2024

August 29, 2024 6:13 pm

Truth, Lies, and O-rings by Allan McDonald with James Hansen

Allan McDonald's telling of the events in Morton Thiokol leading up to--and in the aftermath of--the Challenger explosion.

Pretty disheartening to see the blatant disregard for safety issues on a continuing basis. The same culture which appears to have been directly culpable for the Columbia failure 17 years later. Namely, when a disaster was narrowly averted that was internalized to mean something was safe to do rather than "wow, we were lucky, we better make sure that doesn't happen again."

The Peace War by Vernor Vinge

After the heavy non-fiction of A Man on the Moon and Truth, Lies, and O-rings I opted for some lighter fare.

I've read this before. I find it particularly amusing because the antagonists of the story is the Livermore Energy Lab (a.k.a. LLNL). They've imposed a tyrannical peace on the world by sealing away the implements of war.

However, the protagonists disagree on these being a preferable world to live in.

What's it all About? Philosophy & the Meaning of Life by Julian Baggini

This is a very short introduction to the fundamental concepts in philosophy on the topic of the meaning of life.

Baggini winds up in the position that meaning in life comes from whatever we give it. Which he recognizes can be rather terrifying to some people who want some ultimate purpose handed down from on high.

But he carefully walks through the argument that any meaning tied to an after life just pushes the question without resolving anything.

Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge

Although I had read The Peace War previously, I was not aware there was a sequel until I stumbled on it looking for new reading ideas.

So I grabbed this to read. It certainly takes place in the same fundamental universe, but it's a completely different kind of story.

While The Peace War is mainly an action/adventure story this is a murder mystery: The death of a woman from natural causes tens of thousands of years ago. How is that murder and why would anyone even care? Guess you'll have to read it to find out.

3D Prints July 2024

July 30, 2024 7:06 pm

My big project lately has been an box organizer for The Guild of Merchant Explorers. It comes with no organization and you just have to stash everything in bags. This makes set up and take down a pain and unnecessarily long.

A couple organizers for the game already exist on the 3D printing websites, but I wanted something better. Something that could stand up to the box being turned sideways or upside down without making a mess. So, naturally, I designed my own to meet my stringent criteria. Also, designing it myself let me spruce it up with premium details.

A challenge of keeping pieces from scattering is that there is space between all the components and the lid when the box is closed. It's only about 2mm, but that's enough for cards and bits of cardboard to slide around.

So to accomplish my goal of keeping pieces from going everywhere when the box is turned I created my trays to nest on each other so there's not enough room for pieces to slide out when they come apart a little bit. This works great, but you'll have a tray on top with nothing above it. So for that case I printed covers which set into the trays to keep things in place.

The game has 3 decks of cards that you use regularly (and 1 which is used only at set up). As a little nicety I chamfered the bottom of the tray so when you press on the side of the card the other side pops up a little making it easier to grab.

Finally, I added the symbols used in each section of the trays to identify what components go where. Overall, I'm extremely pleased with the final results. Set up and take down are now almost instantaneous. And I already got a request from someone at the board game meetup to print one for them.

Some of my design notes from the project. I worked on it for about a month before I decided I was happy with it and printed it.

For the last 8 years I've organized and run an event at work called Developer Day to encourage software developers to interact with each other and learn about the various projects happening around the Lab.

To encourage attendance and participation I give out door prizes--usually whatever I find interesting off of Amazon. This year I augmented the prizes with some 3D printed things I designed.

First up is building 453. This is the main supercomputer building on site and the building where we've been holding the event. I modeled it based on aerial imagery from Google Maps and some educated guesses from first-hand information. Then I put it on a base and added the Lab logo and some text. It's about the size of a credit card. The big bland block on the back is the machine building where the supercomputers are housed.


Then I played around with a couple of designs of these text blocks. They're hollow, about 2.5 inches long, and 3/4 of an inch tall.


And then I thought it might be fun to do something with light and the translucency of the filament material. So I designed these blocks which show LLNL when light shines through them.


And my final project of the month was modeling the Trinidad Head Light Station in Trindad, CA. One of the projects my team runs is named after this lighthouse and I'm considering printing a few of these for those team members.

I printed this in parts and assembled it after so I could get the differing colors without wasting a huge amount of filament switching back and forth during the print. I'm pretty happy with it. I'm very pleased with how the assembly went.

Games July 2024

July 29, 2024 9:19 pm

Played several games of Turing Machine over the course of the month. I won 1 game outright and tied for the win on 4 more. I brought it to work one day for a team activity and it was significantly easier to teach to a team of computer scientists.

Jess and I completed Quest 8 in Kinfire Chronicles: Night's Fall. It was a fierce battle which came right down the last couple of chit draws. But we prevailed in the end.

I played a new game at the board-game meetup this month: ARCS. It's been bouncing around the top-5 of the BoardGameGeek Top-50 Hotness chart since it was delivered to crowdfunding backers earlier this month. It's a game I wasn't expecting to like very much--direct adversarial play, zero-sum aspects, but without being narrative based to counter some of that pain. But I enjoyed it and the guy who owns it says the campaign mode (which adds narrative) is spectacular.

Something I found very engaging is that because of the randomness of dealt hands you have to have a very adaptable play style to be effective. So it's not a game where people pick a strategy and play it. If you are an aggressive player, you might be blocked from making aggressive moves due to the circumstances of a round. If you persist in an aggressive play style you'll just be ineffective. So that aspect of finding an effective path forward for the hand you are dealt keeps things interesting and fresh.

It is a fairly complex game which is somewhat necessary to support the level of flexibility it requires. There have to be enough routes you might pursue to have room for players to shift strategies. But it can be a lot to take in as a new player.

I played twice over two meetups. I lost the first time and won the second time.

The family played a session of Castle Panic with The Wizard's Tower expansion. The balance on this game is very well done. Our games often come right down to the very end and this was no different.

Our castle was down to a single tower which was on fire. We managed to get to the end of the monster bag and then kill all the monsters on the board, but we couldn't finish off the last imp before it got into our castle and toppled the final tower. A real nail biter.

I finally finished designing and printing my box organizer for The Guild of Merchant Explorers. I'll get to the details of that in my 3D-prints post for the month, but here's a sneak peek:

Jess and I played after I completed the organizer. The organizer is great. The longest part of getting ready to play now is just shuffling the cards. and clean up takes seconds. I'm very pleased with it. Jess won our game. Then I brought it to the board game meetup to show off the organizer and after ooh-ing and aww-ing we played--which I won.

Amazon's Prime Day has usually been pretty disappointing unless you really want lots of cheap houseware crap or cheap jewelry, but this year actually had some decent deals on things I had on my wishlist. So I picked up a copy of Heat: Pedal to the Metal. It's a racing board game which I had been hesitant about. But it's been bouncing around the BoardGameGeek Top 50 Hotness charts for months. So after reading some reviews I decided to put it on my watch list to grab if the price was right. And during Prime Day it had a solid discount well below its lowest previous price so I nabbed it.

While a racing game is nominally adversarial this one's really not in practice. You don't attack other players or anything. It's kind of a sneaky "group solitaire" game. You're managing your car to perform around the track as best you can with the hands you're dealt. You can't block other cars or interfere with their actions. So it ended up being right up my alley.

Jess and I played the basic rules to introduce us to the concepts. I enjoyed the game and am interested in getting into the advanced rules and grand-prix mode (in which you play a series of races and obtain vehicle upgrades in between). I won our game.

Books July 2024

8:41 pm

The Spy Who Saved the World by Schecter & Deriabin

The story of Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet Colonel who fed military intelligence to the US and UK before being caught and executed.

The authors argue that Penkovsky's data on Soviet missile programs and strategic doctrine gave Kennedy a crucial edge in both the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin

This is a focused chronicle of the Apollo program and the astronauts that flew during it.

Still quite incredible that such feats were accomplished in the mid-twentieth century with such rudimentary technologies--almost through sheer will of the thousands and thousands of people that made it happen.

These two books overlap in the early 1960s and I am always re-awed by that decade and just how many world-shaping events were happening simultaneously. It must have been a wild time to be alive.

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.