Having World Cup games here means lots of samples to estimate how many graphic designers know that hexagons alone cannot tile a sphere. (Roughly 1/3, I'd say.)

I just realized it's weird that most people seem to think that zero-gravity "Vomit Comet" flights achieve free fall by diving straight down, instead of following a parabolic arc up and over like they really do. Because that's actually a thing commonly done in everyday life, when stealing a bite of something drippy from a plate across the table. You do a little bouncing motion, and then move it up and over in an arc to your own plate, trying to keep everything in freefall so the drips follow the fork and don't fall on the table on the way. It's the exact same maneuver!

It's kind of fiddly still, but for the first time I have the complete Life Cells, connected to each other only via homemade magnetic pogo pin connectors, running real Life behavior!

I ordered the parts needed from a real control panel today, which will have play/pause, single step, and adjustable speed controls. I'm also thinking about trying to get more Cells made before Open Sauce, but there probably just isn't time at this point. There are a couple circuit tweaks I want to make that I shouldn't rush, and while it won't yet be the 10x15 grid I've been dreaming of, I will at least have a working system to show off.

We're approaching Open Sauce again (July 18-19 in San Mateo, CA), which means that I am once again looking for someone to help run the booth.

I can provide an exhibitor pass for the full weekend, plus access to the Friday night party. That's limited to just 2 people from each booth plus all the featured guests, and it's usually one of the highlights of the weekend. I can't guarantee you'll get to chat with your favorite A-list maker, of course, but that's when it is most likely to happen.

In return, I'm hoping to find someone who can at least stop by my booth a couple times each day to watch things while I run to the bathroom and maybe grab some lunch. You're welcome to stick around for more, it's actually quite fun running the booth, if exhausting. But it absolutely wouldn't be expected.

DM me if you're interested!

At what point does it become millimobility?

Hrm. I might not be able to put off getting a new soldering iron much longer.

I like that the west coast presents a simple question: WA OR CA?

RE: https://mastodon.social/@keyboards/116509114870238848

Aw, it's so cute!

RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@ludd/116735043116172902

I'm much happier to let a robot wipe my ass.

The lens on the right used to be in the glasses. The lens in the glasses used to be a blank like the one above. Shaping it on the belt sander to match the original only took about 15 minutes, and I can probably do it faster with some practice. So that's proof of concept that you can buy prescription blanks cheap and shape them to fit old frames! Next up, doing the same with 3D printed frames, and then it's time to get properly silly with this idea.

Biblically accurate surveillance state

It is hard to exaggerate just how common autonomous cars are here.

Bay Area folks: I'll be in town next week Monday through Thursday with a lot of free time. Let me know if you want to meet up for coffee of something. Or if there is something I should be sure to check out while in the area!

Well, the new hot air station works great, but I think I'm going to have to rearrange my electronics bench a bit.

My punch card cyberdeck from last year got a nice mention in this Make blog post:

https://makezine.com/article/technology/computers-mobile/destroy-big-tech-with-a-salvaged-cyberdeck/

And looking at it the other way, a histogram with all the sizes grouped into 0.25" bins, it's quite exponential in the other direction. There is *far* more resolution available down at the smallest sizes. Not too surprising, but again, a cleaner curve than I would have expected.

Talking about all the weird imperial drill bit sizing systems yesterday made me curious what kind of patterns were there. So I put every real size into a spreadsheet, with it being currently sold on McMaster being used as a proxy for what counts as a "real" size.

First interesting thing: Combing all the fractional, wire gage, letter and metric sizes together results in a fairly clean exponential curve. I would have guessed the clumpiness of the letter and wire gage sizes would be visible, but that all happens down where it's pretty linear anyway and disappears.

Does anyone need a 38" x 52" x 7" granite surface plate? I know of a dead CMM in the LA area which is going to become landfill if they can't find anyone to take it off their hands.

Turns out you can buy prescription lenses in their full 60mm blank form for like $20. So it looks like a very silly custom glasses idea I had might happen after all.

"What's in the box?"

"Precision."