I treat my persona on the internet like it is an extension of myself. I do not mask my complexity, my identity (if anyone cares to dig), and I hold myself to a universal moral standard that is entirely my own. If someone is rude, I delete my comments, block them, and move on just like I would if I met them elsewhere. I want to be helpful, to engage, but also to just be myself. I’m disabled, and in a lot of pain. I need the chance to think out what I am saying and to do this social engagement in between projects and other tasks. When I feel my limitations, I think about Stephen Hawking and what it must have been like with ALS. While other people’s problems do nothing to help with my own, I still find it helpful to keep in mind that it can always be worse until the day it can’t, and nothing really matters once you’re gone. So you might as well remember today for the glass half full before the rose colored glasses in your future force the perspective on you later. I try not to focus on the negative any more than this.

I just got lucky with the RadioShack unit having been the most convenient option and a 900 series iron. I got into electronics long before 3d printing. The hot knife attachment mixed with Xacto blades has some uses and the attachment is nice for a way to add a longer threaded stud for other custom stuff.

In a pinch, it might be possible to add a single threaded turn to a sharp conical tip, especially if you can find the cheapest copper ones without the hard plating. Before I learned about the 900 series tips from McMaster, I had a couple of conicals that I used a die to cut a single thread into. That thread is enough to save the insert, but the ones from McMaster make the task more precise in a press jig that can pull too. There is a decent chance of getting an insert out methodically and saving a larger print with the threaded removal tips, you’ll just need a larger diameter insert if you can get the old one out cleanly.

Karma in action.

…

Finally, Poland Can in Space

You can’t do a lot of things with other irons like you can with a 900 tip, especially with 3d printing. There are hundreds of specialties. Like I have tips for ribbon cables, a Xacto blade holder, common heatset inserts installation tools, but also the specialty threaded removal tools from McMaster. That is in addition to all of my specialty soldering tips.

I’ve been tempted in the past to go to a faster heating setup for my rework station, probably a T12, but instead I made my own circuit boards for mine. I have the old digital soldering station from RadioShack. It is a 900 series clone from Atten that uses a 2 wire element with the thermocouple in series with the element. I mase circuit boards that offset the element to contact one side of the tip and adjusted it to extend closer to the end of the tip bore. I also modified my station to have dual irons so that I do not need to change tips often, I just swap irons with a switch.

I think a case for a different setup can be made for soldering, but for 3d printing, there is no replacement for the number of options available for crafting extras and heatset inserts options. Like I wouldn’t do iterative designs with heatset inserts in many cases if I had no ability to remove them.

• “Look what authoritarianism built at the expense of better lives for the average person when the rest of the world was far more egalitarian.”
• “Giant extinct humans played with big building blocks. Come see what they made.”

hmmm…

In Minecraft no less

Not any more. I use an offline open source LLM first quite a bit now because it is better than their junk. It may only be accurate 80% of the time, but that is a far higher percentage than any present search engine.

People complain about web scrapers, but scraping is the only practical alternative for finding info and sources now that the web crawlers are worse than trash.

Soldering is nothing like welding. Neither task is particularly hard, although welding takes a bit more coordination. Soldering is about as hard as using a hot glue gun or microwaving a meal, or scrubbing a toilet.

When you’ve never done it before, it is easy to build it up in your mind. Here’s the things that matter:

• acid core solder is only for pipes in a home
• flux is important and the mess it makes is not
• for just a small job, any soldering iron is fine, as is any solder
• wet everything you’re joining with flux and the solder will wick into place
• the tip of the iron should be shiny with solder before you start, and this may involve a good bit of solder added to the tip and then removed by a wet sponge or wire ball made for the task

An adjustable iron is nice, and you’ll likely find that eventually you will use it for threaded inserts in prints. There is a lot of marketing about irons and junk, but it is hard to beat the value of one of the Chinese 936 Hakko clone irons. Most of the marketing junk is to try and obfuscate the value and availability of these clones. The Hakko 900 series tips are the defacto standard and there are many extra accessory options available that are only possible with this tip/iron type. Last time I checked a 936 clone is usually under $40. The actual circuit board required to build one is under $5 on AliEx while the iron handle and lead are ~$8. You don’t need this for a basic job, but an adjustable soldering iron is a lifetime useful tool to have on hand.

Good solder makes a big difference on bigger projects when you’re doing this a lot. However, if I was in a zombie apocalypse, I could easily make a single solder connection by heating the tip of a screwdriver in a candle flame, use some resin from a pine tree, and a chip off of the pewter candlestick holder to solder a button to a circuit board.

Buttons can be a bit challenging with 3d printing design. It depends on your goals, but clearances and textures matter a lot more than it may first appear. It is possible to get something that just works, but is loose or crude. Getting a button like the inserts that go into a typical video game controller are quite challenging to clearance and develop a consistent tactile feel. I’ve done this in practice and it took a lot more iterations than I expected.

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Dry with pickled onions and some chicken.

I absolutely hate salads, but that is what I ate 5 days a week when I worked for a chain of bike shops. It’s how I lost my last bit of weight to get under 7% back when I was racing. Going from 350lbs to 220lbs wasn’t super hard while just commuting to work, and training/racing casually. Going from 220lbs to under 190lbs was super hard for me. Eating something I could barely tolerate meant I only ate what I absolutely needed because I was freaking starving… So, to me, while I hate salads, if I’m eating one, it is for a specific reason, and if I’m objective about that reason, I’m going to fit my opinion to what best meets those goals. Therefore, my favorite salad is the one I can only barely tolerate and will eat, but only as much as I absolutely must. Like seriously, I brought my lunch into my office and would eat a few bites over the course of hours. That too is a major aspect of real weight loss. How much you eat at any given point in time is very important.

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I consider anyone pushing anyone over Biden as part of the Trump campaign. This is a two party system. Creating indecisiveness like this is a very viable and practical subversion tactic and with Trump’s Kremlin backers as the Russian candidate as Putin’s puppet, anyone that fails to recognise this ploy is being foolish and falling for their nonsense. The Platonic sophism tactic is hard for the simple minded to see through. Unplug from the news cycle and think for yourself outside of the sophist spin doctor nonsense. Ask your own questions and seek out those answers without distraction and exercise skepticism about all sources. If your general media leads your thoughts, you have no real thoughts of your own.

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Go to war -

He should start with the supreme court if he has an ounce of worth.

Yes, but in a less civil warlike posture. The consequences of the shift to venture capital driving the economy in the 1960’s shifted the need to create more massive scale wars, but unchecked consolidation of wealth destroys the necessary egalitarian framework of a real democracy. All the pieces are in place to enslave the nation, i. e. we all carry tracking devices that can not be turned off, all of our financial means can be controlled, we are surrounded by cameras on most homes and vehicles that are connected to a monitoring system of a few entities. We only have the illusion of autonomy. Real democracies are very rare in history. The blood that bought this one is old money that few value with a thorough understanding. I’d say it was inevitable for unchecked venture capital to destroy the USA, but perhaps it was better than the warhawks destroying the world again in the 1980’s.

It is never about children. It is about surveillance with a thin vernier to vocalize imbeciles. Trusting government is a time honored tradition of the worst of incompetent humans. Picture a world where Google Meta and Amazon are the Kremlin. Think of the information they have, cameras on every house, every bit of your life history online and in government. All power that can be abused will be abused eventually. The ownership over your digital footprint is direct ownership over you in the end. The only effect this has on the future is the subjugation and theft of these children’s future autonomy.

Fizisist must test gravity to scritch the fabric of the universe

Same as average Germans in 1900 or 1930; just barely scraping by or worse, with not actual representation in the decisions being made by traitors behind closed doors.

We will be hated and abused just as much as anyone. I hope the coming shift in relevant world powers will do a better job. This will soon be the new Italian peninsula of Rome. People are too stupid here to realize that the emperors of Rome were due to the consolidation of wealth. It resulted in massive civil wars and the eventual export of all Roman wealth to Constantinople. The USA will be the Italian peninsula of the late Roman era.

So the new Hitler is handed the means… This is the rhyming history of the Reich. Populists are what kills civilizations and lead to the death of millions. They are the worst of subsentient human behavior.