Using a vinyl cutter and mini-sand blaster I made some alternate universe corporate schwag! I like the idea that someone might have swiped these during an interview before both companies had their 'accidents.'

I was gifted an unused Ender 3 Pro two weeks ago and managed to model and print an adapter to connect Sony E-Mount cameras onto a 42mm dovetail used by microscopes.

Bed adhesion, leveling, stringing, clearance issues, blobs and permanently welded supports, I got to battle it all but thanks to the massive volume of community support I worked my way though.

I was given an Ender 3 Pro last week and after a few bumps managed to successfully CAD, slice and print a booster seat for my phone. The caddy as it was would grab the volume down button on my phone, this little wedge solves the issue!

I learned this week that many high speed CD-ROM drives used balancing balls on the spindle to stop discs from vibrating at 10Krpm.

Between the platter that supports the CD and the motor there is a puck with a toroidal void containing a few ball bearings. When an out of balance CD is spun up the spindle and disc together rotate around their common center of mass, some point between the spindle and the edge of the disk. This means that the void containing the balls no longer rotates around it's center, it spins like a hula-hoop around the spindle/DC center of mass. With the "lighter" side of the system being farther from the center of rotation the balls roll 'down hill' towards the side of the void that is experiencing more centrifugal force. Eventually enough balls will collect on the light side to perfectly cancel out the heavy side. If there are too many balls they will distribute themselves inside the void until they cancel out each other's weight!

The link leads to a scaled up demo of this using an empty water bottle and steel BBs.

// Randomly spawn drops

// Take a random fraction of each cell move it down, or down and to the left or right

// The remainder of the fraction stays where it is

// Subtract a constant small value from all cells to prevent rain from accumulating

I found a box of CD-Roms and floppy disks in my mum's basement and damnit, I want to play them! I could use emulators, DosBox or VMs but it's never quite the same as having the real thing, so between an eBay mobo and a box of old parts I managed to build my new gaming rig to cover 1990-2005.

Its running a P3 at 1GHz, 512MB of ram, and an ATI Xpert98 with 8MB of memory. As I didn't want to run an old IDE drive with a million hours on it, I tried an SATA-IDE adapter, it caused some issues during the install but that just felt like the standard Windows experience.

Though unpopular, I went with ME for 2 reasons, the first was Dos support, the second is that I went from W95 to ME as a kid, 98 wouldn't have felt the same. The install bricked twice with video drivers but I finally got it up and running with the default drivers and an 18" Samsung flat CRT (runs up to 1600x1200 at a nauseating 60hz).

So what were your favorite games from the 90's and early 2000s?

Made with Processing.org

Repaired some broken solder joints, sanded out the biggest scuffs and polished most of the scratches out of the screen. Oh yeah, and the paint job.

I tried to go for an 80's NES theme. Not perfect but not bad.

The two hemispheres are electrically connected to each other and to an AC power supply, the ring is connected to the same AC supply but 180 degrees out of phase. Particles are charged and then injected into the trap, they are then alternately attracted to the ring and hemispheres causing them to oscillate and become trapped! As the voltage is increased lighter particles pick up more speed until they are finally thrown free from the trap. In ideal conditions ions are all charged the same amount allowing the trap to sort the ions from lightest to heaviest, allowing you to determine the atoms that make up a particular substance.

In this model I can not control the charge on the particles but it is possible to roughly sort them from smallest to largest.

Notes: This trap is scaled WAY up, the ring had a diameter of about 24mm. I'm trapping non-dairy creamer not individual ions. The frequency this trap runs at is WAY lower frequency than that of a real ion trap. This trap runs at a much higher voltage than a real trap. Otherwise them mechanism of operation is identical to the real thing.

So I bought 2 sets because it looked like one set was briefly lost in the mail and this past week I got an email from Amazon that said one set I bought were “fakes.”

• Both sets have printing that matches legitimate manufactures.
• The “legitimate” set have all black filters (not the metalized filters I am used to like Thousand Oaks Optical) the “fakes” have the metalized filters.
• Both sets of glasses have the same transmittance as the Thousand Oaks filter material I use on my telescope and cameras.
• The build quality of the “legitimate” glasses is quite a bit worse than the “fakes” with the two layers of paper being misaligned

So, what I suspect is that I actually received a crappy set of “real” glasses and a well made set of counterfeits, this seems in line with the press release made by the American Astronomical Scociety.^[0]^

Some of these newly identified counterfeits are indistinguishable from genuine Qiwei products and appear to be safe. Others look like Qiwei’s eclipse glasses, but when you put them on, you realize they are no darker than ordinary sunglasses. So, these products are not just counterfeit, but also fake –– they’re sold as eclipse glasses, but they are not safe for solar viewing.

So, did anyone get unlucky enough to get some ‘real-fake’ glasses? An did anyone get a set of legitimate glasses with the non-metalized filter?

^[0]^ https://aas.org/press/american-astronomical-society-warns-counterfeit-fake-eclipse-glasses