Sunday, September 2
Scratch-Built 3D-Printer Goes Back to the Roots of the Hobby
It’s so easy and so cheap to order things like CNC routers and 3D-printers off the shelf that we can be forgiven for forgetting what was once involved in owning machines such as these. It used to be that you had no choice but to build your machine from the ground up. While that’s less true today, it’s still the case if you want to push the limits of what’s commercially available, and this huge scratch-built 3D-printer is a good example of that.
It’s not exactly a fresh build – [Thomas Workshop] posted this last year – but it escaped our notice at the time, and we think the three-part video series below that details the build deserves a look over. When we say scratch built, we mean it. This machine started off as a bundle of aluminum and steel stock. No 80/20 extrusions, no off-the-shelf linear rails – just metal and a plan. The build was helped considerably by a small CNC router, which also had that DIY look, but most of the parts were cut and finished with simple hand tools. The resulting gantry allows an enormous work volume 40 cm in each dimension, with a heated bed that uses four heat mats. We were impressed that [Thomas] got the build just far enough to print parts that were used to finish the build – that’s the hacker spirit.
It’s perhaps not the biggest 3D-printer we’ve seen – that distinction might go to this enormous 8-cubic foot machine – and it certainly can’t print a house. But it’s an impressive build that probably cost a whole lot less than a commercial machine of similar capacity, and it’s got that scratch-built cred.
Thanks to [Baldpower] for the tip.
Gallery: Exploring Nintendo’s flagship New York City store
Growing up, I loved exploring the heavily branded shopping experiences of the Disney Store and the Warner Bros. Studio Store. These days, I can get a more tech-oriented version of the same basic concept at one of Apple or Microsoft's many retail locations. But to get Nintendo's version of that kind of retail wonderland, I have to go to the company's one and only Nintendo World Store location, in New York City's Rockefeller Center.
For locals, Nintendo World is just another tourist trap. But for hundreds of tourists every day, the half-museum, half-arcade, half-expansive gift shop (yup, three halves) is a kind of mecca to pay homage to the company and its creations. The same appeal might not translate if Nintendo expanded the concept to every mall and shopping center in the country. That said, we think the depth and breadth of multi-generational Nintendo fandom could probably sustain more than a single location in one city.
Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Between Cintiq and streaming, animation is thriving—ask Titmouse’s Chris Prynoski
AUSTIN, Texas—Chris Prynoski remembers paper (and, no, that sentiment is not as absurd as it seems). The animation veteran has been in the field for more than two decades now with early stuff so beloved (he directed an episode of Daria and sequences of Beavis and Butthead Do America) that it now comes up in reboot conversation. "We usually get a call every couple years about a Daria reboot, and it never happens," Prynoski tells Ars offstage at the recent RTX Animation festival. "But this time they made an announcement, so perhaps it’s more serious."
Since then, however, both animation at large and Prynoski's role specifically have changed. He now leads perhaps the best studio in the business, Titmouse, which Prynoski also co-founded alongside his wife Shannon back in 2000. The company works on seemingly everything: kids' shows (Niko and the Sword of Light), cult classics (Metalocalypse), high-profile reboots (TMNT), video games, ads, virtual reality, music videos, movies, and generally just the hottest cartoons at any given moment (Netflix's Big Mouth anyone? Season two starts in October). No one working with him starts with paper these days.
"The fundamentals of animation haven't changed a lot. When I started, you were drawing on pieces of paper; people were using computers to scan but colored in ink and paint," Prynoski says. "Before my time, it was the big ol' Oxberry cameras. But it pretty quickly got taken over by computers. Now, hardly anybody uses pieces of paper... Anything we do starts on [Wacom] Cintiqs, which are basically big computer screens you can draw on. But the main thing is still that artistic skill you have to develop—whether it's on a piece of paper or computer screen—which has stayed pretty similar."
Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Branch out your SQLite Database with LiteTree
Whether you want some quick and dirty data storage, or simply don’t have that heavy requirements for your local database system, SQLite is always a good choice. With its portable single-file approach, bindings to all major languages, and availability on systems of all sizes, it is relatively easy to integrate a SQLite database in your undertakings. And if you tend to develop directly in your production environment, you may be interested to hear that the folks at [aergo] made this a lot more flexible (and interesting) by adding Git-style branching to the SQLite engine.
Similar to Git, each database operation is now stored as a commit with a unique id as reference point, and new branches will keep track how they diverge from their parent reference point. This essentially lets you modify your data set or database schema on the fly, while keeping your original data not only untouched, but fully isolated and functional. Unfortunately, merging branches is not yet supported, but it is planned for the near future.
In case you don’t see much use for git-alike functionality in a database, how about the other way around then: using Git as a database, among other tricks?