How I was feeling over this last week.

My wife took me to an incredible Valentine’s dinner. I wanted to have dinner in my state, not in Mordor.

I got what I needed. A lovely dinner with my lovely wife.

I love her so much, it sometimes hurts.

I finished the first set of base plates for putting Gridfinity into the top desk drawer of the printer support platform.

It looks nice. It is a 15 inch by 14 7/8 inch drawer. The base plate printed in four sections. It could have been just put in the drawer and worked, but I put snaps on the edges.

Since then, I’ve been watching as things move from the desk next to the printer and into its own bin, often custom, in one of three Gridfinity drawers. The two custom printed drawers in the riser and the one desk drawer.

It is slower than I would like, but it keeps getting better. I think this is going to work.

The next base plate will be for the “Shelf of No Return”. This is the shelf where things from the dining table get cleared, never to be seen again.

The hope is that when we turn that into an organized space, there will be less inclination to just pile stuff there.

Just a short post. I’ve spent the last two days “fixing things.”

Our dishwasher decided to stop emptying the dirty water. I knew exactly what the problem was: the sump/discharge pump had died, again.

Quick order of a $25 part from Amazon, get a hand under the dishwasher, press the release catch, rotate the pump and it comes off in your hand.

Remove the power connector, attach the power connector to new pump, put the pump into place, and rotate until you hear the click. Done.

Except it didn’t resolve the issue.

Call out the repair dude; I didn’t have time to deal with this.

Two weeks later, he’s there. As I suspected, he diagnosed the issue as a dead controller board. This is a $130 part. And it is known to be a quick failure part; if the first dies, the second will die shortly after. Of course, the extra brown on a couple of wires and the look of some ABS connectors made it appear that something had gone overcurrent.

We decided to replace the dishwasher. Communications issues put a delay on that. Then Facebook Marketplace to the rescue. A 300 series Bosch dishwasher for under $200, in good condition.

Which leads us to Saturday, when I’m looking at the new dishwasher and realizing that I don’t see some of the things I expect to see. Turns out that there are missing parts, the power cable for one. Back to Amazon.

That’s tomorrow’s issue: installing the dishwasher, part two.

Meanwhile, I managed to break the 3D printer.

I was changing from ABS to PLA on the external supply. I messed up. Usually the UI just tells you what to do. But I haven’t read the online manual, so there are things I don’t get, and I don’t know I don’t know.

The sequence I had been using, which always worked before, was to unload the old filament, load the new filament, tell the printer the type and color of the newly loaded filament.

This is the wrong sequence.

You first unload the old filament. You then tell the printer the new filament type and color. Then you load the new filament.

When you do it in this order, the printer helpfully tells you, “Don’t push that PLA into the chamber/hotend that is too hot! It will melt and jam things.”

I didn’t get that warning. I pushed the PLA into the extruder; I kept feeding during the “grab filament” stage. And I created a blob after the drive wheels and before the cold end of the nozzle. It couldn’t go forward. The printer then tried to retract the filament. This deformed the filament going the other direction. Locking the end of the filament in the extruder drive.

This was a 15 minute fix, if I had a clue. Instead it took 2 plus hours. But it is fixed and I know more now.

I just have to keep fixing.

Watching court cases can be interesting. Watching the legal system can be interesting. Watching the system is crucial.

Back in 2022 there was the case of New York Pistol and Rifle Association v. The City of New York. This question in this case involved the right of the people of NYC to take their permitted firearms out of the city.

As the laws were at the start of the court case, a person had to get a permit to possess a firearm. They were then given permission to have that firearm on their premises, to transport it in a disabled manner to one of seven gun ranges in NYC, where they could shoot.

They were not allowed to take the gun out of the city to other ranges nor to competitions.

The plaintiffs, the good guys, argued that they owned property outside of NYC where they wanted to possess their firearms. The city and state argued that if they wanted a gun in those places, they should buy a second gun and store it in that other place, leaving it unattended when they were in the city.

The city and state of New York argued this case vigorously through the district and Second Circuit Court of Appeals. All the inferior courts found that this infringement was consistent with the Second Amendment and Heller.

When the Supreme Court granted cert, the city and state backpedaled so fast that it made Road Runner cartoons look slow in comparison. The city changed the regulation. The state passed a law saying that the city law was illegal, and the lawyers argued that the case was moot.

The Supreme Court agreed that the case was mooted, and the case was closed.

We thought this would be the end of Second Amendment cases in the Supreme Court that year, but the court choose to hear Bruen and we got one of the best opinions on the Second Amendment in years.

Watching The Case

I was watching this case. When it was mooted, I was concerned. When Bruen was decided, I was through the roof with happiness, tempered by my knowledge that there were going to be Bruen tantrum response laws.

What I didn’t realize at first was that this was a stepping stone.

We don’t get back our rights instantly. It is a war. A series of battles where we win, over and over again, only to face another battle.

Bruen is just about the right to carry outside our homes without being subjected to subjective licensing regimes.

Until you realize that it is that stepping stone.

When the Fourth Circuit heard oral arguments on Bianchi shortly after Bruen issued, I was sure we were going to see a rapid advancement of good Second Amendment Case law.

That case was heard and disappeared. The next case was Antonyuk v. Hochul. We had wins at the district level, and it looked like we were going to get wins at the appeals level. But we didn’t.

Watching cases was a disappointment. We were stuck in the same court of bad opinions as we were before Bruen. It didn’t seem like anything had really changed.

Watching the Legal System

From this I started to notice patterns. When Chicago’s infringements, oops, Illinois’s infringements were heard by the Seventh Circuit Court, a name popped up. Easterbrook. Why was his name familiar? Because he was the judge who authored the Seventh Circuit Court’s opinion in McDonald where he found that the Second Amendment didn’t apply to the people of Illinois, “Because the Supreme Court has never said that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Second Amendment.”

This case also made it to the Supreme Court, where The Court proceeded to say, “The Second Amendment damn well does apply to the states, you moron.”

This is a web of legal decisions. Each layered on the last, making a stronger and stronger platform for The People to exercise their rights.

What I started to see is that there is a game being played by the infringing states. It wasn’t about winning; it was about not losing.

If a Second Amendment case makes it to this Supreme Court, The People will win. The three DEI hires on the Court are the wise Latino, Obama’s in-house lawyer, and “What’s a woman?” Jackson will not be able to convince any of the originalists to violate their morals or the law.

But what if we were to lose Thomas? If Hillary or Kamala were able to appoint another Jackson, the battle would be much more difficult.

The infringers aren’t interested in winning right now; they just don’t want to lose. They are waiting for the makeup of the Supreme Court to change to favor them instead of The People.

This is how come we saw Duncan GVRed to the Ninth Circuit Court, where they sent it back down to the District Court, where the District Court found that it was just as unconstitutional under Bruen as it was before Bruen.

Which means that Duncan still has not been decided. It is still up in the air with millions of dollars spent.

So, the infringers want to keep these cases out of the Supreme Court. One of the ways they do this is by arguing the ripeness of a case.

The gist of “ripeness” is that any controversy in law across this nation will have suits brought in different circuits. Until the circuit courts have had a chance to weigh in, the case is not ripe for the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court needs to know the opinions of the inferior courts to make good judgments.

The counter to this is when there is a circuit split.

A circuit split happens when two or more circuits come to different opinions on the same controversy. If circuit A says that assault weapon bans are constitutional and circuit B says that they aren’t, that’s a split.

In the First Circuit, they have found that MA’s infringements are consistent with the Second Amendment. So having a shell casing in MA without having the proper license/permit/permission is a felony, but cross over to NH and it isn’t an issue.

Two states with two different sets of laws, both “constitutional” according to the First Circuit, and no other circuit disagrees.

We are much more likely to see the Supreme Court take a case if there is a circuit split.

Watching the System

New Jersey had that tantrum after Bruen and decided to make as much of New Jersey a “sensitive” place, gun-free zones. It was very egregious.

The district court enjoined the laws. The administrative panel of the Third Circuit stayed most of the restraining order. When the case was heard by the merits panel, two of the three found that New Jersey’s laws were consistent with the Second Amendment and let the laws stand.

But the system worked. Trump managed to get Judge Mascott appointed to the Third Circuit. The day the case was to be heard by the en banc Third Circuit court, Mascott was sworn in at the Supreme Court, and then was in court to sit with the en banc panel.

We will win that case. And with that win, there will be a circuit split.

The system, appointing originalists to fill as many judicial positions as possible, is going to give us a win. And that win will mean that there will be bigger, nationwide wins.

But there’s more!

The Trump and Bondi DOJ seems to be for The People one day, and then argues for infringements the next day. It is enough to give a grown man whiplash.

For example, the DOJ is arguing that the registration requirements of the NFA should still apply, even if the tax is zero.

We all know this is BS. Trump ordered his DOJ to become defenders of the Second Amendment; why would they argue for the NFA? That’s just stupid.

Except it isn’t.

Trump ordered the DOJ to defend the Second Amendment. If Newsom were to become president, he is just as likely to order his DOJ to go back to infringing.

What the pen can do, the pen can undo.

On the other hand, if the Supreme Court were to rule that without the tax requirement, there is no hook for Congress to regulate suppressors and SBR, that is much more concrete.

It is a system. You need to look at all the moving parts to see just how complicated it actually is. You can’t just take a single snapshot and claim that is representative of the system. You have to look from many different angles.

Ally sent me a meme that said that Trump is asking for term limits. She suggested that our opinion on term limits be the question of the week.

I disagree, I don’t know anybody on the right that doesn’t want term limits. How long have some of those swamp creatures been in office?

Senator Sanders has been in public office his entire life. He’s become rich as a “public servant” with multiple million-plus dollar homes.

Term limits are just a good idea.

The Lead

My friend has children. His firearms are locked in expensive safes. He doesn’t ever leave a firearm where a child or stranger could easily access it.

While my children were younger, I kept my firearms under lock and key. If my gun wasn’t on me, it was locked up.

Today I have multiple display cabinets, like my Uncle Alan had when I was a kid. I have display cases and display racks. And of course I still have my safes.

The Question

What criteria do you use when deciding how to store your firearms and ammunition?

So one of the prepper groups I belong to on Facebook has been posting these. I thought I’d pass some along. I believe these are meant for law enforcement, hence the “pursuit” comment.

As a prepper, I would not be worried about some of the things LEOs would be concerned about. I look at this scenario and the only “weight” that I would bother to attempt pulling up a steep embankment is a living person. The vehicle and the dead can stay at the bottom of the ravine, if we’re in a SHTF event.

Pulleys make lifting things easier. There’s a system called a 4-in-1 that would work in this case, though we’d be doing a 3-in-1 as we only have 4 pulleys. Rather than spend 20 minutes typing it up, I’m going to share a video that shows you the details clearly.

I have been doing computer modeling of some sort since around 1989. I’m not great at it; my task was generally making software that real modelers would use.

The software I worked on was BRL-CAD. BRL-CAD is a true solid modeling system. It is based on Combinatorial Solid Geometry (CSG). That is to say, you create solids and then use Boolean logic to get the shape you want.

What this means, in practical terms, is that you represent a sphere with a vector and a scalar. The first is the point in 3 space where the center of the sphere is located, and the other is the radius of the sphere.

The way we viewed the geometry was wireframe for modeling and then ray tracing for 3D rendering.

And we did astonishing things with this software. The visuals were often not the point of the model; often it was analysis of the model. For example, we had code that could be used to analyze the penetration mechanics of one solid impacting another solid, a target.

When we needed to move to the modern graphics processors, we needed a method of converting our solid models into triangles. We used non-manifold geometry instead of the industry standard of winged edges, thanks to some cutting edge research out of Australia.

That’s just backstory; sorry for the interruption.

Here is a case I’m designing for a Banana Pi BPI-M2 board that is running my NTP service.

This doesn’t have any of the cutouts required for the ports, but it is a good generic case. I’ll be adding design parameters for putting in posts for the board and other needed options for the case.

The basic design is parameterized. Which is to say, I have a spreadsheet that has values for width, length, height, shell thickness, and clearances.

The wedges for the snap fit are also derived from those values. It looks good.

Until I started to do the math.

I know what an inch is. I even have a good idea of what a 1/16th of an inch is. And because I’ve been playing with it, I know that 0.062 inches is close to 1/16th of an inch.

I have a feel for all of that.

What is a millimeter, though?

Well, that turns out to be 0.039 inches. Closer to 1/32nd than to 1/16. That’s small.

0.5 mm is 0.0196 inches. This is even smaller. While I strive to hit my tolerances within a few thousandths, and when I’m dialing something in, I’ll always get to a thousandth or less, those are small numbers.

And here is where I started to realize that I was making design mistakes. I had set my shell thickness to 1.5 mm with a clearance of 0.5 mm.

I got the 0.5 mm clearance from several sources talking about 3D printing snap-together cases. When I set the lip to be half the shell thickness, I got a 0.75 mm wide lip. That looked great. Then I remembered the clearance requirements and added allowance for that.

This meant that my lip was only 0.25 mm thick, or 0.0098 inches. That’s not a feature; that’s a burr.

In addition, the nozzle I’ll be using is 0.4 mm in diameter. The smallest feature I can print will be 0.4 mm or larger. I would have to use a different nozzle to get that level of detail.

The image you see above had the shell thickness set to 3 mm. I still want to do the lip, I’ll do a few test prints to dial it in.

There is this place where the mathematically perfect collides with physics, which collides with engineering, which is firmly entrenched in the real world.

The real world always wins.

Today’s stupid comes from the public, non-political sector. I participate in a variety of prepper and off-grid living groups on Facebook and elsewhere. Yesterday, one of the groups highlighted a set of stairs basically like the ones Chris made for our shed. They fold up against the wall. I liked the post, and was going to move on, but stupidly decided to check the comments. I ran into a guy, Todd, who said, and I quote, “Don’t weigh more than 150 lbs max for those stairs.” (I cleaned it up. His grammar was so atrocious I couldn’t do a direct quote.)

I patiently explained that it’s entirely possible to make stairs that will hold heavier weights, and that I know it’s so because a) math and b) hubby actually built some and he weights quite a bit more than 150 lbs (as do I) and he goes up and down the stairs just fine.

The response? “How ’bout a picture? I don’t believe you.” I kind of stared at it for a while, but then I responded to him. I basically said, well, I had facts on my side, but he was welcome to not believe those facts… however they were still facts. *shrug* Chris then responded by asking if the dude knew the type of wood, the type of hinges, the ratings for the screws, etc etc, and if not, then you couldn’t judge how much weight could go on the stairs. Basically, what I’d said… *math*.

There’s stupid on all sides of me these days.

I had someone from the “new poor” group who woefully explained that a single person cannot eat healthily on $30 a week. I sat down and made a delicious week’s menu for two people, two whole grown-ass people, for $30 a week. Well, $32 actually. But for TWO people, not one. I got told I was unrealistic for expecting people to… *gasp* cook. Because people on welfare don’t have time to cook, because now they’re burdened with “working” for 20 hours a week.

I didn’t bother explaining how I’d been working 40+ hour weeks for most of my life, and still managed to cook meals from scratch every night. Sometimes it meant careful planning and cooking on the weekend, then judicial use of the crockpot or microwave during the week, but I had food on the table, hot, delicious, healthy, and as far from processed as I could manage. Every. Single. Day. For years, folks.

There is a subset of people who are actively choosing to be willfully ignorant. They go out of their way to complain about things, especially online but occasionally in person, and then will not even glance at a fix for their problem. If you try to spoon feed it to them, the result is a tantrum that would look poor on a 2 year old, never mind a grown-ass adult. And while I do agree that the majority of them do appear to be on the Left, there are some doozies on the Right as well, and it bothers me.

I can’t help someone who actively WANTS to be poor, ignorant, hurt, or damaged. There’s this wonderful trend right now where people are claiming to be “triggered” over pretty much anything. That is, and I say this with no remorse whatsoever, weaponizing trauma, and it’s a VILE habit.

Some of us lived through real trauma. You can tell, because we’re the ones helping the OTHER ones with trauma, while telling people “what I went through wasn’t that bad, not as bad as Ms. X here.” We’re not using our trauma as an excuse. We might occasionally have to ask for grace, but we don’t use it as an excuse. And we never stop trying to get over it, to fix it, to repair it, to patch it, to soothe it.

“Ohh… but I’m triggered!” Yeah honey? So am I, but I’m still out here helping others, taking care of myself and my family, doing my best to earn a living and get shit done. Your trauma can be real but that doesn’t mean it’s a reason to not work, or do whatever you need to be doing. Get off your ass and go get shit done.

One of the most powerful things about FreeCAD is that it is a fully scriptable CAD modeling system. This means you can write python scripts to do things.

They call them macros.

Which means they have plugins that do remarkable things. Just wonderful things.

The one I recently started using is the Gridfinity addon. Click the add button, and it will give you a bin. You can click some parameters to get exactly the shape you want.

If all you want is a bin, this works perfectly.

I want to make custom shadow cutouts in bins for some of my tools.

What I can’t do is select the face of the Bin and make direct modifications to it.

More learning to do.

For now, it is getting easier to get things done the way I want to.

When I heard this song on ,Fallout it struck a chord with me. My country is worth fighting for.