Fighting with computers

The first Prusa i3 I built used a 6mm-thick acrylic frame. It worked ok, but when I saw sgraber's design  I thought it will add a lot of rigidity to the acrylic frame. I later bought an aluminium frame and I forgot about the matter. Recently I came across a local business laser cutting acrylic and I decided to give it a go with a similar but smaller design. One of the things I have observed about 3D printers is that they tend to be big. Having a large surface for the print area is nice because you can print big parts, but you pay the price of the printer being bulky. As many of the things I print at home are small parts, I thought I would be a good idea to have a small printer at home and keep the larger ones for larger printers I might have at my office. Of course it is still to be seen whether things will work out this way or not. So I ended up building this smaller sibling of my home Prusa i3. These are the sizes of the rods I have used:  X-axis: 2x265mm smooth r

An ongoing project required some 2D vector paths to be mirrored. I was programming in Java and using Area object to represent these paths. Though the obvious thing was to do this myself, I turned to the libraries for help.  I have not used AffineTransform before, but it seemed the right tool for the job. Unfortunately, either my understanding is shrinking (which may well be the case) or the existing documentation is not good enough. After trying several matrices from different posts online I realized I was not getting any closer to a good solution. The main problem is that while you can mirror an Area object with just one matrix (-1,0,0,1,0,0) you can't avoid the translation that will happen at the same time. The solution to my problem ended up being quite simple (I wanted to mirror the image in the X axis). // object a is the area I want to flip AffineTransform at = new AffineTransform(); at.scale(-1,1); Rectangle r = a.getBounds(); at.translate(-( r.width + 2 * r.x ), 0.0);

I woke up this morning to a frozen G+ account. I was warned my account was blocked due to infringing user policies and that I was no longer able to post until fate was determined. I was offered all sorts of informative pages about what those policies are about but none about what I might be doing wrong. It was vaguely said that I was spamming. Not owning a business to advertise and not knowingly advertising other businesses, beyond the casual comment of that shop seems to have good prices to friends, I was puzzled. Whether the issue was triggered by a user complain or a bot detecting some offending content, I was not told. I was just told that some content was against Google+ policies but not flagging which that content was I was left to my own devices, in the dark. It is as if the police will arrest you saying that you know why we do this without explaining further. Being convinced that this was a mistake and that I was not, knowingly, spamming anyone (in fact I hate spam), I