Alt account for @mcdanlj
1st Fedora Project Lead. Co-author Linux Application Development. Sr. Director Engineering Pendo. Ex-{Linux Journal, Red Hat, rPath, SAS}. Christian. Father. Maker (including machining, 3D printing, and electronics). Books. Classical music. Aviation (PP-Inst-SEL). https://musings.danlj.org/
I play wordle; my wife also plays many of the offshoot games. As we waited for our takeout to be ready, I asked, "Want to play one of your weirdles?"
We now have a general family name for these games, and I'm newly familiar with squaredle.app — in which I get lots of archaic words before noticing many of the words in current use.
I went looking this morning and discovered that you can buy a kit which *replaces* a stepper driver and turns a normal stepper motor drawing up to 3A into a closed-loop stepper, for less than $20. That's a pretty low incremental cost for going closed loop!
https://forum.makerforums.info/t/motion-detection/85550/4?u=mcdanlj
This is essentially how switchless homing works; the trinamic drivers can measure back-EMF when you hit a hard stop. But this requires a hard stop; you are exceeding a threshold for a simple measurement. You could in theory treat a stepper as a quadrature encoder and thus know both direction and distance of a move, but the generated voltage is proportional to speed, and so the slower the stepper moves, the smaller the signal. Switchless moving is moving the motor at a known speed and knows what...
Why does social.makerforums.info exist? Why have both Discourse and Mastodon at Maker Forums? Do you want to join us?
https://forum.makerforums.info/t/introducing-maker-forums-social-mastodon/85533?u=mcdanlj
What if Twitter didn’t have to be at twitter.com? What if you could follow your facebook friends on twitter, and vice versa? Email works between different services run by different companies because of standards for how email is formatted and how it it sent. Why can’t the same be true for social networking? Maybe someday? The future is now! We have those standards,¹ and they work. Just like email between different providers, social networks can now cross those boundaries. This whole collection ...
I've been working on a design for a keyway cutting tool for my lathe, based on a morse taper 3 quick-change tool holder. I finally learned that I can make hidden line animations in FreeCAD that make the inside workings clearer, so here's one to enjoy. ☺
https://forum.makerforums.info/t/keyway-cutter-design-and-project/85441?u=mcdanlj
This project is a bust. I think it’s a combination of small amounts of bad implementation and large amounts of bad design. I did cut that 5mm keyway, but there were complications. It turns out that the reamer I used for the sleeve wasn’t really a tight enough tolerance for the tool rod, and it wiggles. Not very much, but when you are trying to take off about .001" at a time, it really doesn’t take much. There’s a bit of play in my compound. Not much, but trying to use this, every little bit ma...
I turned my notes about how I set up Mastodon on CentOS 9 derivatives with Docker into something I hope is useful for others.
https://musings.danlj.org/2022/06/04/mastodon-on-centos-9-derivatives.html
I recently found myself setting up a Mastodon server. Elon Musk threatening to buy Twitter reminded me how fragile it is to live in walled gardens controlled by others. I know something of what it takes to run large-scale applications in the cloud. It’s my job. (Senior Director of Engineering, Platform, at Pendo.) I have some clue what it costs, and I’m not upset at being presented advertisements in Twitter. I even like being recommended content that I didn’t know that I wanted to find!
It would be really awesome to be able to follow `@[email protected]` and see new posts (with threaded comments) from the forum throughout the fediverse. It wouldn't have to be bidirectional to be useful.
Anyone want to write a plugin for Discourse to enable that? It's mostly back-end work, and there are patterns between the RSS and chat integrations in Discourse that might make this a reasonable project for someone who doesn't know Ruby but is interested to learn.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/federation-support-for-discourse/90921/59?u=mcdanlj
This. Possibly also integrating remote “Like” actions. I have noticed that the Fediverse has become noticeably more active and more populous since Elon Musk started his Twitter takeover bid. On the Discourse instances I run (three of them at the moment) I’d love to be able to use Mastodon (in my case) to be able to follow and “boost” them to a wider audience, to make the information on my instances more accessible and visible to a crowd of others who might care. All of my instances are for ex...
It was interesting getting Mastodon up and running on AlmaLinux 9.
The CentOS 9 derivatives boot amazingly fast. At least half of my boot time to shell is waiting for grub! That's awesome for reducing the overhead of maintenance.
I ended up using Docker, which probably makes it take a few seconds longer to boot than if I just ran it all from source, but means I can manage all the services separately. It definitely makes tootctl take longer to run.
It's interesting having two (for the moment) Mastodon accounts running. i have been at @mcdanlj for a few years, and now also am at @mcdanlj — which means that I get to see how well notifications flow around the fediverse, at least between those two accounts.
I'll *probably* end up redirecting my account at mastodon.cloud to the one at social.makerforums.info since I run that one. But I'm new to this running Mastodon thing! ☺
Michael K Johnson
Maker Forums Admin