The Free Universal Construction Kit
fffff.at298 points by robinhouston 4 days ago
298 points by robinhouston 4 days ago
In case the authors are here, the first sentence contains the bytes e2 80 94 which would be UTF-8 for an em dash, but it has been reinterpreted as 3 bytes using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252#Code_page_layout and shown on the page as —. Further down, there's a lot of similar errors such as a single right quote (U+2019) in K'nex. Firefox seems to have first removed their encoding configuration menu in version 89, then introduced a new button in version 91, and that one is disabled now as well so there's no fixing this user-side it seems :/
Edit: ah the page is from 2012-03-19, from the <meta property="article:published_time"> tag
This is probably the case of a bodged migration from one CMS to another.
My blog suffered the same, and going through loads of old pages to check and fix them just isn't worth the effort.
The archived version from 2012 is showing the characters correct. So probably some migration like you said.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120319180000/https://fffff.at/...
The website itself has been closed since 2015 according to the front page.
Which also suffers from encoding problems making weird characters show up.
But which was showing the characters the way it should on August 1st 2015 when the site was closing down.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150801234212/http://fffff.at/
Who wants to bet that at some point after the closing of the site, they switched over from a live CMS to a static copy of the site and in the process of doing so things got a little screwed up when exporting data from a MySQL database with the different encoding weirdnesses that can sometimes occur with MySQL and how the db schema was set there.
> Why shouldn’t we be able to?
I have no idea why but my brain immediately interpreted this as a Scottish accent, like ‘shouldnae’. Weird.
This thing is from 2012. It's a set of printable models for toy parts that allow interconnecting with a bunch of different construction toys, like Lego and K'nex.
I remember thinking this was pretty subversive and cool back then. My own experience in 3D printing since that time has taught me that there is no way that these parts can ever be printed accurately enough to actually work. It didn't get much traction on the Thingiverse files either.
I did not expect to wake up to se fffffat on hn. God i miss them all so much.
These kits can have extraordinary longevity. I was playing with Lincoln Logs in 1967. Turns out they got started in 1918. Lego bricks have been around since 1945. The moat created by seriously delighting your customers at a young age is large.
It is a really nice concept. I had never heard of it. But then as GenX at young age I played with Fishertechnik [0] more than with Lego. Around since 1966 [1].
> The moat created by seriously delighting your customers at a young age is large.
I'm not sure that's enough: most kids wouldn't be able to tell a genuine Lego brick from a knock-off.
(Lego famously has insane quality control on their tolerances. But I haven't had any trouble with knock-off bricks so far either.)
I'm sure that Lego still captures virtually all of the revenue in this category, no?
Don't forget Erector Sets.
I spend untold hours failing to build a cable tramway between my mother's dresser and bed.
But at least now I'm an expert at pylon design!
> The moat created by seriously delighting your customers at a young age is large.
I wish Meccano would get its shit together. I can’t see anything I want on their limited site and there is so much cool stuff that could be made.
The idea send wild, it reminds me of the katamari video game where you roll up assorted stuff.
Any zometool aficionados here
Zometool rules!
I run workshops about the use of modular systems in facilitating non-expert participation in architecture. One I did (at the CAAD Futures Conference in 2023) was with Zometool. It was a blast and really successful.
In preparation I also got to interview the late great Steve Baer, inventor of the Zome (among many other things - seriously look him up, he's one of the most brilliant people of the past 100 years imo). It was a huge honor.
The book chapter the organizers were supposed to do about the conference workshops never materialized (hrmph), but I've done other little collaborative build projects since, so one day I'll document them all together.
yeah I dig it a fair bit. It's good for making jigs for carpenting geometric stuff. Those funny angles.
Very cool. Do two copyright infringements (one on each side of the adapter) cancel each other out? I really like it!
There is some interoperability provision to patents and copyright in European union if I remember correctly but I don't know how broad they are and if they apply to this.
At least Lego‘s patent on the bricks expired. You can’t make mini figures but bricks shouldn’t be a problem
Well done indeed
I hope that Lego (not lawyers ofc) would appreciate such creativity approach and hire creators. (E.g. similar to acquihire of OpenClaw creator by OpenAI.)
How many of us do think this way?
I am always jealous (in good way) when I see similar projects.
Indeed Amazon is chock full of shitty Chinese Lego ripoffs. The bricks do indeed fit together but the quality is abysmal.
Super cool, lock-in is very real. We are overflowing with Duplo and Lego sets because I just don't want to deal with another system. There are, of course, other models on Thingiverse, Printables, etc., but knowing these are properly designed to fit and work is a huge plus. Cudos to the team!
No Construx? I built everything out of those as a kid.
Ditto. My kids are still pretty young, and my old Construx are one of the favorite building toys.
Neat idea, but as an adult who builds little machines out of Lego Technic for fun sometimes, the adapter selection seems very limited. In order to make this idea "practical" you would need adapters with a variety of sizes, shapes, and orientations. I guess I'm not the target audience - I can definitely see this being cool for children.
That’s the joy of 3d printing. You can adapt these to any adapter if you need it.
Wow, Tinkertoys, I still remember how the wood smelled and the big drum it came in.
(2012)
When I was a kid I used to rate my uncles and aunts based off who got me Legos or Megablocks.
Idk how I’d feel if they got me this.
I was so confused recently, when I bought a toy car kit from some German brand which cost 25 euro and came with the pieces all joined together straight from the injection mold, so you had to twist them off one by one, and then the little injection spikes stabbed your fingers while you worked.
Bought an almost equivalent set from Lego (stab-free!) for 9 euro. How does that pricing make sense haha
With such kits you are generally supposed to remove the parts from the runners with nippers and then sand those nubs down.
Economy of scale, Lego can invest the billions(?) in machines and molds that don't leave connection points (?), partially by reusing pieces between sets.
That's an awesome project. I'm sure there are many kids that have been gifted LEGO knockoffs that are not compatible with legos from adults that didn't know any better. A similar "interop" project for those would be great
Almost all (back then, I hear the clone quality is much higher now) were "compatible" but had little to no clutch power, a wall built with some of them would inevitably break at the clone bricks.
Crappy tolerance in the clone parts. I hear the clones got much better now.
> Note: all units are in inches.
Not so universal as I'd hoped, but I love the concept and the organization behind it, Free Art and Technology Lab.
Is this complaint just for the sake of complaining? You print out the pieces, they connect various toys together. The units could be light-years for all it matters.
There's something about the internet that makes people want to moan in public about nothing.
Whenever I see someone in a current British television show use "inches" or "feet," I'm reminded of the HN metric mafia that insists that the United States is the only place in the world that uses imperial units.
Even Wikipedia will tell you that's false.
Every post/comment is selecting across 100,000+ people worldwide for the individuals most likely to complain about it.
There’s no other place on earth I can invite 100,000 people to disagree with me. Exception is maybe a public office. (Which the vast majority of people shy away from, for just this reason)
There's this universal constant 2.54 you can use it to divide any value in inches and badabing you get the value in centimeters
up until very recently, the only units that made it even remotely "universal" was US customary units. Or, as Arduino Vs Everyone on youtube says: "units that have gone to the moon."
Now, i speak larger measurements in metric if i think the person i am talking to understands or doesn't care; but short measurements i still use "quarter inch" or "teenth" or "thou" pronounced like "wow", from the beginning of "thousandth".
I know km, liters - i drink at least 3 liters of liquid a day, if not 4, but i drink it 1 quart beverage receptacle at a time, odd how that fits!
is it really so hard to have a ruler with both measurements? I have a ruler that lets you convert from font point to two other measurement units to inches, for page layout.
I'm american, from the '80s, and we never used metric day-to-day.
the US will be US customary units basically forever. because we're an absolutely massive geography, and there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of mile markers, speed limit signs, "distance to" signs, speed warning signs, gas stations, etc.
So 2026 is the year where i finally say: Please, please, shut up about this. No one cares.
> is it really so hard to have a ruler with both measurements? I have a ruler that lets you convert from font point to two other measurement units to inches, for page layout.
The problem with the imperial unit system rather is that it does not form something "to build more complicated units out of".
For example: if you want inch (in) as a unit, why not have "in^2" as a corresponding small area unit and "in^3" as corresponding volume unit?
Additionally, there should be constant/regular conversion factors between the various subunits of a measure, i.e.
10^-3 km = 1 m = 10 dm = 100 cm = 1000 mm = 10^6 µm = 10^9 nm = ...
1 lea = 3 mi = 24 fur = 240 ch = 5280 yd = 15840 ft = ...we don't use leagues or furlongs. I know what a chain is because i have one, but that's specifically to measure land against a plat map. Every location in this country is based off common reference locations (there's a literal marker on the ground), with only chains and angles to delimit things (generally).
Read that last part again, because they use GPS to determine if the marker has moved, and that takes X minutes to quiesce. you can't take X*Y minutes to check each chain mark and angle.. not all land is rectilinear. we have a bit less than ten million km^2 of land in this country.
I'd reckon that maybe 1% of Americans know what a league is, as in the definition. Less for "furlong", less for "chain".
This is how these conversations go, usually. It's completely pointless, most of the people here will never interface with something where this matters. I'm a few decades old - 2.25 score years old, to be accurate. My wife knows what a score is, and how many feet in a mile, which i can never remember; by the by, it's about 5300 feet.
like Celsius, the metric measurements don't "mean" anything directly to a human. a meter is how fast light travels in 1/speedoflightinmeterspersecond. water boils at 100 and freezes at 0. compare to ~100F "roughly median body temperature", "roughly the length of an adult foot", and "roughly the length of the middle bone in your thumb".
yes, for "science" using units that convert is great, one of my favorite things to read is the Frink language unit file for that reason. Metric is cute and ostensibly "well-defined". great, use it.
you're not getting ~400,000,000 people to switch, potentially ever. The sheer cost is astronomical. a speed limit sign, just the sign is ~$22. The total cost of install could be from $500 to $3000. Per speed limit sign. There's at least 10,000 speed limit signs on interstates alone. [nearly] Every single mile of every single highway and interstate in the US has a reflective sign stating what mile it is - except for mile 420, i'm not sure why, that'll be missing but there will be a 419.7 mile marker. weird.
> In 2002, a contractor installed just over 50 miles’ worth of markers on I-78 and Routes 22 and 33 at a cost of $230,000, or about $4,500 per mile. Today, [...] $6,500 per mile, said PennDOT spokesman Ron Young.
and
> As of 2022, [...] the Interstate Highway System, which has a total length of 48,890 miles (78,680 km)
and that's just interstates. We have expressways, freeways, spurs, feeders, highways, state roads that use mile markers. Speed limit signs vary in distance, but figure 2 miles per (raelly 1 per mile since they're on both directions of travel, and usually there's 2 per direction, one on either shoulder) on nearly every commute surface. we have ~2,600,000 miles of paved roads, and a bit over 4,000,000 miles of roads, total, in the US - that's 6.437376e+6 kilometers, or 21 lightseconds in a vacuum, or 32 lightseconds in fiber optic cable. 32000ms ping, awesome.
Every house in the US is built with 16" on-center framing for the walls. we're not going to switch to "406.4mm on center", because our sheetrock, plywood, etc are all 48"x96".
every other country that switched did it 70+ years ago, has less people, or is drastically smaller.
like i said, rudely, but now politely, give it up, we're staying with our US customary units.
I can't take seriously anyone who measures butter by volume
I've been cooking for something like a quarter century, for multiple people, and i have never once, in my life, used a kitchen scale. I have one for doing METRIC measurements of ratios of liquids for other uses, but not once for cooking.
A stick of butter is a quarter pound. it doesn't matter though, because the butter is marked in "recipe increments". if you melt it, you can use "tablespoons" to measure it, literally.
eta: i haven't even used measuring cups or spoons for anything in like a decade, unless i am making bread or bread-like things.
I feel like the only way to summon the corporate lawyers faster would be to put a Mickey mouse on the box.
Mickey mouse is in the public domain, at last!
I think they would have a very strong case that using the mouse on a product is likely to confuse consumers about the origin of the product and therefore infringe on their trademark.
Nah, Disney seems to be genuinely letting it go. Amazon and other sites are flooded with Steamboat Willie merchandise at this point.
In fact I play cornhole competitively, and last year I picked up a set of Steamboat Willie themed bags:
https://www.logiccornhole.com/products/steamboat-willie-colo...
If you go to the homepage (or look at the banner) the project is shut down since 2015.
I'm disappointed this wasn't a joke about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_property
I’m disappointed that VEX IQ didn’t make the list of connections. For a System they have a lot of well thought out parts, they need help on the decoration side and smaller gear patterns.
Tell your kids about FUCK, the most fun way to play with them bricks...
I was going to say something about the choice of acronym for the project, but, well, a couple people figured it out. :D
Do you mean leaving them on a hard floor so a parent can injure their heel stepping on one at night?
FUCK yeah.
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swank and deboner.