On buying and using a laser cutter

April 18, 2012November 28, 2012 Plasma2002 10 Comments

After an unexpected tax return came in, I finally decided to get a laser cutter. One had been on my wish list for quite some time, and this was the perfect excuse to take the plunge.

After reading a bunch of online reviews, I decided to buy Full Spectrum’s 40W Deluxe Hobby Laser. After owning and using it for 2 months now, I would definitely consider it a good decision. This post should explain the rundown of how I set it up, what I found out, and what you can probably expect, should you choose to invest in your own laser cutter.

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Party Scroller

August 31, 2011July 28, 2016 Plasma2002 7 Comments

Those jumbo screens at concerts that display your text messages can be a lot of fun. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have the same thing for your own parties or social gatherings? Well I tested that question. As it turns out, guests love it

Why

concertWall I’ve always loved the idea of sending messages to the big screens you usually find at concerts and other large events. I figured it could be scaled down, while still being just as entertaining. It may not have one of those spiffy 5-digit phone numbers, but the Google Voice number that it uses works just as well – especially since it also works as a vanity number for my handle 🙂

After testing the sign at a party held at home, I noticed that people really seemed to enjoy it. One part of it that led to people enjoying it was the fact that the messages were anonymous. While it would have been really easy to make the sign show who the message was from, if theres one thing I’ve learned from the internet, it’s that people love being anonymous. Leaving a message that your peers can see, without knowing who wrote it, will always invoke the most curious behavior.

With any anonymity, comes that behavior. I already knew that, so I took the liberty to set up some bad-word filters to start replacing parts of messages. You can see that list in one of the scripts below – which is most likely causing Google to flag my page as inappropriate, but I digress… Not only did this keep the board clean, but it was even more entertaining to people to see such ‘odd’ words come up in their messages. It only kept people texting more and more to see what other replacements they could figure out.

All in all, it really seems this experiment was a success. People loved it, and I loved setting it up. I highly recommend you do the same for your next party or other event. As long as your guests have their cell phones, they’re definitely going to be tempted to send something.

Technical Details

The Party Scroller makes use of several servers (more…)

Auger and a Laser Cutter

June 10, 2011June 10, 2014 Plasma2002 Leave a comment

What happens when you have one auger lying around, and a laser cutter that you’re just dying to make something with? You make a dog-food hopper!

The motor assembly was taken out of an old CD-ROM drive, and the rest was modeled around it via Google Sketchup. It was then exported to SVG and sent to the laser. Everything went better than expected 🙂

Now all that’s left to do is to cut some trash-can inserts out of plywood to keep the kibble near the auger pickup.

Still deciding if I should

May 24, 2011April 17, 2012 Plasma2002 Leave a comment

Ok, so here I am at my sister-in-law’s high school graduation, and I decided to take a little walk… Guess what I found 🙂

Exhibit A: football field full of ~300 people about to graduate.

Exhibit B: the industrial high-flow sprinkler controller for the field that somebody just happened to leave UNLOCKED

I’m sure you can put two and two together at this point. 🙂

It sure would make one hell of a final ceremony…

The Button

April 10, 2011 Plasma2002 3 Comments

What’s it gonna do?

Best two dollars ever spent

February 23, 2011February 23, 2011 Plasma2002 1 Comment

Today I went to my local coffee shop before work to get some caffeine, and was stopped on the way in by one of the local homeless guys. I’ve seen him before, and he has asked me for some spare change before too, but today, he apparently decided to step up his game plan.

He started by catching me between the sidewalk and the door, and immediately started telling me his story of woe and why he needed some money. It went something along the lines of this.

He said he was traveling all across America to panhandle, trying to make $50. He was going from state to state panhandling. A traveling panhandler, this man was. He used the word “panhandle” more times than I had ever heard in my life. He said needed the $50 so he could open a bank account and get a lock box. He then reached into his pants pocket and produced an empty wallet, save for a California I.D. card… he didn’t say anything about it, but rather, he just kept fiddling with it between his fingers. When I looked down at it, it most definitely was not his I.D. card, but actually that of a man of a completely different ethnicity, and what looked like about 20 years age difference.
Why he pulled the card out I will never know… but he continued his story without taking a breath or letting me say a word.

He said he wasn’t able to get a lock-box yet because the poh-leece have his name on file, and he needed a tape worm removed.

Yes. You read that right. It made about as much sense to me as I bet it does to you. But I digress…

He reiterated the fact that he had family all across the United States and needed to go see them and was trying to make $50 today for traveling money and a lock box. He then finally got to the point and asked if I had anything I could spare. I simply told him I would see what I had after I went and got my coffee.

While getting my coffee, I was trying to digest everything he had told me, and I was even more dumbfounded than before, but I couldn’t help but just start laughing at nothing.

When I came out, I gave him $2 cash and told him to have a good one. He then proceeded on to his next client.

What he is planning on storing in that lock-box, and how he plans on getting that tape-worm removed, I hope to never find out, but one thing’s for sure… that was an amazing two dollars.