smackeyacky

I am definitely a casual gamer. I buy perhaps one or two games a year, fire them up, never finish them and move back on to working for a living. Owning an older Acer Nitro does make getting new games a little more attractive though. My favourite game of all time is the same one many people my age have: Deus Ex Deus Ex was something of an obsession for a while. I loved the game play. If you're not familiar with it, it's a near future role playing game where the protagonist can upgrade themselves with various modifications to make them a better fighter, or better hacker (broadly anyway). As you acquire different skills, your gameplay changes and how you approach each level changes. The first run through I really did treat it like an RPG, not sure whether my actions would affect the story. Most that was a carefully crafted illusion. The storyline does branch somewhat but mostly it's on rails with the rails hidden fairly carefully. On subsequent playthroughs of cou...

Older Cisco and HPE gear provides web interfaces that just don't work any more with modern versions of Firefox or Chrome. This isn't a massive deal: the preferred way to set up an old Cisco 3560 switch is to use the command line via a serial cable anyway. The Integrated Lights Out stuff on older HPE gear is a little more problematic. Enter the Chrome Internet Explorer extension: IETab To get around this, there is a great Chrome extension called IETab . Installation is simple and it works superbly! Here it is - enabling me to use the web interface on my office 3560, which is great as I can now enable POE where I need it. I will eventually work out how to use the CLI on the Cisco (I need some fancy VLAN stuff happening on there) but for now, we're golden.

In part 1, I set up the Anycubic Mono and printed out the demo model which went OK. Not perfect, but good enough as a learning experience. Now I want to move on to reproducing the existing SmartShepherd parts before modifying them. Step one: Turn a step file into something the Anycubic understands The overall process sounds simple enough: take your CAD file (generally a STEP file), export that as an STL file (which describes the surface of your model), import that into a slicer, get the slicer to generate a file tailored for your 3D printer. The original CAD models were built with SolidWorks, a fabulous bit of software that has a jaw-dropping pricetag. There are alternatives but all of them seem to suck. FreeCAD sounds great, but I can't get it to reliably select parts of my model without crashing. Varicad ($910USD per year with a 30 day trial period) seems much easier to use and respects the part grouping that was originally created in SolidWorks, unlike FreeCAD. Varic...

Some months back I asked other HAX alumni what their recommendations would be for a 3D printer. When based out of Shenzhen, we would send our models out for prototyping to a local 3D printing service that had a high quality resin based printer and the models used to come back almost useable. I didn't want to invest too much into this process - I am not a product designer and barely know my way around CAD software, but I do know what I want out of the next version of the product and figured an affordable 3D printer will help me get pretty close before I pass the new CAD model off to somebody who really knows what they are doing. The most common recommendation that came back was for the AnyCubic Photon Mono. Then, of course, SmartShepherd hit the busiest period of the year and I set that job aside for when things got quieter. Thankfully that also coincided with a sale from AnyCubic, so I pulled the trigger on a kit including an AnyCubic Photon Mono, a wash and dry station and 2k...