HewlettHackard

I’m not really sure where to post this, but wanted to share that screwing a 1/4-20 bolt into the bottom hole of my otherwise-sealed Philips Sonicare 4100 and just pulling on it successfully opens the toothbrush. An M6 screw might work too; M5 is slightly too small. Philips says to use a hammer to open it, which is absurd. The battery is still soldered, but in my case that wasn’t what I needed to repair anyway.

Apparently other brands are designed to have replaceable batteries. Don’t buy Philips Sonicare.

Has anyone ever experimented with Banksia wood for woodworking? The picture used by one random seller online looks pretty interesting. I’m not in Australia, so I don’t really have the wood available and don’t want to spend $$$$ shipping something that might be awful.

What’s a decent blade for ripping accurately? I’m using an old Craftsman 113 belt-driven saw, which I understand isn’t very powerful. I’d like to get nice rips on some 3/4” thick oak. If I can rip thicker stock in the future, that would be great, but as long as I can at least rip thicker softwoods too I think I’ll be satisfied.

I don’t expect to do enough woodworking to worry about a blade made to last through many re-sharpenings; I just want nice rips. Is a $20-30 Diablo from a big box store going to do what I want, or do I really need to step up to the $70-80 range for cut quality? Thanks!

While looking into workbenches, I came across a suggestion that scaffolding screw jacks could be used to make a large vise, but also comments saying that since they’re designed for use on muddy construction sites, the threads have excessive clearance or slop. Is that a problem in practice? I can’t figure out why it would be, since I would think backlash just means you need an extra fraction of a turn when switching from tightening the vise to loosening it. What am I missing?

Is a router the right tool to make long 1/8”-3/16” wide grooves or slots in wood? It seems like I could do it with a circular saw, but only if the desired width matches my blade kerf. I don’t have a table saw. If it is the right tool, does anyone have bits or bit sets they recommend for such small cuts?

It occurred to me that one way to potentially eliminate all filament swap waste from purge towers or Bambu-style filament “poops” is to instead do something similar to a “purge object” or a “wipe object” but where the object is… filament.

The idea was somewhat inspired by Stefan’s video from a few months ago, which first introduced me to the idea of printing filament: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ-N1fr4N0w

If the purge object is new filament, then you don’t need to figure out what to use it for immediately; you can store the mixed-color filament for later use until you have a genuine need for a color-agnostic or structural object. No more piles of fidget spinners you didn’t really want.

A few other thoughts:

• The filament probably needs a minimum bend radius so it can feed into an extruder without breaking. One option would be to print a circle or a rounded square / squircle type of shape toward the perimeter of the build volume (potentially multiple concentric ones, or spiralized shapes). Another option would be to print disconnected straight segments.
• The filament doesn’t need to be printed flat. It could potentially spiral upwards (likely with supports). That could help avoid print head collisions for taller models (in which case you might not want the head to have to get back down to <1.75mm from the print bed). In the most general case, the filament could be printed at arbitrary angles, even vertically, and could start at some height above the build plate (potentially supported by the object itself, for example in an object where color changes don’t start at the very bottom). Maybe the angle could even be optimized to provide the best match between purge volume per layer and volume of new filament printed on each layer.
• A good solution probably requires a good way to connect multiple segments of printed filament together
• Mixing materials rather than just colors seems like a bad idea to me (e.g. soluble supports) but I’m going to mention it as a possibility anyway; you could conceive of something inspired by Stefan’s composite material and intelligently organize the different materials within your new filament.
• You could potentially control the mixes / transition colors that go into your purge filament, or even choose multiple different new filaments for different color transitions. For example, you might have separate new filaments for red-green, green-blue, and blue-red transitions. Maybe you want it create particularly pretty new filament, or avoid particularly ugly combinations.

I don’t actually have a multi-color / multi-filament printer, and I don’t have time to experiment with this (even though the first prototype could be as trivial using a filament shape as the wipe object in PrusaSlicer). I’m mostly sharing this to establish prior art in case someone nefarious seeks to patent something similar in the future (which is also why I added some half-baked thoughts that might make other things become obvious to someone skilled in the art), though it’d be great if the idea is actually good and someone could implement it well. Or for all I know this does already exist.

Thanks for taking the time to read this! Feel free to repost/share/steal the idea if you like it.

Prop 129 seems to have some good intent as far as increasing access to veterinary care and potentially lowering costs, but it seems like:

1. The people who would be most informed are pretty consistently against it
2. It seems a bit concerning to me after I did some research

For #1, even one of the advocacy groups presents statistics showing that fewer than half of vet techs in their survey agree: . And basically every professional association is strongly against it, for example:

• Colorado Veterinary Medicine Association
• American Veterinary Medical Association

For #2, among other concerns I see, one of the two colleges with programs is LMU, whose program is 100% online yet VPAs will be allowed to perform surgery. I don’t feel like someone should perform surgery on my pets without having some in person experience.

While I have no doubt that plenty of the advocacy for this prop is well-intentioned, I don’t think it’s likely to have the effects it sounds like it should.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

Back when I joined lemmy.ca, the front page was full of bicycles, city/province-specific community posts, and others like woodworking This morning, four or five of the front page posts were making fun of some crazy bikini lady(?). I read their “read this first” post and understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, but is there a way to get our default front page to be a bit more…friendly and community-oriented?

For those who haven’t noticed before, CNC Kitchen (Stefan) puts almost all of his content online in text and picture form, not just YouTube. It’s really awesome for searchability and skimming to quickly find bits you’re interested in. I’ve come across it randomly a couple of times while researching things like foaming PLA without even realizing it’s his content, and really appreciate its existence!

Saw this and loved the idea!