Today, I know a lot of business people who do the kinds of things I would write software for using Excel or Access and macros.

But it's mostly boring business stuff.

My mom used to weave batch files and sidekick databases in to something resembling a computer program.

I used to go off about hypercard a lot.

It was a tool, scarcely more complicated than Powerpoint, that enabled anyone who chose to to make programs that do things.

I just realized that there's a decent chance many of you have not seen this and so I have to rectify that: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=XNrCU1wPqw8

You're welcome/I'm sorry.

We got our injection molder. Here is a piece pulled in glow in the dark HDPE.

It works.

We have to make some molds.

If we print them standing up, it's basically the same throughput, put with higher latency.

That is to say that we can print 5 or 6 at a time, but it will take 6 hours for them to print.

Once we have the resin settings dialed in, we can print a mold in about an hour.

We probably need to print them standing up for the best resolution, not laying down, but printing them laying down takes an hour, and printing them standing up takes 6 hours.

If we get sufficient resolution laying down, we can do 1 mold per hour per printer, or somewhere in the ball park of 14 per printer, or 42 per working day in the makerspace.

Our first attempt at printing a mold in our high temp resin didn't work out. We used some "recommended" settings for our slicer, but they were just wrong.

So I grabbed the settings recommended by the manufacturer, and we're printing again.

I had to head home, so I won't find out how it did until the morning.

If it didn't work, we'll adjust the settings and try a third time. It normally takes me about three or four tries to get a new resin dialed in.

But we're learning and getting better.

We should have a little keshi style robot tomorrow. Maybe also a keshi Commando Cody.

They should be made entirely out of recycled plastic, probably milk jugs.

If things go well, we'll be able to go from finished digital file to a production run of 100 or more pieces in two hours.

Regardless, the thing that is taking the longest right now is prepping the digital files for printing.

These models are mostly sculpted, rather than built from primitives. That means that our files are ... messy. Lots of extraneous polygons, too many voids, etc.

It's tricky to get these meshes to play nice when we slice them up, or when we try to subtract them from our mold template.

There are just Complicated geometries at work, you know?

Our plastic recycling operation is working surprisingly well!

Crush up some plastic, feed it in to the machine, out comes pellets suitable for injecting.

It's easy enough.

@ekaitz_zarraga Awesome! That sounds great, and I'm happy to pay someone who does not consider themselves a professional.

Have you done any digital sculpting, or all physical?

Do you want to do original characters, or work to recreate existing characters?

Anyway, to reiterate my original point:

I want to hire people to design toys to be manufactured using directly recycled plastics at my makerspace.

You can do original characters, or you can do public domain stuff (comic book characters, movie monsters, fairy tale creatures, etc.)

We're using 3D printing to make our molds, which means we can prototype very rapidly, and iterate often.

It also means we can go from finished model to a run of finished parts in less than 24 hours.

And since we also run a coffee shop that produces a fair amount of waste plastic, and we're recycling that waste plastic directly in to toys, we're keeping plastics out of landfills.

That's neat!

If this sounds like your kind of thing, shoot me a link to some work, or just send me a message, and we can talk about it.

If you only want to do one toy, great! If you want to establish an ongoing relationship, also great!

I need to move quickly, because I only have 6 weeks to get toys out before the biggest toy event I do every year, and then sales will slow dramatically until the holidays.

Our injection molding machine should be here tomorrow.

Our high temp resin for printing injection molds should be here tomorrow.

Our plastic shredder for pulping milk jugs in to usable pellets should be here tomorrow.

Toylanta is in 6 weeks.

So my next several weeks are going to be a flurry of designing molds, printing them, and running off toys.

That brings me to my big point:

Do you want to design toys and action figures to have (semi)professionally produced on very accurate equipment, in exchange for money?

I'm hiring one or more toy designers!

Previous experience in CAD or 3D sculpting is a plus, but if you're a physical sculptor we can probably find a way to make that work too?

I'm looking for freelancers, but I'm also willing to bring someone on more permanently (for tax reasons, you'd need to be in GA.)

We're doing Keshi style soft plastic caricatures of characters that we already do at the 3 3/4 scale.

Additionally, we're doing glyos style (I'll talk about glyos later, promise) renditions of all of our existing 3 3/4 figures, because the glyos system means that we can assemble a toy from smaller pieces.

Hi! My team is looking to hire some Technical Program Managers.

Are you a TPM? Do you want to work for a popular gaming and social company?

I saw someone say "The internet is forever" earlier and it kind of hurt.

The internet is barely for now, Data disappears all the time. Sites go down, DMCA takedowns. No seeders. No funding. Never archived. Harddrive failure. Redesign that breaks legacy URLs.

The internet is for never.

I am wasting a few minutes today trying to get my palm lifedrive to sync with my Pop_OS laptop.

I got jpilot to install, and I have pilot-xfer. But I have absolutely no idea which TTY the palm is on, and I can't seem to find a method of identification?