3d-printing – use-cases.org – Matthew Tippett's Blog

Meltdown and Spectre Computer Vulnerability Cubicle Magnets

When something bad happens, like Meltdown or Spectre, or Heartbleed, your engineers end up having late nights, grueling daily update meetings. At the end of the day when the dust settles, we don’t get a Service Ribbon that shows your involvement in those days of battle.

With the security industry creating well-recognized brands and logos some of the bigger vulnerabilities, we might have those opportunities to make sure those that join the firefight get the tech equivalent to the service ribbon.

At Badgly, we’ve created some cubicle magnets that allow for a commemoration of those days when you lots lunches, nights and weekends to solve some of your companies biggest and burning issues. We’ve got a set of Vulnerability badges for Meltdown, Spectre, and Heartbleed. We’ll update this post with images when they get back from the printers. Some sample renderings are below.

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For geekiness points, all the vulnerability badges will be golden-ratio rectangles. Is there a vulnerability that you’d like to see memorialized? Post comments below.

Gamifying the Workplace: Badges IRL with 3D Printing

We’ve seen badges and gamificiation appear in everything from a core business plan (Foursquare & Gowalla) to navigation apps (Waze). I’ve seen them on a user homepage at least two companies. It helps get people engaged by bringing together groups of common interest and drive involvement in tasks that they might not otherwise be involved in. You look up a colleagues and find they’ve done something similar to you.

The problem with the virtual badges is that they are too cheap to make (effectively free to create a new one) and only appear when you go to the employee’s homepage. Having played with 3d printing, I realized that you could make these badges in real life and bring a bit of physical interest to the work place, applying the same rules. With a few minutes on an online 3d modeling tool, online 3d printing services, and finally a magnet and some super glue, you can easily end up with full color sandstone badge.

Continue reading “Gamifying the Workplace: Badges IRL with 3D Printing”

3D Printing Shelf Pegs [Updated]

Update: After Shapeways tweaked their pricing. I’ve moved over to selling them online at https://badgly.com/. I’m keeping them on Shapeways, but I have a lot more control on Badgly. Have a look there and feel free to use the 5OFF coupon code for 5% off.

When buying a house, you always find that there are some parts of the house that the previous owner had something installed, and the bag of spare parts and the supplier they used are lost to antiquity. This some times only gives you the option of replace, hack, or just live with it. This happened in the house we bought last year.

The shelves in the kitchen don’t have your standard Ikea style shelf pegs that hold the shelves up. Neither do they have the standard shelf pegs you can buy at home depot. These are custom jobs created by some unknown manufacturer. Not only are they non-standard pegs, but the holes they fit into are not only custom, they are a funky insert, twist and lock style.

After a discussion with a colleague at work I thought I’d 3D printing. After going through a bit of a process, I ended up ordering a set from shapeways.com. Here is the comparison of the original with the new.

Ultimately, I ended up with this shapeways part. I’ve included a rendering below.

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