I went off script a bit with the flatbread. My grocery store usually has a pretty good pita or naan, but they recently started carrying an onion missi roti that I wanted to try. I believe it uses whole wheat, so it started off darker than your usual pita straight from the jump. I may have left it on the grill for a minute too long, but rest assured it was far from cracker-esque.

Before you go too far down the 3D printed resin route, look and see if laser cut acrylic might work for your needs. There are services where you upload a vector file, and they’ll cut out a piece of clear plastic with whatever shape and thickness you need. At that point you just need to sandwich the pieces together and apply some fasteners.

It varies between fish whether or not you want to keep the skin on while cooking. Some just turn to rubber if you try to sear them. Salmon skin comes out a bit like crispy chicken skin. It adds some nice texture and meaty flavor. But everyone’s got their own preferences.

Just mashing together shape primitives and Thingiverse parts in TinkerCAD is entirely underrated. It’s still primarily what I use unless I need particularly curvy corner.

Fusion360 and FreeCAD are the CAD versions of Photoshop and GIMP (if Photoshop had a restricted free tier). They’re both trying to be a legit piece of CAD software, so there’s a bit of a learning curve coming from TinkerCAD. I found it easier to “feel my way around” Fusion360’s UI. FreeCAD has a layer of, “How did Open Source devs decide to be different here?” on top of learning something new.

“One day I’m going to be a 70 year old man named Zac.”

I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.

That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.

It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.

Zac Gorman’s comic with the original dialog: https://magicalgametime.com/post/48470399171

The two hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors.

The games aren’t deep per se, but they just get a little tonally weird towards the end given the franchise’s cute presentation. You go from fighting a tree who won’t stop disrupting forest creatures to battling an unknowable alien incarnation of darkness who wants to take over all of reality. The series has a lot of, “Oh no, our friend’s been possessed by a manifestation of pure evil!” plots.

The signal to noise ratio has seemed particularly out of wack with Google lately. The amount of blog spam SEO nonsense that crops up into the top 4 results has been pretty noticeable.

I’m not sure it’s entirely a Google thing. Reddit’s decline has made it harder to find quick answers for, “My washing machine’s making this weird string of beeps?” Niche hobbies moving from forums to Discord chats means, “How do I safely remove a keycap without damaging the switch?” is becoming a pinned message in a server you have to hear about via word of mouth. Basically any technology troubleshooting topic has moved from a blog post / forum to a YouTube video. And a 10 minute long one at that. Gotta hit those higher ad tiers.

For what it’s worth, I’m starting the new year off giving Kagi a try. It’s a startup trying to make a paid search engine work. You get 100 free searches to give it a try. After that it’s $5/mo for 300 searches, or $10/mo for unlimited. I’m not sure I’ll sign up for it just yet, but it seems pretty nice. No ads, custom components for things like Stack Overflow and Reddit, and some other nice touches for people who care about search. Their image search actually has a “View Image” link in addition to the “View Page” link. It’s hard to quantify how “good” a search result is, but I’ve been pretty impressed with it so far.