So, one thing I did note is that a lot of the PETG vendors these days have been ratcheting up the speed that their normal non-rapid PETG filaments are printable at as well.

For example, Prusament PETG is good up to 200 mm/s and Elegoo’s Pro PETG is good up to 270 mm/s.

1. A sex thing
2. Las Vegas or similar places
3. An adult-size playground where everything’s built for a larger person and all of the climbing toys that got removed sometime in the 80s-90s timeframe because of legal liability are back, too.

You can always mock some stuff up and try it out in PrusaSlicer to see how long it thinks it’ll take?

Wall thickness potentially depends on the size of the object? I guess 2mm would the the starting point, fill one with soil, see how sturdy it feels. Complexity for 3D printing is “free”, kinda. A lot of the best container designs incorporate ribs to strengthen them without using up too much material. Given that the joins are the weak part, you’d potentially want that a lot thicker.

You also want to look at “vase mode”. Some of the fastest printing objects you can get on a 3D printer are where you design around the constraints of vase mode and then you can use a fat nozzle with thick layers to print really fast.

You can always print plumbing instead of using PVC pipes? I’ve definitely seen self-watering pots such that they just have a pipe incorporated into the design such that it just sticks up along the corner. So, worse case, each module has a watering port. If you want to get fancy, you could make a manifold such that a single pipe sticks up in the middle and fills 4 reservoirs, although the fancier the plumbing the more likely you are to have one of them get dried out faster unless your filling routine tops them off.

Yeah, see if you know Python, then OpenSCAD is not a hard jump? One of the reasons why I really like OpenSCAD is that libraries like BOSL2 have parametric joiners and snaps and stuff. And you could totally write modifiers for FreeCAD or Blender to do it, sure, but it’s a lot less trouble to get it done with OpenSCAD. This way your end-result would let you input the size of the bed and it would figure out how many sections it needs, etc.

Lesee… 120x40x40cm is a lot of plastic to print, even with a single printer running all day all night.

What I’d suggest is that you make the wooden outside for the 120x40x40cm shelf and make 20cm x 20cm x 40cm units. At which point you can make bigger multi-part modules. It might actually make sense to keep the cups separate because you could adjust the holes and stuff based on the plant’s needs. Whereas the reservoir section is going to be happiest as a single tub. But the important part is that if you are a few modules short, just add a spacer for this season. And it gives you more time to experiment on the tub and allows you to swap that out mid-season.

This is pretty darn ambitious for a starter project. I say this as someone who is trying to get some fancy new 3D printable tomato cages going before the plants get tall and dangerous and I’ve been doing this for a while.

So you really probably want to de-complicate this, either by only making planters that are sized for the printer or finding a existing planter that’s the right size but not self-watering and designing just the self-watering part. You’ll probably learn a lot about the right way to do one this year and then next year you can attack the next generation of the planters.

The problem with printing in pieces is that you are going to have to make sure that the joints are strong enough for the weight of the soil. This is why using a ready-made outer container might help. In the same way, what you really want is something finger-ish or jigsaw-ish so that the pieces align themselves more easily and interlock.

You will probably want a fatter nozzle, otherwise this is going to take forever to print.

PETG seems to have worked fairly well for me for outdoor stuff? Coating or paint or whatnot is handy. You might want to look at the epoxy family? If you can print on the balcony, you might consider ASA which is totally fine for outdoor use with no paint.

FreeCAD is a bit of a learning curve? The thing that FreeCAD would make easier is a parametric model, where you say that you want a 400 x 400 x 300 planter. Except that if you are really serious about making large self-watering planters that are parametric, you are going to end up wanting to write code to make it all happen, which either means the Python in FreeCAD, the Python in Blender, or maybe just use OpenSCAD.

One avenue, which is also too big of an ask for this season, is making a multi-part model to cast the large pieces in concrete.

Another avenue would be to just design around the outside being wood and the 3D printed parts being brackets and jigs and connectors and the self-watering bits.

My theory is that they are shooting with the spoons and then some team of poor schmucks gets the lucky assignment of burning 12+ hour days 7 days a week to make the spoons look less spoon.

“lucky” assignment.

It kinda makes sense? Spiderman and Deadpool both they spent a lot of time fixing the mask to make the body language work.

My dad designed jet engines and nobody made him design a jet engine on the whiteboard. So you are starting from the right place.

We are here where we are today because we spent too much time thinking that acting like the right kind of nerd meant you were a good programmer. There’s nothing wrong with going to a job, working hard, and then doing something else. I know very productive engineers who don’t have a favorite science fiction book who were great to work with.

Given things lately, I think it’s healthy that a lot of people have had to take a step back and realize that their employer would totally harvest their organs for profit if they could get away with it. Providing people the right “tech subculture” cues has resulted in a lot of people working themselves to death and never seeing any income windfalls.

I actively hate a bunch of my old science fiction books from when I was a kid because they were written with what is, to my adult mind, a not-very-subtle fascist bent. There’s, obviously, some great novels out there that expand your mind … but at the same time, there’s a lot of the science fiction canon where I’d probably hate working with people who took those books seriously.

And, likewise, there’s a lot of people who simply don’t have time because they are smart people actually trying to get into the lucrative field of computer science and a good scifi novel reading session is a luxury they just don’t have.

“Tell me about your favorite science fiction book” is pretty much a textbook case for how to have good intentions but conduct an interview that’s, when you step back and think about it some more, biased. It’s checking for subculture-fit in ways that have nothing to do with how they are at work.

On the other hand, whiteboard tests are also useless.

If you want to make a better interview, I’d suggest you have an interview guide. Not a manager? Just write your own for your interviews and keep to it. This protects you from unconsciously giving the person who looks the part easy questions.

If you want to check for culture fit, talk about things at work that matter. Are you worried someone is going to talk down to a junior engineer? Make them talk about a time they had to mentor a junior engineer. Did they succeed? What did they do? Ask them about the best project manager or doc writer they worked with. Are you worried that they aren’t serious enough about getting shit done at work? Talk about the worst incident they ever were part of, but not the technical parts, just how they made sure it got fixed. Are you worried that they aren’t a good team player? Ask about their best collaborations. Or how they organized work on a large project. Or the time that they took one for the team. If you think through how the last crop of yuppies pissed you off for a while and break it down into questions that they’d not have a good answer to, you should be able to make a nice set of behavioral screening questions and a set of attributes that you want the person to display in their answers.

FYI: Text sometimes work when calls don’t. Text use much less bandwidth.

Sure… but… not all municipalities let you text 911. And with the way modern phones are being implemented with VoIP+LTE and iMessage/RCS and some of the very exciting failure modes of modern networking… I’m having a very real concern that even if my municipality lets me text 911 (I don’t remember offhand but I think mine does) that if I actually needed to dial 911 under relatively prosaic emergencies like a silly little power outage, I might be out of luck.

I’m not convinced on the cell phone thing. Every time there’s even a minor thing around where I am, like a dinky little power outage, everybody grabs their cellphone and my service goes to crap, so much so that when I’ve tried to work through a power outage with my phone, I’ve worked out of my wife’s car after having driven somewhere that does have power.

Also, a standard ham radio uses a lot less power than the entire chain of phone plus network equipment. So, sure, there’s cell tower trucks with generators but a ham rig needs a dinky little solar panel.

I guess it depends on your aspirations and where you live?

A radio that can hit the bands longer than the 10 meter band is pricey. Which is why Ham has traditionally been the sort of hobby that a distinguished older white gentleman does, not a thing for regular people.

On the other hand, a cheap VHF/UHF handheld radio can be really quite cheap (Baofeng radios being an example). You will only be able to talk to the local area but most areas have a repeater in convenient geographic locations (mountaintops, ideally) that will listen on one frequency and then transmit at higher power on another frequency so that you can reach a wider area. So in my area for the EmComm use-case, there’s a whole organized VHF/UHF system of volunteers.

Oh yeah, and you can also screw around with putting custom firmware on WiFi devices or Meshtastic in Ham mode.

I dono… I’d like to think that there’s useful things especially these days to be done with Ham radio and that it’s not just a thing that is just for distinguished older white gentlemen, but it’s kinda hamstrung (LOL, pun) by the present-day audience that’s preventing people from seeing what it could be.

Funny you ask because I literally just got my ham license because of this.

Radio works without infrastructure. Okay there’s some ham stuff that is internet-connected et al but overall you are just spewing radio waves into the ether with a variety of simple encodings and someone else can pick them up. So powering a few radios off of a dinky solar panel and battery combo is no biggie, whereas powering cell towers, routing infrastructure, et al is a bunch of generators that need to be fueled and whatnot.

Like… you can hit the 20-meter-and-longer wavelengths with a radio and a random bit of wire and some ingenuity and get your signal all over the place. And the maximum power you are ever allowed is 1500 watts and most folks can make do with far less power than that.

Also, amateur radio has fun stuff to do other than mere EmComm needs. Part of why Twitter used to be handy in a pinch for lesser-disasters in days past was that it could be used for EmComm needs but also had other fun stuff to be done with it. Things that are “just” for EmComm infrastructure tend to get forgotten about and abandoned and rot away to nothingness.

A lot of areas in the US have ARES/RACES orgs to provide an already organized group of people… but some of the fun games that hams play like POTA/SOTA, Field Days, et al also serve to make it fun to have a portable setup.

So… I’m not sure if this is an entirely rational thought.

I’d always wanted to do ham radio but hadn’t bothered. Before my time, ham radio let you do amazing things that weren’t otherwise very easy. Like have a group chat with a bunch of people all over the world. Except when I was looking for things to do, you could get on the Internet and chat with a bunch of people all over the world … without the antennas and hardware and all.

Lately some stuff happened and my spouse’s friend who lives near Asheville NC and lived through the flooding there where ham radio was the only working form of communications, so my spouse got pressured into buying a radio, which means that I got myself a license because … well, radio works without much infrastructure?

Mostly I figure I needed to fill the void that was getting on Twitter if something happened locally.

My household celebrates two different winter-related holidays, Christmas included.

I have some connectors there on my ESPHome devices to string up intelligent LED strands. I even got some RGBW LED strands so that I can have more pleasant-looking lights.

I’ve got a fake tree and some other decorations, plus a blob of older LED and incandescent strands.

…and I just haven’t felt any real holiday spirit the past few years so none of it’s been put up.

I’d ended up having a conversation with an archivist about the somewhat related question of “What was the Soviet Union’s history of itself, absent the editorializing that the rest of the world has been doing?”

For example, Tamim Ansary wrote Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes that explained a lot of things about the middle east through that sort of lens, so I was hoping that someone would write a history of the USSR in a similar fashion, which I didn’t find.

One of the problems we have when approaching the more successful world governments is understanding … well, I guess good intentions? There’s kinda two sides to the story of Dear Leader. On one side, the self-aggrandizement as the father of the country, on the other side the act of actually trying to be the father of the country. Obviously a strongman today is mostly running the show almost entirely for selfish reasons but what you kinda see in the USSR and modern day China is at the same time an attempt to make the state better off. Which, of course, falls prey to effective use of power. “Do this or you will be executed” doesn’t work very well… not with the US approach to the death penalty, not to the totalitarianism of the attempted Communist state.

But, even today, there’s tons of “Good idea, bad implementation” things that the Chinese government does where the rest of the world governments just let things get worse.

The vibes I was getting in the days of Lenin from my reading was interesting. Lenin was the leader of the USSR but not in the way that Stalin was. The Bolsheviks of the time insisted that things be discussed and debated and worked through and not even Lenin was above that. And there was a very forward-looking idealistic sort of viewpoint. They could reject everything and do things right for once and many of them were new to power so they were freed of that worldview. And a lot of those things didn’t pan out as well as they wanted it to and people started to need to be “convinced” to do the new thing. First the “useless” hereditary upper-class, but then everybody else. And then eventually Lenin died and Stalin didn’t have that much patience for the Bolshevik old-guard and took over.

tl;dr: In a sense, it’s as if a bunch of Star Trek fans had toppled a government and were trying to build the best government ever for the future, using whatever means necessary.

So, there’s a lot of things to unpack here.

First, the idea that your spouse is your primary sole emotional connection is a relatively weird new concept on the scale of things. There’s been a huge period of history where your primary emotional connection was your male companions and your spouse was infantalized by comparison. If you were well-off you might be so lucky and have your group of emotional companions, your group of romantic companions, and the person who bears your legitimate children.

Second, there’s really not much of a good underlying working model for actual modern conservatism. The frontiersman/“house on the prairie” sort of rugged independence was never actually a thing back then and a lot of big issues like medical bills were a lot simpler when the answer to having any sort of illness was that you either get over it after relatively inexpensive and simple treatments or you die. So the conservative movement must necessarily sell you a false bill of goods. US politics are such that there is no actual fully-left political party, so that by default makes you a democrat.

There’s also a bunch of added uniquely christian baggage. So there are left-wing christians who also have their own set of weird baggage.

Third, mostly irrespective of politics, there’s a lot of cultural programming for males that they can’t actually worthwhile work though their emotions in a productive fashion. Movies, TV shows, books, literally everything in the media creates this idea of maleness and the writers are just trying to write a catchy story and seldom have time to think about what kind of male they are creating. This is, overall, a relatively recent concept.

Fourth, “things men need emotionally that women cannot provide” is actually pretty silly. Outside of practical advice about what to do with specific pieces of anatomy where maybe it would be nice to have some reference, the things people do is a pretty wide field. “Oh, someone to watch football with” ignores female football fans, et al. This ties in a lot with right wing men because they can’t necessarily have an emotional connection with someone not-male because that’s equivalent to messing around with someone’s property. And it also ties in with the social programming that created a stereotype for how men are supposed to relate to each other that’s just a writer trying to put a good story together without thinking of the social implications.

Radicalization doesn’t work on people who are emotionally connected and comfortable. Part of why we are where we are is that there’s a whole class of people whose happiness has been precluded by the structure of their lives and the best people who can take advantage of this are fraudsters selling a false bill of goods. And I don’t even really feel sympathy for those people anymore because they are hurting people who I do very much care about and after a point it doesn’t matter if they are just too dumb to see it.

But, I guess, to return to your initial point, the idea that if you find a person and get married to them that you have “solved” connection, that’s the road to unhappiness. Partially because marriage generally requires a commitment and effort to stay together as things happen and people change… but also because relying on one single person without other social connectivity is not a stable equilibrium.

Nothing would change, ironically.

In 2006, the band Stefy released the Orange Album. They were amazing electro-pop but after they completely failed to make themselves a presence, they got dropped from Wind Up Records and Stefy went off into obscurity.

If you listen to it now, you can kinda place it into a whole genre of electro-pop music that really started to catch on a few years later. People weren’t ready for it yet.

A giant swath of 80s-90s teenagers thought that anarchism was “chaos everywhere and no homework!!11” it’s just that thankfully most of them didn’t collect a bunch of questionable advice into a book, LOL.

But, good connection that cryptobros are the modern version thereof, I hadn’t quite realized that until you posted.

CrimethInc published some years ago a book entitled Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook that covers their Anarchist view of revolutionary action which they explicitly titled in reference to the old one.

And I think I also saw at one point, someone had collected a bunch of recipes from actual capital-A Anarchists to make an Anarchist Bookbook full of yummy food recipes but I can’t find it right now.

More to the point, the company using shady means to collect the data does not need to care if the data is useful, just that it’s marketable.

Yeah, like, we’ve got a fairly nice sporty-ish sedan that’s approaching 300k and since we’ve only got one car we kinda have to be ready to buy a new one quickly, I’ve done some of the thought process based on our needs and where we are in life. And the thing is, I like a nice car but I’m unclear on exactly how nice of a car I would actually appreciate driving, given that I don’t like to die or hurt other people, so I’m not going to go 3x the speed limit on some backroad and have never gotten a speeding ticket just that the upgrade from a 1.8L engine ecomony-ish sedan to a 2.5L engine sporty-ish sedan did feel real nice.

Meanwhile, one in-law got a Porsche so another in-law on the same side of the family had to trade in his Audi SUV for roughly the same SUV on the Porsche side and it’s all some douchebag power fantasy.

But, yeah, I like seeing actual-car-persons nerd out because I know enough to get at what they are nerding out about. Joy is much funner than douchebaggery.