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Fondots

@ Fondots @lemmy.world

Posts
2
Comments
671
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Recreate old chess pieces

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  • I don't have any specific recommendations for software or services, but I do have a couple general thoughts on this problem

    How many pieces are missing and how ornate is the set?

    If you have at least one of every piece the easiest course of action is probably to 3d scan them. A scanner is probably a bit pricey to buy just for this one project, but if you ask around you can probably find a hobbyist or makerspace that will let you use theirs.

    If you can't find a scanner, as long as your set isn't too ornate, most chest sets are probably pretty easy to model for the most part. Except for the knights which are of course horses which are a weird irregular shape, most chess pieces are essentially cylinders and cones of various sizes stacked on top of each other. With a little quality time taking measurements with some calipers and some youtube how-to videos, you could probably learn enough to make a pretty decent model pretty quickly.

    You might even be able to carefully trace your pieces onto a piece of paper or maybe use a contour gauge to do the same, scan that tracing into your computer, and create a 3d model from that profile. Heck, you might even be able to just take a picture of the pieces then trace them on your computer.

    It's been a long time since I've done any 3d modeling personally, but something like that is a feature in a lot of software I've used.

    Then you'd just need to add some details- a slot cut into the bishops hat, some crenulations at the top of the rook, a cross on top of the king, etc. which should all also be pretty straightforward to model

    Again, if you ask around at makerspaces and such you can probably find someone willing to take up the challenge or help you figure out how to do that.

    Of course if your set has a lot of textures and details you wouldn't be able to capture them that way, like if your pieces have a face or otherwise aren't rotationally symmetrical, or the rook has a brick pattern, etc.

    And if you need to model the knight, that's going to take some more advanced modeling skills unless it's a really simple and kind of abstract horse.

    If you are missing pieces entirely, unless you can track down another set to use as a reference, you're going to have to recreate them from scratch. You can take some styling cues from the other pieces- like the bases are probably all pretty much the same, but beyond that you'd kind of have to work off of memory and eyeballing them.

    EDIT: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I was thinking about good ways to recreate your missing pieces by 3D printing so I kind of forgot to consider other techniques

    Again, assuming you have at least one of each of the pieces you need, make a mold and cast new ones out of epoxy or something.

    Also, again assuming no detailed textures, except for the knights, most chess pieces are almost perfect lathe projects. There's some really cheap tiny lathes to be had on Amazon that would probably be up to the task of turning a chunk of plastic into a chess piece.

  • Cops of lemmy, what's it like marijuana being not a big deal then all the sudden a really big deal then back to being like probably not a big deal to it probably becoming a really big deal again?

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  • Policies vary on this place to place, and of course there's no accounting for police who don't bother to follow the policies

    But as a current dispatcher.

    1. Yes, people do call about that. I went into some more detail on that in my other comment.
    2. Phone calls are only half of what we do, we're also the ones on the radio with the field units. If they pull a traffic or pedestrian stop, they call it in to us over the radio so we can check their status, send backup, run information for them, etc. because if we don't know they're out on, for example, a traffic stop and something happens, we otherwise wouldn't know about it until it's too late. They give us a short disposition at the end of the call- if someone was cited, parties advised to separate, they turned the music down, crowd dispersing, subject in custody, etc. We don't get all the details, we don't get their full reports or anything, but we have a pretty good general overview of the outcome.

  • Cops of lemmy, what's it like marijuana being not a big deal then all the sudden a really big deal then back to being like probably not a big deal to it probably becoming a really big deal again?

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  • Current 911 dispatcher here, same kind of experience.

    Recreational is not legal in our state. FWIW, I don't smoke myself.

    Seen our officers give plenty of warnings for weed, but really the only time anyone gets cited for it is when the person is already getting taken in on multiple charges and being a massive dick about it so the officers are really throwing the book at them.

    I know at least one of the sergeants in my county used to smoke a lot because he went to high school with me. I've occasionally seen him enter some colorful notes into calls, like that he gave someone a "warning for the electric lettuce"

    I know a handful of my fellow dispatchers smoke, and I'm pretty sure at least one of my supervisors does, and even more of my coworkers admit to smoking in the past (as long as you can pass the drug test to get hired, past drug use is not a disqualifier for our agency, though lying about it could be if something about it comes up on your background check, and unless they have reason to think that you're under the influence on the job we're not subject to testing otherwise)

    We pretty much all roll our eyes when we get a call where the main complaint is "someone's smoking marijuana"

    We have to enter something about it, we can't just ignore a 911 call for liability reasons. But we all know it's a waste of everyone's time and resources. We don't really have a specific code to enter it as so unfortunately we usually have to enter it as something like "suspicious activity" which is a fairly high-priority call, but when we can we'll try to bury it in something trivial like a noise complaint because cops don't really need to be going out lights & sirens to tell someone to be more discreet with their smoking.

  • Super Bowl halftime performer detained after unfurling Sudanese-Palestinian flag

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  • There's no reason to arrest him, he didn't break any laws.

    However, the NFL isn't the government, they're a private organization, they can tell someone that they're banned from their properties and events just about as easily as you can tell someone that they're not welcome at your back yard BBQ (as long as they're not banning them because they belong to a protected class)

    They're probably well within their rights here to ban them just because they don't like what he did.

    However, I can almost guarantee you that with an organization as lawyered-up as the NFL he signed some sort of contact to be a part of the performance where he agreed to some policy or code of conduct or something that says in some way that performers aren't permitted to go off-script like that, and not only can they decide to ban him for that but they may be able to sue him for breach of contract or something.

  • You can summon a baguette out of thin air but it is always slightly stale. How do you use this ability for personal gain?

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  • Unless you read the prompt as the baguette will always remain slightly stale, so no matter how you attempt to freshen it up, it will still be slightly stale.

  • You can summon a baguette out of thin air but it is always slightly stale. How do you use this ability for personal gain?

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  • I contact every James Randi-type paranormal debunker that I can find and explain my power to them. I agree to all of their terms and agree to demonstrate it to them under whatever tightly controlled absolutely perfectly sterile conditions they want.

    And I do it for them, claim my prize money, and continue on with my life.

    My power is to summon a baguette, not unlimited baguettes, so I gotta make that one count and I think that's my best to get the most bang for my buck.

    Or if I get to decide where exactly that baguette is summoned to, perhaps I will have it spring into existence occupying the same space as [REDACTED]'s brain stem. Having them out of the picture would greatly enrich my life.

  • What country are you from and what languages do you speak?

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  • Also US

    English of course

    I took a few years of French in middle and high school, not much of it stuck. A couple basic words and phrases, and if they speak slowly and clearly I can usually get the gist of what someone is saying and fake my way through some reading.

    The story of my French education is a mess, full of long term substitutes, substitute-substitutes, a sad lonely man whose spirit was absolutely broken by the kids who had him first semester before I had him and got fired a couple weeks before the end of the school year, and a lady who was absolutely baffled by the fact that her French 3 class barely spoke any French because the first 2 years of our French education was a total waste.

    A handful of Spanish words and phrases from middle school "exploratory" Spanish class for a couple months and working in a warehouse for a few years where I was one of only a handful of native English speakers, but nowhere close to conversational.

    And I've been teaching myself Esperanto, which has been going rather well. It's hard to say how conversational I am because there's not a whole lot of esperantists running around to chat with, but I'm reading at probably about a 2nd grade level, which is something I suppose.

  • According to you, what happens when you die?

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  • It's just nothing.

    Asking what you experience after death is a nonsensical question, you don't experience anything at all.

    What did you see/hear/feel/experience back in 1066 during the Norman Conquest of England?

    You weren't there, you weren't alive then, so you didn't experience anything at all.

    That same sort of non-experience is what awaits you after death.

  • Trump back to golfing after demanding federal workers return to office

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  • I'm not certain what the president's "normal" hours/workweek are really expected to be, I kind of assume that is theory it's kind of a 24/7/365 gig for 4 years

    But I feel like it may be worth pointing out that if you work a normal Monday-Friday gig and take no additional vacation, your weekends off would add up to about 29% of the year off.

    If you get, say, 10 vacation days you're now up around 31%

    Personally I work 12 hour shifts on a 2-2-3 rotation, so even if I don't take any of my PTO and depending how the calendar works out on any given year I'm sitting at just about 50% of days off the job (provided I don't come in for overtime) for my normal schedule, though I technically work slightly more hours than someone who does a normal 40 hour work week.

    So I don't think just looking at raw numbers of how many days off they took is necessarily a useful metric.

    How many hours they actually spend working and how much they manage to achieve is probably much more important, though I suspect it's difficult if not impossible to get real metrics on that

    I suspect that trump probably isn't the type to put in a full 8 hours of actual work, and even if he does get roped into an all-day meeting, it's probably not particularly productive since they'd have to spend the whole time explaining the basics to him instead of actually getting anything done. And I'm sure the only reason he ever brings work home with him is so that he can sell it to the highest bidder from his private bathroom/copier room.

  • Relevant again: How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms.

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  • I think it depends on how you use those different sites

    I transitioned from Reddit to Lemmy pretty seamlessly like you did. Around the time it became clear they weren't backing down on the API thing and other bullshit, I looked up some reddit alternatives, chose Lemmy, and kept right on doing what I was doing on Reddit.

    On the other hand, I'm having a bit of a hard time ditching Facebook.

    The difference is I know the people I'm friends with on Facebook, I have actual relationships with them, I'm there to interact with those specific people. Leaving Facebook without finding a decent alternative and getting those people to switch with me (which probably means they'd also have to convince their other friends to switch too) means losing contact with those people.

    On Reddit and now Lemmy, I'm basically here to read articles and have conversations with strangers about those articles. I don't really form lasting relationships here, I don't recognize usernames outside of maybe 2 or 3 big names. If they weren't full of the worst kinds of idiots, trolls, bots, and scammers I could pretty much get what I'm looking for from the comment section on a news site.

    Some people do build those kinds of relationships here though, they come to Reddit or Lemmy, at least in part, to interact with specific users and communities that they have some sort of connection to, and when you have connections like that, it gets pretty hard to leave that platform. Unless all of your friends leave at the same time and go to the same platform, you need to either lose some friends, split your time between the two platforms (neither of which may be as good as what you had because not everyone is there) or you have to find some other way of staying in touch and keeping the friendship going (which is often much easier said than done)

  • Deleted

    Why are my posts being downvoted?

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  • Couple thoughts

    It's already been touched on but you posted the same pic in a few different subs in a short time frame, that can come across as spammy. Lemmy overall isn't as active as say reddit, so depending on how people browse, what they're subscribed to, etc. that could mean you're taking up a pretty big chunk of their main page which can be annoying when you're seeing the same thing a half dozen times.

    Some people are just weird about NSFW posts in general and downvote it when they see it.

    I'm pretty sure some people also tend to downvote clothed/bathing suit/lingerie pics in NSFW communities because they think it should only be for nudity.

    I'm no art critic, but in my opinion it's just not a particularly good photo. Not that you yourself are unattractive but I just don't think it's a particularly flattering photo.

    And on titsonastick, I'd argue that it's not a particularly good fit for that community. Not that your pics don't necessarily belong there in general but I don't think that picture does a great job of showing off how skinny you are vs how big your boobs are.

    And finally complaining about or questioning downvotes is a pretty good way to invite assholes to downvote you more

    For the record, I haven't down or upvoted any of your posts. It's not necessarily my personal taste but I don't find it egregious enough to warrant a downvote. People have different personal philosophies on how they vote, I tend to scroll past most posts and comments and only up if I find it to be particularly good or useful, I've enjoyed lots of posts that I didn't bother to upvote, and only tend to downvote outright spam, bad faith arguments, and outright racism and stuff like that, but others will vote on pretty much everything in front of them.

  • TIL that tracing phone calls by keeping the phone line open is a totally outdated trope

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  • It goes through your phone's data connection. That's part of the reason we don't get GPS info on all calls, no data, no gps. If you call from a deactivated cell phone that can only call 911 for example, since you don't have data we don't get that gps data(or your emergency contact or medical info if you've filled that out on your phone)

  • TIL that tracing phone calls by keeping the phone line open is a totally outdated trope

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  • I work in 911 dispatch, so I have some relevant knowledge here

    Cell tower triangulation is our bread and butter for locating a cell phone. It also kind of sucks.

    With triangulation we get a set of latitude/longitude coordinates, a "confidence factor" which is a radius in meters around that point that basically shows you the potential error, and a "confidence percentage" which is how confident the cell provider is in that information (it's 90% I've literally never seen it be any number other than 90%)

    The confidence factor depends on a few different things- geography, how many cell towers the phone is able to connect to, if you're inside/outside, etc.

    The policy where I work is if it's within 300 meters we can enter the call as normal and send cops, fire, EMS, or whoever out to look for the emergency if we get no other location info from the caller. More than 300m and it's usually getting bumped down to an information call, cops will still go to check it out but even 300m is a pretty big area to have them check and can include potentially hundreds of houses, apartments, businesses, etc.

    Usually we can get that 300m accuracy, but not always by a longshot, I sometimes see them in the thousands of meters which is basically useless. It also takes about 20-30 seconds to refresh so it's not a live location, and if they're, for example, in a moving vehicle, they can be a pretty significant distance away in 30 seconds, let alone in the several minutes it takes responders to arrive.

    And once we're off the call, we don't get any further location updates. If we want to ping the phone again, that involves calling the phone company and faxing them paperwork or something like that (it's handled by our supervisor so I'm not directly involved in that part of the process) I think it normally ends up taking like 10 or 20 minutes for us to get a ping that way, and then it's only 1 ping at a time and they're going to be spaced out about that far or further.

    Handset gps based location is generally more accurate (although occasionally it does happen that it's less accurate than the triangulation) but we don't necessarily get it on every call, it's still kind of a hacked-together system at a lot of dispatch centers and it doesn't always integrate well with the other software. It does update much faster, and we usually continue to get updated locations from it for maybe a couple minutes after we hang up.

    We don't really have any way that I'm aware of to request a gps based ping on a phone we're not on the line with.

    I'm sure the feds have some back doors and extra tools at their disposal that we don't have at a county 911 center, I really can't speak to that. I doubt they're able to get a much more accurate triangulation ping than we are, that seems like a pretty hard limitation of the technology to me.

  • What would your favorite gamepade look like and have unlike other? What are the benefits?

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  • My use case is a little unusual, my PC is hooked up to my tv and gets used for watching some movies and TV and such in addition to gaming

    I'd like it to have some sort of slide out keyboard, a scroll wheel, and a trackpad or trackball so that it's more useable for general PC navigation, and maybe some media control buttons-play/pause, skip, etc.

    I'd also like volume controls, and if I dare to dream big maybe an IR blaster to control my TV and AV receiver with some power and input buttons.

    I think a trackball instead of a right stick would be nice for precise aiming but sometimes I'd like it to act like a joystick so maybe some kind of sensor ring around the edge of it to detect when my thumb is at the edge to keep it moving that direction like a joystick or maybe both a stick and a ball

    6 face buttons instead of the now standard 4. I emulate some retro games and it would be nice for N64 and Genesis games. Mapping those buttons to a joystick or shoulder buttons or whatever just doesn't feel right, and I'd probably come up with some macros or something to map them to for other games

    However it's implemented, I'd want to be able to have 4 controllers connected at once, and the ability to play and charge at the same time

    Some sort of charging dock or at least wireless charging built it would be nice

    And if we really want to get wild with it, let's make it split in half with the necessary sensors and speaker and such for Wii and switch emulation and to use as VR controllers

    Trying to cram all of that into an affordable, usable, attractive controller is probably a pipe dream, but that's my theoretical ideal

  • Why do humans find predators cute?

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  • Depends a bit on what you want to consider a "weasel"

    The weasel family (mustildae) is pretty diverse, we don't necessarily call everything in that family a "weasel" but that distinction is somewhat arbitrary.

    It includes all manner of critters from the Least Weasel (yes, that's seriously what someone decided to call the smallest weasel) that can be as small as about 4½" in length and weigh about an ounce or so

    Up to Giant Otters that can reach about 5'7" in length or Sea Otters that can weigh about 100lbs

    And in between you have some things like badgers and wolverines

  • Why do humans find predators cute?

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  • It's not something I'd generally consider to be one of my kinks, but I remember one time noticing a girl I know has somewhat more prominent than average canine teeth. Not ridiculously exaggerated vampire fangs or anything, definitely within the range of normal variation of the human species, but towards the upper end of that range, just a tiny bit longer and pointier than most.

    And that did something for me. Like the primal reptilian part of my brain was saying "yesss, now there's a female you can go and hunt mammoths with"

    It surely didn't hurt that she is otherwise very conventionally attractive, but in that moment it wasn't the great tits, ass, pretty face, blue eyes, long blonde hair, etc. that caught my eye, it was those carnivore teeth.

    She's also been an on-again/off-again vegetarian as long as I've known her, and has expressed some interest in hunting, so I think her own lizard-brain also seems to have some strong thoughts on the matter.

  • What have you created that you really want to show off?

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  • I don't think either are particularly exciting and I didn't take pictures, but I'm proud of them.

    After years of putting it off, I've finally cobbled together a gaming PC, it's not a powerhouse, most of the parts are about 10+ years old salvaged from my wife's upgrades over the last few years, and I still need to find a keyboard and mouse I like

    I don't really have space in my home for a desk, the spare bedroom/office is home to my wife's computer and don't really have room to squeeze in another, so I built it in a HTPC case, and it's pretty damn cool playing on the 70inch TV with surround sound and the hue lights synced up to it

    The other is the cabinets above our fridge. We got a new fridge that's a bit bigger than our old one, and there's a bit of a weird bump at the top that prevented the cabinets from swinging open fully.

    So I moved the hinges to the top of the doors instead of the side, and added some gas springs so they stay open, they have enough clearance to open that way.

    The measurements the springs came with to tell you where to mount them are total bullshit. Took a bit of trial and error to figure that out, but my cabinets now have DeLorean-style gullwing doors.

  • Friendica is a great fediverse alternative to Facebook

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  • The general concept of Facebook I think is fine

    I don't have any problem with the idea of a website where you can go to share things with your friends, family, coworkers, etc.

    For me, the biggest problem is that there's way too many opportunities for you to interact with people you don't have any real connection to.

    Unless you have mutual friends, you shouldn't see anything someone else is posting, sharing, liking, or commenting on. The only thing you should see from them is a name, profile picture, and a short bio when you search for them.

    There shouldn't be public pages for businesses, celebrities, etc. Everything you see on Facebook should be there because someone you actually know thought that it should be shared with their friends.

    And if, for some reason there must be public pages, then you should only see what your friends are commenting on those pages, not complete strangers.

    There shouldn't be public groups that just anyone can join. Groups should be limited to people you're actually connected to in some way. Not that you necessarily need to be friends directly, but you should be able to trace a clear line of mutual friends connecting any two people in the group together. There shouldn't be a public "we love bowling" (for example) group that anyone can join, but if you started a bowling league and wanted to start a group for it, you might start with Jeff, Walter, and Donny who all know each other, then Jeff adds his friend Smoky who also wants to join, and then Smoky adds his friend Liam who adds his friend Jesús, etc. Jeff may not be directly friends with Jesús, but they're connected by actual people so they can be in the same group. And Jesús and Jeff wouldn't get to see anything each other do outside of that group because they're not friends and don't even have any immediate mutual friends. Their entire relationship is through the bowling league.

    Want to talk to, follow, and share things with strangers? Go join a forum, get on Lemmy/reddit, use Twitter, start a blog, publish a book, send an op ed into the local newspaper, etc. That's what those platforms are for. Facebook is for talking to people you know.

    Friendica and other Facebook like platforms don't really solve those problems, but since they're smaller and less businesses and such are on them it kind of feels like they do.

    That's my 2¢ on the matter anyway.

  • I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone

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  • It kind of sounds like that article is about the "hey Siri" feature getting activated accidentally, like if it picks up something that sounds similar to the trigger phrase and starts recording

    Which is still a big security/privacy issue, but not exactly the same as if they're just turning the microphone on whenever they want to listen to you and serve you ads

  • What HATED or highly disliked movie you ACTUALLY really enjoyed?

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  • Overall, I tend to just be happy to be watching anything star wars. None of the movies are that deep, I'm just in it to watch space wizards with laser swords flying around in space ships with robot sidekicks battling evil. As long as most of those boxes get checked, I'm pretty happy with any star wars media, and in my mind I'm right back to being a little kid watching Star wars for the first time. Anything more is just icing on the cake.

    Now I can absolutely rank them and admit that some of them are better movies than others, and the sequels and prequels definitely drop the ball on that in a lot of ways

    And while on the whole, the sequels and prequels aren't great movies (arguably the OT aren't even great movies if we're being totally objective) I think that in a lot of ways they do a better job at universe building by dropping hints at other parts of the galaxy that we don't get to explore right then and there, they just do a shitty job of following through on them and tying them together into a coherent narrative.

    I think that just about any part of episode 8 for example could have been expanded out into a pretty cool movie or show, there was a lot to work with there, they just didn't work together as the same movie

    The force dyad thing between Rey and Kylo is pretty fucking cool

    Casino heist or spycraft movies are a pretty tried and true movie formula, I probably would have saved it for something like a Solo movie, or maybe Andor. The stuff about the military industrial complex profiting off of selling weapons to both sides could work for either of them. Han is from Cornelia, where the arms dealers are building a lot of these battleships and such, and it's also established that he's a gambler so a casino makes sense for him, or Andor could work well with the gritty political side of things.

    Fucking broom kid! Let's get more non-jedi non-sith force sensitives

    Finn was just criminally underutilized all-around

    The Holdo maneuver was pretty fucking badass

    You can argue about how the bombing run doesn't make sense from a physics perspective, or was tactically stupid, but it was a cool scene nonetheless

    I could go on, I think you could build out a pretty decent movie, show, or at least an episode or two of a show from any of those ideas if they just committed to the idea