The people here at Hackaday aren’t dedicating their entire lives to moderating comments and sending press releases to the circular file; some of us actually have jobs and hobbies. [James Hobson] works at a projector company that was having a pumpkin carving contest today. He came up with the best possible use of a pumpkin projector – a R2D2-‘o-lantern that plays the message from [Leia] to [Obi-Wan Kenobi]. [James] submitted this to reddit, but one of the mods deleted it. We’re much cooler than a few mods and their little empire, so we’re putting it up here.
Instead of a knife, [James] used a rather interesting method for carving a pumpkin – a laser cutter. By maxing out the Z height of his laser cutter, he was able to cut a perfect R2D2 graphic on the surface of a pumpkin. No, [James] isn’t removing any of the pumpkin’s skin after the lasering is done, but the result still looks great when backlit.
Inside the pumpkin is a projector playing the famous distress message made from the captured Tantive IV. It’s not entirely accurate – [James] put the projector behind R2’s radar eye and not the holographic projectors, and to project [Leia] in mid-air he would need something like this, Still, it’s a great project we expect to see cloned a year or so from now.
Awesome!
Very nice, I didn’t know you could use a laser cutter on a pumpkin but I think he should throw this message in as well…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpkJoQUFqXM
Oh cool. A youtube video that has embedding disabled. Awesome.
Sorry didn’t realize when I put it up.
Reddit is a hole, its like 4chan if you replace the trolling with hipster douchebaggery. amirite?
kisses and lovies HAD xoxoxo
It’s the exact opposite of 4chan (at least it was until a few months ago, but we’re not talking about that). 4chan was the purest form of anarchy you’ll ever find. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, but on extremely rare occasions there was freakin gold. The signal to noise ratio was into negative dB, but somehow there was something there.
Reddit, on the other hand, is the most perfect example of a modern democracy I’ve ever seen. You have people voting in a direct democracy. This, of course, means nothing but bread and circuses, marginalized viewpoints, Federalist No. 10, and other inconsequential shit. However, and this is where it really starts to resemble a modern democracy, is that the mods of all the major subs are crooked. Completely and irredeemably crooked. I will leave the evidence of how far this goes as an exercise to the reader. The mods are the gatekeepers for what can and cannot be voted on, leading to a feedback loop of pointless drivel.
So yeah. Reddit is a hole, but it’s completely unlike 4chan.
The solution? A benevolent dictator. Hi, I’m an editor for Hackaday and I’m extremely liberal in my moderation duties. Glad to meet you. Stay for a while.
And here I was thinking you were talking about Mos Eisley in there….. However that’s the entire reason why I avoid Reddit,
Forget the major subs. The beauty of reddit is that anybody can create their own subreddit and have complete control over the content, and even the css. I like to think of reddit as more of a platform for creating niche forums/aggregators. Unfortunately, the reddit admins haven’t done well to explain how this works to new visitors who just see the (mostly) shitty default subs. The biggest flaw of reddit is that the depth of subreddits is completely hidden at first.
I would be inclined to agree with you, but there are a lot of times where ‘smaller’ subs fall victim to groupthink or incredibly overt manipulation. here’s something from /r/programming that is obvious advertising, dressed up with a ‘controvercial’ headline that would get a ton of comments (because who reads the articles, lol). /r/3Dprinting is bad, with one of the mods plugging his online object repository, even though there are really astonishing misunderstanding on what an open 3D printing repository should have (it’s not an open source back end, that’s for sure).
I agree the smaller subs are worth it, but the entire site is really, really starting to look like Digg a few years ago. The only thing missing is MrBabyMan. I don’t know what would replace it, though. I have an idea of just cloning reddit, but capping the number of users at 1 Million, activity required at least every seven days or else your account is deleted and another person takes your place. I’d build it, but I have other shit to do.
/r/aww is still decent. No sad awws.
Voting could be made relevant by the right algorithm. – What does it *mean* when one unique individual with preferences, gifts and faults votes for something? This information can be exposed. It is compute-intensive to do so but generally compute is cheap while bandwidth is expensive. You can identify groups which upvote certain things and downvote other things.
This appears to segregate people. It is important to note that the greatest problem this world has is that it has many cultures and subcultures which don’t communicate with each other. What we can achieve is data about which groups can communicate with each other, and from it derive which groups could communicate and benefit from it. Potentially we could even derive which groups should be kept segregated, which would be shocking news.
Designing this database could be a rewarding experience in itself as it involves deep contemplation about engineering an index of indices.
Amusingly a communist (real not USSR/china) example would be a server where everyone has equal access like in the case of friends sharing a gameserver. Of course if one person needs admin privileges, everyone gets them. Inevitably it does as communist countries do (real and quasi), self destructs in rapid and often spectacular fashion.
I also did this exact same project with my son’s birthday cake last year.
http://hackaday.com/2013/06/19/r2d2-cake-plays-leias-distress-message/
http://mfsamuel.blogspot.com
While that is cool, I can also sorta understand why they would mod it out of a pumpkin [b]carving[/b] contest. I don’t think I would count laser etching as carving either, at least any more than I would count pumpkin painting as carving. Maybe if the laser had actually taken significant chunks out (next time maybe try an industrial 3-Axis mill?) or had been used to add fine accents (crosshatch shading) to a carving and/or blocked out the pumpkin for carving.
There is a hole for the projector, that’s carving ;)
And the hole looks very crude, indeed.
Yeah, except half of HaD’s content seems to be coming from reddit nowadays.
reddit is an aggregator that effectively links to everything. If only half of our content makes it to reddit, we’re doing amazing work.
Is that why so many of my tip submissions dont get posted? I spanned the whole gammit from stupid to cool and didn’t see any interest….
why would reddit delete the post?
Another laser-engraved pumpkin: http://guavaduck.com/pumpkin-globe/
What a bunch of self-righteous bullshit. Here’s a tip: if you find yourself writing “submitted this to reddit, but one of the mods deleted it” you’re doing reddit wrong. There is no general “reddit” and no general “mods”. If you have a problem with a sub, you need to name that sub so people can know where to complain.
That said, it’s a really cool project, it’s a shame they deleted it.