Analog hobbies
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@Karla said in Analog hobbies:
I like these and I'm not even into Disney Princesses:
That is a really good paint job, to go from an obviously Disney animated character to what almost looks like a real person in two steps!
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@Gurth said in Analog hobbies:
@Karla said in Analog hobbies:
I like these and I'm not even into Disney Princesses:
That is a really good paint job, to go from an obviously Disney animated character to what almost looks like a real person in two steps!
Well, two steps that they show.
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@Karla I'm guessing they do model trains of some sort as an analog hobby.
Why it was a video instead of an image I can't answer.
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@coderpatsy Probably a video conversion error. Longer video got cut. Maybe even during upload, if NodeBB does automatic conversions.
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@coderpatsy said in Analog hobbies:
I'm guessing they do model trains of some sort as an analog hobby.
Although it's not really an analog hobby, not entirely anyway:- Design the layout on the computer
- Run virtual trains around the layout to make sure they don't bump into buildings or scenery, or even lieu of building the physical layout at all if you don't have the room, money, and/or time
- Design buildings and other stuff on the computer
- 3D print buildings and other stuff
- DCC to control the trains
I can't currently use my 3D printer for the purpose for which I bought it, because
, so I am reviving my long-dormant model railroad hobby. My ex-wife and I did G and O scales when we had the house in Silly Valley; I wound up with all(?) the G scale stuff, and she got the O scale, which never really interested me. The printer has revived my interest in HO, which I used to do decades ago around high-school age. I still have that old stuff; some of which is still usable and some isn't.There's quite a bit of HO scale stuff available on Thingiverse and other 3D sites. I've downloaded and modified a couple of buildings, one of which I'm in the process of printing. (A section of the roof is in the printer at this moment.)
The one I'm currently printing is a house. At one time (from the styles, I'd guess c. 1910 or so), you could order house kits (lumber and other stuff cut to size, not including bricks and concrete) from the Sears catalog. Some guy has modeled a couple of these for 3D printing.
The other one I'm modeling will be one of the main industries to be served by the trains of my layout. It started life as a tabletop gaming miniature, which I scaled to HO size. This makes it a very large building, which I've had to cut into many pieces to be able to print it on my small printer. In figuring out how to hold those pieces together — specifically, how to support the roof, which I had to cut into 12 pieces — I created some really big (for HO scale) beams to support the roof sections. (The beams were big because the roof seams weren't straight; they followed the shape of skylights and ducts that were part of the roof, so the beams had to be wide to support both sides of the zig-zagging seams. Were, past tense; I've since modified the design, but kept the ideas that came from the original version.) The huge beams gave me the idea of using them to support a big gantry crane for moving really heavy objects inside the building. That, in turn, gave me the idea that the building should be a machine shop that makes oversize objects like ship propellers and engine blocks, which require that the business be served by train for transportation of both raw materials (big chunks of metal) and finished products; having industries that need trains is a key feature of creating a realistic model train layout.
I haven't started designing the layout itself yet. My model railroad CAD program is 10+ years out-of-date; I'll buy the latest version when my new computer gets here next week. (The old program is installed on my old XP machine that I haven't used in several years. I need to fire that up someday and pull the data off of it onto my new machine.) I also don't have room at the moment to build it. The spare bedroom where it would go is currently full of junk, mostly belonging to my daughter, who I hope will someday remove the crap elsewhere. Actually, I really hope to someday move to a house with a basement, which would be the ideal place to build a train layout.
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@HardwareGeek said in Analog hobbies:
Actually, I really hope to someday move to a house with a basement, which would be the ideal place to build a train layout.
Technically, model trains above ground level are toys. Hobbyism requires a basement. The same principle applies to D&D - a game must happen at least one of overnight and/or in a basement, or it's just a bunch of dorks having an argument.
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@Polygeekery said in Analog hobbies:
So tell me, what "analog" hobbies do you have?
Playing music. But I use digital synthesizers, so I guess that doesn't count.
I also have a ukulele that's definitely analog, but I've yet to learn how to play it
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@Gribnit said in Analog hobbies:
@HardwareGeek said in Analog hobbies:
Actually, I really hope to someday move to a house with a basement, which would be the ideal place to build a train layout.
Technically, model trains above ground level are toys. Hobbyism requires a basement. The same principle applies to D&D - a game must happen at least one of overnight and/or in a basement, or it's just a bunch of dorks having an argument.
Conversely, when it happens at a very high altitude (such as in the cloud) and mostly happens during working hours, a bunch of dorks having an argument is called "a web forum."
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@Zerosquare said in Analog hobbies:
@Polygeekery said in Analog hobbies:
So tell me, what "analog" hobbies do you have?
Playing music. But I use digital synthesizers, so I guess that doesn't count.
I also have a ukulele that's definitely analog, but I've yet to learn how to play it
I write music, but also using digital synthesizers. (I'd love to have somebody play it someday on real instruments, but I doubt that will happen.) I also have a piano that I play very, very badly, but it's digital, too.
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Can we listen to it anywhere?
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@Zerosquare I'd have to actually finish writing something first. (Brahms took over 14 years to write his first symphony; I've been working on mine for over 40.) And if I did have something publicly available, I probably wouldn't tell you guys, because it would have my real name attached to it. Maybe someday after I retire and don't care about being employable, I'll be less protective of my anonymity.
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@HardwareGeek said in Analog hobbies:
Brahms took over 14 years to write his first symphony; I've been working on mine for over 40.
So it's gonna be three times as good? Nice!
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@Zerosquare I wish! I'm almost entirely self-taught at music theory and composition, and frankly, I'm not very good at it. That's one of the reasons it's taken me so long.
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@HardwareGeek said in Analog hobbies:
it would have my real name attached to it
Not necessarily. You could just publish it on the internets somewhere using totally inconspicuous username such as - I don't know - ancientpendant55 (like and subscribe)
Maybe get down wit da yoof and publish 10 second snips on Tic Tac as soon as you compose them
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@HardwareGeek said in Analog hobbies:
I also have a piano that I play very, very badly, but it's digital, too.
My digital piano is broken :(
It plays fine, it's not an electronic problem, but there's something wrong with the key mechanism. When I release the keys they either get stuck or they jump back with a sharp thud.
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@Zecc Possibly, the keyboard simply needs a solid cleaning.
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@Gribnit said in Analog hobbies:
Technically, model trains above ground level are toys. Hobbyism requires a basement.
Having a model railway in the basement would be a bit difficult in my area. The ground water level would mess with the electrics.
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@GOG said in Analog hobbies:
@Zecc Possibly, the keyboard simply needs a solid cleaning.
A key isn't supposed to make a loud thud (like two rigid materials colliding) when being released, no matter how fast.
I haven't tried opening it, but I predict there will be some sort of spongy or velvety shock absorbing material that has fallen out of place, or that the keys are not longer hitting.
It's likely that a handier, less
ier, more knowledgeable about where electric shocks can be taken or not, person than I could open it and fix it by just realigning stuff inside it.
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@Gurth said in Analog hobbies:
@Gribnit said in Analog hobbies:
Technically, model trains above ground level are toys. Hobbyism requires a basement.
Having a model railway in the basement would be a bit difficult in my area. The ground water level would mess with the electrics.
Failing that, can you at least claim an attic?
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@PleegWat said in Analog hobbies:
@Gurth said in Analog hobbies:
@Gribnit said in Analog hobbies:
Technically, model trains above ground level are toys. Hobbyism requires a basement.
Having a model railway in the basement would be a bit difficult in my area. The ground water level would mess with the electrics.
Failing that, can you at least claim an attic?
I'm going to seize on this tangent to whine about my house. It has no attic. The trusses were designed partly so that there are no internal load-bearing walls, but also partly to prevent me from storing anything in the attic. Every truss has a couple of diagonal bits that make it hard to walk past, so storage isn't really doable: I'd have to have an access-to-house for pretty much every single truss section.
(There is an A/C and a furnace up there, but I imagine they weren't much fun to install.)
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@Gurth said in Analog hobbies:
@Gribnit said in Analog hobbies:
Technically, model trains above ground level are toys. Hobbyism requires a basement.
Having a model railway in the basement would be a bit difficult in my area. The ground water level would mess with the electrics.
Add fill
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@Zecc That is certainly possible.
I don't think electronic keyboard instruments have much in the way of high voltage stuff inside (nothing like tube amplifiers, for example; more like the inside of a desktop), so you could probably open it pretty safely and if it is a simple mechanical issue - fix it (I'm assuming it's no longer under warranty).
If you're not comfortable doing this sort of thing yourself, having it repaired by a qualified technician shouldn't be too expensive - especially if it is a simple mechanical fault.
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@PleegWat said in Analog hobbies:
Failing that, can you at least claim an attic?
I can, and I do for building my models in (which brings us neatly back to what my analog hobby is).
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@GOG said in Analog hobbies:
I don't think electronic keyboard instruments have much in the way of high voltage stuff inside
Well, aside from the spacebar, usually that has a farad cap.
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@HardwareGeek said in Analog hobbies:
There's quite a bit of HO scale stuff available on Thingiverse and other 3D sites. I've downloaded and modified a couple of buildings, one of which I'm in the process of printing. (A section of the roof is in the printer at this moment.)
The one I'm currently printing is a house. At one time (from the styles, I'd guess c. 1910 or so), you could order house kits (lumber and other stuff cut to size, not including bricks and concrete) from the Sears catalog. Some guy has modeled a couple of these for 3D printing.
It turns out this house kit appeared in a 1912 catalog, so I guessed pretty well at the date, as well as the one the modeler posted, which I assume was later, because the price was significantly higher.
It also turns out, having found a catalog image that I can actually read, that the modeler didn't follow the floor plan very accurately. The most obvious is that the chimney is in entirely the wrong place. It should, of course, be above the fireplace, which is in the living room, right about the center of the house. The modeler put it over the kitchen, where the floor plan shows the stove vent, at the far back corner of the house. The correct position and modeled position are in line from the viewpoint of the catalog picture of the house, but different distances. Fixing this would require modifying and reprinting the chimney and two roof sections (fixing the hole where the chimney is, and making a hole where it's supposed to be; the chimney needs to be modified because it's too tall for that location on the roof, and possibly the angle where it meets the roof may be different).
More subtly, but more annoyingly, some of the dimensions are off. This wouldn't matter for just the building exterior, but I'm also trying to model the interior. To get hallways to line up with doors, stairs and stuff, walls need to be in certain places, so I can't really make the living room any smaller. And that puts the fireplace where the chimney would have to run through the middle of the upstairs hall. I can shift the upstairs walls more easily than the downstairs walls, but not really enough to fix the chimney problem without making the rooms on the right side of the house absurdly small, because the modeler really shortchanged the overall width. All of which hardly matters, because you can hardly see any of the interior through the tiny, 1/87 scale windows, but I'm a perfectionist.
Another subtle thing that only shows up when modeling the interior is that the kitchen windows are too big. The bottoms are way below any reasonable counter height, and this is potentially visible through the windows, even at 1/87 scale. Fixing this involves modifying and reprinting one wall section (which is completely trivial, except for the clapboard siding, which will be a minor PITA) and the associated windows, window frames, and window "glass". Maybe a half-hour to fix and 6-ish hours to reprint (10-15 including the roof and chimney).
My model railroad CAD program is 10+ years out-of-date; I'll buy the latest version when my new computer gets here next week. (The old program is installed on my old XP machine that I haven't used in several years. I need to fire that up someday and pull the data off of it onto my new machine.) I also don't have room at the moment to build it. The spare bedroom where it would go is currently full of junk,
I've bought the latest version of the CAD program. I could, theoretically, have bought an upgrade for less money, but I have no idea where the old serial number is. I've measured the spare bedroom and drawn the outline of the the largest layout I could hypothetically put in there and still walk around, which gives me a good idea of where I want to put the big industrial building, but I haven't gotten beyond that, yet.
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@HardwareGeek said in Analog hobbies:
the chimney is in entirely the wrong place... Fixing this would require modifying and reprinting the chimney and two roof sections (fixing the hole where the chimney is, and making a hole where it's supposed to be; ... the kitchen windows are too big... Fixing this involves modifying and reprinting one wall section ... and the associated windows, window frames, and window "glass". Maybe a half-hour to fix and 6-ish hours to reprint (10-15 including the roof and chimney).
I fixed these and reprinted the wall and roof sections (the second roof section is still printing). The roof sections are pretty big and take up most of the printable area; I can fit a few small things on the printer build surface with one, but not the kitchen wall. So I tried rotating it 90°, standing it on its end, because it has a smaller footprint that way, and I could fit it and the walls into a single print run. (A second run is still needed for the other roof section.) It needs lots of supports, no matter which way it's oriented, and there's no apparent reason it shouldn't have printed in that orientation just as well as in the usual orientation, but for some reason it did not like it at all. It looked more like the roof of an old, collapsing barn than the roof of an inhabited, well-maintained house.
So I used the walls from that print and printed the roof again, with other, smaller stuff filling the remaining printable space.I am also learning more about what my printer can and can't do. I'm printing some of the interior walls, and printing walls that are accurately scaled down from their IRL dimensions (1.52 mm thick) is possible, although they're too thin to successfully print holes through the walls to run wires/fibers for lighting. Doors, however scale down to about 0.44 mm thick; that's too thin. They print, but they're so thin, they're flexible and warped. Hmm, maybe the dimension compensation I turned on for the airbrush adapter is thinning them more than necessary; I should try turning that off.
