#Makers#3DPrinting
I reached for my digital calipers the other day, and they were flickering like an LCD in a horror movie. Unsurprisingly, I did not have spare LR44 disc batteries on hand.
I decided "Eff this. I never want to need my calipers and have them not work because some battery died." So, I ordered these. Mitutoyo is a brand known for good precision, but I couldn't bring myself to spend the $100 to $300‡ for their more precise ones. These were only $35.
@masukomi We teach the physics students to use vernier scales. I challenge them to a race, them using digital calipers, me on manual. I put the battery on the desk as soon as they realise I've removed it, but most still faff around replacing it rather than just reading the scale, as we've just taught them to do.
@_thegeoff I have a Starret 359 Universal Bevel Vernier Protractor from the early 1920s. It's one of my favorite possessions. Partially because of its ridiculous accuracy that I can trust, and partially because it's a wonderful example of an elegant, and simple solution to a really hard problem.
I feel like, as a society, we've forgotten (or never learned) to value elegantly simple solutions to problems.
@_thegeoff programming is rife with this. We just reuse or build on top of whatever crap already exists, or rely on "fast enough" CPUs to compensate for our horribly inefficient code.
We rarely ask "how can I make this simpler? How can i make this easier to maintain?"
@masukomi I count myself lucky to be among the early days of the home computing generation. Maybe 7 when I first played with a ZX81. Old enough to have been interested in, if not completely understand, Assembly languages as a kid.
Funnily enough, currently working on an arts project involving binary in sand on a beach.
@_thegeoff@masukomi The 'apps' we installed on our Palm Pilots were the very model of concise, efficient coding, when program size was measured in tens, and only rarely hundreds of kB.
@talloplanic@_thegeoff i don’t want to go back to those limitations but i DO wish developers would think about their code as if RAM and CPU were resources you needed to conserve. All of our lives would be better for that.
@nyrath@masukomi@_thegeoff
After two years of COVID isolation, I started feeling the urge to wear my watch again. Mechanical with self-winding, started like a space cadet.
And I am restoring my habit of taking photographs, but I have started doing so with 1950s vintage cameras, or successors for the 1970s or 1990s with entirely mechanical operation. One lacks it's battery, but since it only feeds the light meter that is no existential problem.
@nyrath@masukomi@_thegeoff
Incidentally, I do think that a good deal of what we call industrial progress consists in decreasing quality, and that is usually a good thing.
Because most of the time, done correctly, it does not turn good things into crap, but rather turns insanely expensive and difficult things into things normal people can do or afford.
For instance: 17th-century pocket watches (for select aristocrats) vs 19th-century iron pocket watches (for workers).
@nyrath@masukomi@_thegeoff
I use cameras that are far older than me because I am a nerd. If we had to rely on that to populate Wikimedia Commons, we would be counting our offer in the thousands of files, not in the hundred of millions.
Don’t confuse quality with price, they’re not the same thing.
e.g. a disk drive in 1980 performed the same job as a disk drive today, yet a disk in 1980 cost about $80k in today’s $s (not a typo) and it would store only about 10 Megabytes. You can now get a 10 Terabyte drive for $200. And the quality/reliability of today’s drives is vastly better by any measure.
see “Quality is Free” by Philip Crosby or anything by Edwards Demming
@wa7iut@nyrath@masukomi@_thegeoff
That is not really representative of what I mean.
What we are seeing with computer is a micro-level view of something that in the long run will look like "in 1950 people did not have computers, and by 2050 they had them".
Quality is for instance how you would use a 1960s Hasselblad camera, as compared to a smartphone snapshot: the Hasselblad has much more artistic potential and durability, but demands a dedication that the smartphone does not.
The way I understand your use of “quality” is related to skill as an artist. I’m sure I’d take mostly bad pictures with a Hasselblad whereas Ansel Adams would probably take fabulous pictures with an iPhone.
btw, If you want control of an iPhone camera similar to what you have in a film camera, there’s software app for that, e.g., ProCamera
@wa7iut@nyrath@masukomi@_thegeoff
"People" did not have an IBM PC in 1981: just very, very few of them could afford it and had a use for them.
An iPhone is unusable after 5 years, and even at the bare physical level its sensor is so much smaller than medium format that there are enormous physical limitations to what it can do. A 1960 Hasselblad can absolutely roll now as it did it back then.
Planned obsolescence is a separate issue from both quality and functionality. A very important issue that only serves to enrich the maker at the expense of the customer, BUT a separate issue.
I tgink it can be reasonably argued that iPhones are good quality devices (well made and great tech) even if they’re soon useless
@photos_floues@wa7iut if you don’t separate them then it becomes impossible to appreciate something that’s truly high quality but guaranteed to be obsolete / non-functional soon
Examples:
Many Early computers, any cutting edge technology hardware, installation art, human lives
But digital calipers… you certainly can get by without them. It does take more skill to use analog calipers. There is beauty in their design and some fairly deep math behind Vernier scales. The feeling of competence and understanding something deep plus the tactile feeling of the fine machined metal is a good feeling. I see why you like the analog. What quality means is probably more clear with them too.
@wa7iut@photos_floues for me there’s also an aspect of trust. I can visually confirm that analog calipers are accurate. With the digital ones who knows.
For example note the discrepancy between the analog backup part of these cheap digital calipers and a decent ruler.
I doubt they even bothered to check the placement of that black plastic piece to the left of the display. Meanwhile the good analog calipers match up perfectly.
@wa7iut@masukomi
to be fair the notion of quality is quite hard to put one's finger on. It is one of the themes of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
Yes, we used to work closely with a group in Bristol, England and the common language was a huge barrier. 😂
OTH, in manufacturing, there are pretty good and universal definitions, i.e., quality is conformance to requirements, not goodness.
Whole books have been written about this. Japan was the original leader in this approach back in the 80s. Edwards Deming was a hero in Japan long before it caught on here in the U.S.
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