I love it mostly as well so far, the only sticking point on both my TVs is constantly having to re-enter my server IP address. It sticks around for a couple days, then it's gone again.

The top comment on the article itself has a great idea to map colors to textures so the blind could identify the colors as well. With the rise of cheap knock offs of LEGO these days, I wonder if one of those could do that.

Lego bricks are injection moulded, so if you put a texture on the sides of the bricks, it will either be impossible to get them out of the moulds or you'd have to have a complex moving mould to release them, which would probably massively slow down production

I know, right? Exceptions:

1. The texture on the top slope of roof bricks is a standard mold finishing (acid etch?) that works fine with mold release.

2. Headlight grille bricks in the 70s used to have texture, along with printing. I'm not in the know but I suspect the texture could be a byproduct of the printing machine that was used then. (I've only seen 2000s era trade machines that used inkjet printing post-moulding.)

3. The 1x2 brick with vertical grooves on one face, horizontal grooves on opposite face... this has been common since the 80s! 1979's Galaxy Explorer had two of them (I think). "Corrugated Steel" or spaceship "greebling" texture.

Trying to puzzle out that mold, I imagine you need a moving insert textured with the horizontal grooves.

Some sets have had dozens or hundreds of that brick (Star Wars), without a noticeable impact on price/piece?

1 - No problem, you can just make the texture not have any overhangs when viewed from the top

2 - I'm not sure what piece you mean :/

3 - That's a very good point that I hadn't thought of. That's piece 2877, and I'm not sure how that would be manufactured... You could potentially have one part on the "bottom" of the mould extend out with the horizontal grooves, and have the vertical grooves on the "top" half of the mould. When the mould separates, the horizontal grooves are locked into the bottom half of the mould, but the vertical ones slide out. Then, when the moulds are fully separated, the part can fall off the bottom half sideways. I hope that makes sense, I don't know how better to describe it. However, that only works if you can cleanly separate the moulds and then have the piece fall off, if the texture was on all sides then you wouldn't be able to separate the mould halves or extract the piece without a complex separating assembly

Yeah 1) is a very old technique. I forget whether the texture makes the part release more easily, or not. 2) This is what they look like now (90s or later) https://img.brickowl.com/files/image_cache/larger/lego-red-b... 3) I see on 2877 that the runner is on a top stud, just like other bricks. I don't know where I'd put the mold parting line, but I think it's usually in the plane of the brick. Stunning how Lego parts never have flash!

You think this one is tough, imagine how they make screw tops for plastic soda bottles!

I've seen a machine that makes 64 of them in one go. Inside the cap is a collapsible core, because the molded screw is all undercuts... the mold opens (horizontally), the cores collapse, and 64 caps fall into the bin. On top of that, it's two materials, over-molded!

Why can't you vary the height of the posts on the top of the piece? Or, add some nubbins on the posts/surface: isn't that what braille is?

You could vary the heights, but it would have an effect on "clutch power" (how well the bricks stick together), and Lego is very big on making sure that's up to standard. Its often what separates Lego bricks from clones. Also you'd struggle to make a kind of braille pattern on some pieces, like 1x1 bricks.

You could try to make the tops of the bumps textured, but that's where Lego puts their trademark, and I don't think they'd compromise on that, since its another protection against fake bricks that claim they're Lego but are worse. I also don't know how well you could feel textural differences in an area that small

Injection molding manuals long ago suggested putting some text like the trademark around the point the sprue enters. Camouflage. I had a little Aha moment when I read that and recalled noticing the dimple on old bricks.

With some exceptions (80s plates with sprue on short end) I expect to find the sprue mark on a corner stud.

Anyhow I'm imagining after-market ways to add texture.

I think that idea is worth testing. Putting a symbol on top of each stud. There could be a tactile symbol per color.

I imagine an aftermarket machine to heat-stamp this on. It would have to be very precise. Pressure would displace plastic and easily change the clutch power.

The only social stuff I interact with anymore is a private forum that's paid, which is by far the best discussion on the internet for me, and other than that some discord servers for games I play.

Global social networks are cancer no matter the protocol, that's my opinion after many years trying to carve out a use for them in my life. No matter how hard I try to curate my feeds, inevitably they make me more angry, sad, and combative in my online life.

I tend to agree, I’ve been thinking a lot over the years that this is the way we get out of this mess - lots and lots of smaller independently owned forums that splinter off onto small communities instead of monolithic single-identity mechanisms like social media & to some extent the fediverse.

> The only social stuff I interact with anymore is a private forum that's paid

Im curious when you say private, do you mean you can only post if you’re a member, or is all post content viewable only by members too? And if the latter, how did you discover the forum, and how did you decide to join?

Nothing is accessible to non members. It's only $5/mo and the fee is explicitly to filter out people who don't care enough about the subject matter to pay a nominal fee.

I found it because someone I followed in my Twitter days hated how nasty conversations inevitably got there, and wanted a place to have in depth, non-ephemeral conversation with like minded people.

These days you'd probably discover it via X where they still post, or their Substack.

I think many people here are overthinking it. OP is mostly talking about simple business website not huge platforms to host. Ddos protection is kind of irrelvant for such small projects. But anyhow there are so many local hosting companies (europe) for at least the last 10 years that provide a free ssl cert, one-click options for wordpress etc. It’s really not that complicated.

Irrelevant nerd myopia. They mostly just paid someone to do it (until they decided "wordpress guy" was not worth the marketing budget). If anything DYI is easier than ever.

Same phenomenon in the Philippines. Always bring full coverage clothes for the ride.

I didn't know freelance interim em was a thing, interesting role.

A lot of people think this until they become managers and discover all the bullshit they have to deal with from above and below. You're literally something of a human shock absorber, and in the analogy when the road is smooth there's not much to it, but when things get bumpy, you're the one taking the hits.

I don't know, I mean for most SaaS products this is true. But for something like Salesforce, the feature set is incredibly broad. The coding is not hard, so much as it is just an enormous volume of code.

It's honestly a good thing. People should have social outlets where things are forgotten, not memorialized for all eternity.

Sure, but it's definitely not the return of forums and the fact it is being used in place of forums will cause trouble down the line.

It's a bad replacement for forums.

The Discords I'm active in are all everyday conversations, like big group chats. Some of them are funny/interesting and occasionally someone gives useful advice, but the vast majority are forgettable.

I think that people should publicly share valuable information (like great conversations or useful advice) and some of their typical conversations (a context summary for outsiders and history). But privacy and ephemeral-ness make people more open. It may be better to have a space for most conversations where they're not expected to be saved, or (because "not expected" in Discord relies on weak evidence and today's norms) guaranteed not to be saved.

It's not really a good thing for technical discussion and support topics though. Information that others might hope to find by searching the web is no longer discoverable that way.

They are forgotten for all useful intents and purposes, but a malicious asshole can and will memorialize everything you say on it.

Without a trusted third party doing something like this on a large scale, it doesn't really matter - because 'nah, that's just a fake.'

My wife and I were recently talking about how we kind of luck boxed into dodging a bullet when we had kids (which was rather late). But it's no wonder so many people had or are having so many issues growing up in a public social media era. It's not only your right, but responsibility, to say, believe, and generally do stupid things as a kid and a young adult. It's an important part of growing up. Nobody should ever have to worry about this period in their life following them around forever.

> it doesn't really matter - because 'nah, that's just a fake.'

The point of this sort of thing is that whether it is fake or not doesn't matter. Because it is possible for someone to record a log of your activities, someone claiming they have an incriminating log of your activities will be believed (By a very large number of people).

It might not be believed in a courtroom, but for the other 99.99% of life, we do not apply the same standards for reviewing evidence.

Whether the platform keeps logs isn't important - the platform won't weigh in on this sort of stuff anyways, unless there's a subpoena.

Yes for social outlets. For niche hobbies? old photos of specific milling machines used in machine shops on board US navy vessels? For 80's european automotive restoration? For repairing and restoring retro-computing devices? Terrible. Terrible Terrible Terrible.

Tbf most old forums seem to have lacked photo hosting so all that’s left is photobucket placeholders

I've been playing Factorio and the base game is 100 hours easily, there are mods that ratchet it up to 500+. It's great brain exercise too, constantly refactoring, solving for bottlenecks, etc.

I would love to be that mentally spry in my old age. I'm not convinced I will be though.