Year: 2025
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Silly Sideprojects: The Lighting-Up-Crotch Snowman!
Finally, a blinky project of the scale I can actually bite off these days (unlike pre-kids), but it requires a bit of backstory. My wife’s mom absolutely loves Christmas, and like many families, their Christmas is full of tradition. It just wouldn’t be Christmas without egg dish, Dead Thelma Neuboldt’s Merry Christmas Chicken in the…
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Electric Monks: AI User Agents and Agency in the AIPocalypse
I’ll begin this rant with a tiny bit of history: look at the HTTP(S) headers a modern Web browser sends with its requests, and you’ll notice that for historical reasons it refers to itself by an odd name: not a browser, not a program, not an App, but a user-agent. While the term may have…
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Clippy, just trying to be helpful!
Louis Rossmann, my spirit animal from the alternate reality where I don’t have a day job and kids, is again speaking some truths. He makes a great argument that we should be pining nostalgic for Clippy, the dancing paperclip everyone of a certain vintage hated for being naively helpful, as opposed to hating our industry…
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Autodesk Ember SLA (Resin) 3D Printer – Findings, Document Dump and new Slicer!
Or: Tim reverse-engineers an open-source product to reconstruct the open-source materials! Long story short, I picked up this Autodesk “open-source” (words I thought I would never hear together) stereolithography printer at a local freecycle event. I thought it was a vacuum cleaner until I saw the Autodesk name on the back label. On realizing what…
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Kalmbach Media / Discover Magazine Subscription Scam
Hello friends from the search engines! If you’re reading this, you’re not the only one to receive one. With apologies in advance for turning this blog into an archive of my snail-mail, here is an “invoice” I got the other day, for a magazine I used to have a gift subscription to years-and-years ago. As…
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Build a Minimalist DIY Vibratory Rock Tumbler
My son and I have gotten into rock tumbling a bit, so I put a small vibratory tumbler on my “would be nice” holiday wishlist. So, apparently this hobby has gotten popular lately and these things can’t be had for love or money. Maybe for lots of money, but I wasn’t ready to drop 400…