That sounds like a pretty sweet gig. Legacy companies especially are filled with lots of opportunities for hacky automation that can substationally improve the day to day lives of worker bees. The trick is getting leadership to support that kind of work. It sounds like you’ve been able to succeed in that regard, so kudos.

Also, my career has caused me to realize how much important stuff around the world relies on some idiotic code snippet someone wrote “as a temporary fix”.

If it’s stupid and it works, is it really stupid?

It’s always fun watching the clash between this reality and compliance/safety/regulatory folks, lol.

My oldest pair of headphones is a pair of Sennheiser HD650s that I bought over 20 years ago. Their headband snapped a few years back, but I was able to track down a spair. They recently got a fresh pair of pads too, but have otherwise been going strong. They have gone through a bit of a boom/bust cycle of usage and are currently seeing near daily usage again.

As someone who recently “upgraded”, I agree. My prior pair of headphones are nearly as good as the new pair and have some functionality that just isn’t offered anymore (lots of physical buttons).

I have a pair of Plantronics 8200UCs that I very recently bought pads for. The first set lasted me since October 2021, so I should be good for a while again. They sound pretty good for music, support multipoint (multiple devices pairing) and aptX HD, have a dongle for teams certification, they support sidetone, their voice feedback is fantastic (muted prompts, etc), and have good physical controls (power switch, dedicated mute button, play/pause, ff/rw, volume, answer/hang up, etc). I wish they had a slightly better microphone and better ANC, but they largely get the job done.

I went down the headphone rabbit hole this holiday season and other than better ANC and transparency mode, which the 8200s lack completely, it turns out that I really wasn’t missing out on much.

So: keep them, unless there’s a very specific reason to ditch them.

Drinking age is set by each state but that hasn’t stopped the feds from tring to influence things.

Very cool, glad to hear it worked out so well!

Local or did you need to travel? Even though you were “only” performing for say ~30 minutes/day were you able to do any other work those days?

This does seem like a good hourly rate, but if you had to travel there and back, and couldn’t do other things for $$ in your free time, the deal doesn’t become as good sounding.

The scanner will only work if your model is absolutely flat. I spent some time trying to model a baseplate for my camera that I wanted a glove like fit on. In the end I had to iterate a ton. I suspect this was due to

• The camera base had a 1mm or so fillet around the edges and the scanner has a very narrow focal plane. This made it hard to precisely place the spline
• I was probably a bit too obsessive about the tight fit initially and would have been better off starting with a looser one

Good luck!

+1 for a flatbed scanner. Put a ruler somewhere on the bed for scale. If you use fusion 360, you can add an image to a sketch and scale it to be the correct size. That said, if you’re going for a perfect fit it’s really hard to beat a pair of calipers and things like radius guides unless it’s a super complex shape.

Great call out on lens distortion. Photoshop, along with most other high feature image editors editors, will often have a lens correction option if they have a built in profile for your lens. Darktable is a good FOSS option. You still need to be absolutely parallel to your object though.

Cars and airplanes do have 3D printed parts. They’re much more common in the prototyping phase, but they are used in production and are making their way to space.

I completely agree with your general sentiment though. Any time a new piece of technology shows promise there are a ton of people who will loudly proclame that it will completely replace <old and busted technology> in <a massive amount of areas> while turning a blind eye to things like scaling and/or practical limitations.

See also: low/no code, which has roots going back to the 1980s at least.

It also makes it easy to find all your subscriptions in one place. When every provider tries to get you to subscribe, hunting them all down becomes a pain.

I dug through your post history to see if I could unearth clues regarding your process. No dice, but I recognize the vast majority of your posts and have commented on a few of them over the past 6 months or so. I didn’t realize they all came from the same person, impressive!

I still have my original question (how did you go about forging this), but now I have another one: what do you do for a living? It’s obvious that you enjoy working across a variety of media and your level of competence suggests that you’ve been doing this type of thing for a while. I am a… very low output hobbiest maker. It’s nice to see what others are able to accomplish with more time input, but it’s never been clear to me just how large (or not) that time input was.