Jay McGavren

ChatGPT tries, and utterly fails, to have a conversation with itself. www.instagram.com/p/DPKXMVEjz9...

A pile of black t-shirts. Tags say "Kirkland".

Thanks to @heatsynclabs.bsky.social , I've got access to a vinyl cutter. Thanks to Costco, I've got 6 blank t-shirts. Time to start some trouble. 😁

Need a lot of plywood for your #LaserCutter on short notice? This brand is my new go-to! Just over $1 per square foot, free shipping. Cuts cleanly. Arrived a bit warped but so do other commonly-recommended brands. www.amazon.com/dp/B09W22LS2X (Not an affiliate link, I just like the product!)

Andre is working on his RC Tug Boat!

Lin updated his 4X4 LED cube! His next project might be an 8X8 cube!

Two icosahedrons folded from pink cardstock. The cuts and perforations look perfect (because they were done on a vinyl cutter). The folds, well, they could be smoother; they're a bit uneven in places.

D20 nets: A lot of copy/pasting of tabs and slots. Inkscape was a HUGE help getting everything aligned right.

And it looks like it's all working! Can surely be made even easier to assemble, but even now they hold together nicely with zero glue!

(Very small) parasitic worm that uses electrostatic charge to attract itself to prey in midair. Fascinating. news.emory.edu/features/202...

Same icosahedron net as before, same tabs, but the bottoms of the little hooks are now slightly separated from the surface (whereas they were flush before).

The fix works great! 🎉

When the #VinylCutter gives me a flawless print, it still feels like winning a prize from a claw machine.

An icosahedron net. Tabs portrude from two edges. One tab has a slot in it to hold the smaller tab opposite it.

The same icosahedron net, cut into cardstock on a vinyl cutter. The tab and slot from the previous screenshot are shown joined together. The join is very smooth and all the angles are correct.

On the second prototype of my tab-and-slot design for assembling cardstock icosahedrons. This is showing real promise! The join is incredibly smooth. No glue needed!

Unfortunately it's also a pain to assemble. I couldn't get the hooks on the tab to catch. I know a fix, just need to implement...

all of this could have been avoided
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nC2p...

This controller won't fit in a pocket, but it's otherwise awesome! And I can leave my phone's case on while playing. This may wind up with a permanent home in my backpack. www.8bitdo.com/ultimate-mob...

Keep an eye out for sales; I scored mine for $25!

People are NOT rescuing their own content from old floppy disks. I know I haven't been. And they are fast becoming unreadable!

www.bbc.com/future/artic...

Jay cut some Spiral Pentagons!

Took this class a month ago and have already accomplished SO much. Cannot stress enough how empowering laser cutter skills are!

You can do laser-y things like cutting plywood and acrylic, but your skills (and designs) ALSO port nicely to vinyl cutters, meaning you can do cardstock and stickers too!

*Sometimes* a Slack ping is about a production failure. Which means, for some users, *every* Slack ping is stress-inducing.

Slack really, really needs a way for considerate senders to mark a message with "this is not urgent". The system could avoid pinging the recipient even if their Do Not Disturb is off, and the recipient would know "I can save looking at this for later".

Plywood scrap cut into a heart shape on a laser cutter and colored with red crayon.

Local schools are on fall break. Time for an impromptu #lasercutter and crayon session! #hackerspace #art

A MacBook with a dark gray case on it. Covering most of the case is a single white vinyl sticker, a series of finely-cut spiraling hexagons nested one inside the other.

My new laptop case. Sticker was cut on my second-hand Silhouette Portrait 3.

I didn't feel like waiting for my transfer tape order to come in, so I used a medium-grip cutting mat to do the transfer instead. Worked fine!

You've heard "Measure twice, cut once". More broadly: consider whether an action is DESTRUCTIVE. Does it permanently and irretrievably alter things?

Are there NON-destructive actions you can try first? If they fail, just undo them!

Destructive actions better succeed, or you're screwed!

Also, Inkscape downscales (or upscales) the stroke width proportionally when you scale a shape, possibly leaving you with struts too thin for the laser cutter. To fix this, you can select all your shapes, and set the stroke back to a single width on all of them at once. (Prior to "stroke to path".)

STOP! Don't follow the prior tutorial! Instead, use a regular shape with no fill, and a stroke width matching the width you want your laser cut's struts to have. Then use "stroke to path" and you'll have a pair of paths separated by the width of your former stroke; that's where the laser will cut.

Wow. SendCutSend just quoted me $230 for a 500mm plywood version of one of my spiral artworks. Maybe they're affordable for other use cases, but they're not for mine.

People tolerate the existence of Caps Lock because no one ever died from it. (That I know of.) They shouldn't tolerate it.

This is why the Caps Lock key should not exist. Shift is a quasimode; your hand is actively on the key, so you are never surprised when CAPITAL LETTERS come out of your keyboard. Caps lock is a mode. You or someone else can set it and forget about it, and you can find yourself ACCIDENTALLY SHOUTING.

Metal lathe policy: "If the key is in the chuck then your hand is on it." Because the key can become a lethal projectile if the lathe is started with the chuck key in.

You won't forget the key if you are literally touching it. Anything else is leaving it to chance.

www.reddit.com/r/Machinists...

Cardstock one was 2 minutes and 40 seconds. But it sprang back apart because I applied the glue stick too hastily and sparingly.

Speed running these isn't the point, obviously, but it's the best proxy I have for ease of assembly.

Next step: tabs and slots so the glue is unnecessary.

Pre-cut (and pre-scored the folds of) an icosahedron net on plain copy paper on a Silhouette Cameo 3. Took 4 minutes to fold and glue it together. Would like to get that time down further if kids are to do this.

Cardstock version was definitely nicer, but can teachers afford cardstock?

I've been using the laser cutters at my local makerspace to cut lots of spiral shapes like this: [Photo of 3 plywood pieces, each with a spiral formed out of a different repeating shape laser-cut into it.] If you want to do the same, you might open Inkscape, make a shape, and scale it and rotate it: [Screenshot of solid pentagons, each one slightly rotated and smaller than the last. The pentagons are completely filled in.] Here's the catch. Laser cutter software's kinda dumb - all it can do when cutting is trace the paths (outer lines) of your shapes. So you could feed the above into it, and it would cut it, but what we'd end up with is the smallest pentagon and a bunch of tiny obtuse triangle shards, rather than a connected shape. In my pieces, the wooden "lines" are actually part of the solid shape; I made them by creating a sort of shape frame using a "difference" operation and then scaling and rotating that. Like so: [Screenshot of: - Two solid squares, one nested inside the other, labelled "overlapping shapes". - A hollow square with a thick, filled-in edge, labelled "difference". - A spiral pattern made out of these hollow squares, nested and rotated. The places the squares are touching are still separated by strokes. Labeled "transform: rotate and scale repeatedly". - The same spiral, but all the squares are now fused into a single shape. No strokes are visible at the places the squares touch. Labeled "union". ] It has to be done this way (as far as I can tell); even if you used a stroke style multiple millimeters thick, the laser would still just cut a 0.1mm line at the center of the stroke. So be sure strokes are drawn on BOTH sides of the wooden struts you want! --Jay McGavren, September 2025

I made this hasty #LaserCutter tutorial for the spiral shapes I've been doing. If you want your finished laser cut to consist of thin lines, the trick is not to draw thick strokes; you actually need paths on *both* sides of your lines!