talaricolandon@gmail.com
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Obi-Wan Kenobi Lightsaber Model
Bitsignal (3D Printed Bitcoin Batsignal)
3D Printed Pushup Bars
Misc
Media Collections:
Good Quotes
Inspiring Stories
Flamin' Hot Cheetos Creator Richard Montañez
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, Phil Knight
Damon Sheehy-Guiseppi NFL story
Heroes of Progress (25 parts, each unrelated)
Fast Projects Catalogued By Patrick Collison
Creation of Spider-Man by Stan Lee
Ryan Graves, Uber's first CEO
Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy
Statement by Jeff Bezos to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary
The Last Dance (Michael Jordan/Chicago Bulls)
Travis Kalanick (Uber Founder) Podcast 2011
Barstool Documentary Chapter 2: Brick by Brick
Barbara Corcoran Career and Shark Tank Audition (32 Tweets)
Apoorva Mehta (Instacart Founder) Y-Combinator Acceptance
How I Built This: James Dyson
Gymshark Story
Brian Chesky on Launching Airbnb and the Challenges of Scale
Bill Gurley: Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Succeed and Thrive in a Career You Love
$2 Burgers in Harlem
Warrick Dunn: Life, NFL, and Charity Story
Josh Kesselman of RAW Papers Interview
Jay-Z Early Career (1 minute 31 seconds)
7 Rejections -Brian Chesky, Airbnb
Elvis Presley: Life and Career (Wikipedia)
Barack Obama in 2000
The Defiant Ones (Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine 4-Part Miniseries)
The Most Astounding Fact - NDT
Dan Carlin- Death Throes of the Republic (Roman History, 6 episodes, 13 hours total)
Tom Brady Response to Draft Scouting Report
Julius Caesar Weeps at Age 33 (before accomplishing the bulk of what he is remembered for) When Comparing Himself to Alexander the Great
"Not Within A Thousand Years Will Man Ever Fly" -Wilbur Wright (2 Years Before Achieving Flight)
66 Years Between Wright Flyer and First Lunar Landing
Reggie Nelson Blackrock Internship
Wright Brothers Focus and Ambition
Bitcoin Early Adopter - Forum Post from 2011
Jason Calacanis on Opportunity
Ken Kocienda on Design of First iPhone Keyboard
The Marketing Genius of Lil Nas X
How Todd McFarlane Became the Biggest Comic Book Artist Ever
Here's How Doug DeMuro Got Started Reviewing Cars
Conor McGregor Story (Twitter Thread, 16 Tweets)
How Beeple Sold His Art For $69 Million
Coinbase Founder Brian Armstrong Posts on Hacker News Looking For Co-founder
Arnold Schwarzenegger - The Speech That Broke The Internet
Brian Acton Rejected From Job At Facebook. 5 Years Later Facebook Acquires Brian Acton's Company "WhatsApp" for $19 billion
Singularity is Near. Various Charts Tracking Progress
Modelled in Fusion 360. Gif/Animation was created using FFmpeg and a Python script called Design History Animation. Rendered image was created using Fusion 360's built in render environment. I plan on 3D printing this when I have more time as well as the paint required for a good finish.
..."in Spain, when he was at leisure and was reading from the history of Alexander, he was lost in thought for a long time, and then burst into tears. His friends were astonished, and asked the reason for his tears. "Do you not think," said he, "it is matter for sorrow that while Alexander, at my age, was already king of so many peoples, I have as yet achieved no brilliant success?"
Source: Page 469 of Parallel Lives by Plutarch
Bonus: Caesar Captured By Pirates (treats his captors as subordinates, threatens them, eventually hunts them down)
"...'The flecks of gold,' wrote Reichel, 'ignite a passionate flame because Wilbur Wright is a zealot.'
He and his brother made the conquest of the sky their existence. They needed this ambition and profound, almost religious, faith in order to deliberately accept their exile to the country of the dunes, far away from all. . . . Wilbur is phlegmatic but only in appearance. He is driven by a will of iron which animates him and drives him in his work.”
Source: Page 305 of The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
3D Printed Pushup Bars
Finished Product/First Working Iteration
I wasn't very impressed with the publicly available files for 3D printed pushup bars so I decided to make my own. The main benefit of this model over other available models is that this is printed in 3 pieces (per bar, 2 bars) rather than 1 piece. This means no supports are required, no sanding or filing is required, and no plastic is wasted. Glue is recommended but not required for function.
Features:
-No supports
-Overbuilt, not going to snap mid use, half an inch of plastic at weakest point
-Grip is the same diameter as a barbell (28.5mm) I chose this diameter because I like barbell lifts and figure I might as well be practicing barbell-grip mind-muscle connection while i'm doing pushups rather than use some arbitrary grip diameter that translates less to barbell lifts
-5.5 inch length grip, large enough for anyone other than Shaq.
-4 inch height. Keeps hands off potentially dirty ground and allows a deeper pump than conventional pushups
-572 grams at 50% infill. About as cheap in material/electricity cost as the cheapest equivalent on Amazon.com except this one is overbuilt and can be customized to the consumers desire. Consumer could even attempt 20% infill to save a lot of plastic if the consumer is a lighter weight person, or if they are confident in the strength of 20% infill.
Room for improvement (v2.0 will be posted in the future if I ever need another set):
-Save plastic on stand height. You would still get great depth but save plastic by taking 1 or 1.5 inches off the square shaped stand height
-Save plastic on the base width. Only purpose of that width is for balance and the current 6 inch base is likely overkill. 4 inches would probably be fine.
-Save plastic on neck of stands (part that inserts into handle). You could likely cut .5 inches or more off and still have the same function
-Change shape of neck to hexagon/triangle/square/non-circular shape. This would keep stands from flopping around even without the recommended glue. This would also ensure that if the glue does fail, the bars still stay straight
-All in all could likely get the product down to 350 grams of plastic total which is pretty cheap in comparison to Amazon options that are far worse quality.
Bitsignal
Finished Product/First Working Iteration
I ran into this tweet around 2AM. It seemed like a decent way to make some quick cash and potentially build my network, but most importantly: learn how to turn image files into 3d printed objects.
The opportunity wasn't going to last forever though. Tweets only stay popular for a short period of time. I had to move fast. One of the main things that fascinates me about 3D printing is the ability it gives to rapidly prototype ideas. I wanted to get this done as fast as possible.
In the year 1990, how long would it have taken to design a product, have a plastic manufacturer produce a first version, wait for it in your mail, address flaws and redesign for a v2, wait for v2 in mail, etc? That process alone could have taken weeks or months. That’s ignoring the fact that you would've had a tough time getting any manufacturer to take you seriously on a product that is likely to sell very few if any units. With 3D printers, this lengthy process has been shortened by orders of magnitude. What might have taken weeks in 1990 took me 5 hours in 2019. Half of that time was spent learning how to translate image files into 3D objects. One problem I ran into was that the projection came out blurry at first. It took me an embarrassing length of time to realize that this was because I was using a flashlight with multiple LEDs, thus multiple shadows were cast by the Bitsignal. I reprinted the Bitsignal to fit a flashlight that had one LED and the problem was solved. The project could've been completed a lot faster.
More importantly, this highlights the impact social media and the internet have had on marketing. I posted the finished product at 7AM. Within 12 hours the product had 5,000 views. Before the internet, how hard would it have been, and how much would it have cost to show a product to 5,000 people? That is 416 people per hour, or about 7 per minute. Most large retail stores likely don't get 7 new people entering per minute, and they definitely don’t get 7 people per minute to look at an individual product on their shelf.
The feedback loops in product design and distribution are tightening. This has massive implications for economic opportunity worldwide.
Room for improvement:
I was never deluding myself into thinking this would be a high-selling product or revolutionary in any way. It was just a fun way to learn something I was going to learn at some point either way. With that in mind, I don’t want to spend much time improving this product. I learned everything I wanted to learn and the rest is just tweaking and optimizing. If I wanted to spend the time, I would improve the product in various ways:
-Increase thickness of the logo extrusion portion itself. If a consumer chooses to use white filament in their 3D printer, and they have a very powerful flashlight, the extrusion is actually thin enough for light to travel through which distorts the intended projection.
-Increase the thickness of the outer wall. Wouldn't cost much to increase the outer wall thickness by 10% or 20% and would ensure the signal never cracks
-Fine tune diameter. The product and flashlight I posted on Etsy fit well together, but if I wanted to spend the filament and time, I could likely fine tune the diameter over the course of a few revisions, and this would result in a smoother and more snug fit with the flashlight
-Make the logo portion smaller in diameter than the body itself. In the current design, the logo is the same size as the body. Changing this would allow the logo to be projected at further distances with a more intense beam of light. Different use cases for both. Current design is better if you want a huge logo projected
Further Ideas:
Generalized image file to light signal website for raves, advertising, etc. Make a website that allows people to easily create their own light signals for whatever logo, shape, word, phrase, etc they might require. Show a simulated version of what the light projection will look like, and then sell the 3d model file or the 3d printed signal to the user. I could either make an interactive user interface, or I could simply have a website that allows people to send me their image files and ill streamline the process so that I can have a model created manually within minutes. The conceptual work is done, it’s just a matter of automating many of the product design aspects, and marketing the service. Its potentially something ill get around to eventually.
Good Quotes
“A mistake repeated more than once is a decision”
“Discipline is choosing between what you want now, and what you want most”
“You can be surprisingly stupid, if you’re sufficiently determined”
“We do not rise to the level of our hopes, we fall to the level of our training”
“The act of discovering who we are will force us to accept that we can go further than we think”
“Self esteem is the reputation that you keep with yourself- you will always know”
“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be”
“Earn with your mind, not your time” -Naval Ravikant
“Not wanting something is as good as having it”
“Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.” -Epictetus
“You cant build a reputation on what you're going to do” -Henry Ford
“I realize it sounds preposterously ambitious for a startup to try to become as big as Apple. But no more ambitious than it was for Apple to become as big as Apple, and they did it.” -Paul Graham
“Live in the future, then build what’s missing” -Paul Graham
“If you look at the ways successful founders have had their ideas, its generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a prepared mind” -Paul Graham
“Desire is suffering. Ever desire you have is an axis where you will suffer” -Naval Ravikant
“There is no better teacher than history in determining the future… there are answers worth billions of dollars in a thirty dollar history book” -Naval Ravikant
“How to find a good spouse? The best single way is to deserve a good spouse” -Charlie Munger
“Make something people want is the destination, but ‘be relentlessly resourceful’ is how you get there”
“The overeducated are worse off than the undereducated because they traded common sense for the illusion of knowledge”
“Chapter One: Page One. Everything else has been a backstory. Your story begins today”
“Inspiration is perishable- act on it immediately”
“Technology changes so rapidly that formerly bad ideas often become good”
“Victory awaits him who has everything in order — luck, people call it.”
“Every rhodes scholar had a great future in their past” -Peter Thiel
“Life is always happening for us, not to us”
“You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.” -Paul Graham
“Those who never change their minds, never change anything” -Winston Churchill
“Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition”
“Human life is gradually turning from a struggle against suffering into a struggle against pleasure”
“The mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day”
“Plans are just another word for ideas on the shelf” -Paul Graham
“Want someone to read the whole thing? Write half as much”
“I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s”
“Negative lessons are just as valuable as positive ones. Perhaps even more valuable: it’s hard to repeat a brilliant performance, but it’s straightforward to avoid errors” -Paul Graham
“The night is darkest just before the dawn”
“What I cannot create, I do not understand”
“The man who wants to lead the orchestra must first turn his back on the crowd”
“Escape competition through authenticity”
“Your next thing should render everything else on your resume insignificant”
“Don't fear moving slowly. Fear standing still”
“I will fail many times, and I will be really right once”
“You can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time — most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are. People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential.” -Sam Altman
“You judge yourself based on your intention, but everyone else based on their behaviour.”
“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.” -John Wooden
"The only thing that's worked so far has been to become the source of my own approval." -Justin Kan
"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain- and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving." -Dale Carnegie
"A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men." -Thomas Carlyle
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." -Mark Twain
"Reality is largely negotiable.
If you stress-test the boundaries and experiment with the “impossibles,” you’ll quickly discover that most limitations are a fragile collection of socially reinforced rules you can choose to break at any time." -Tim Ferriss
"Many a false step was made by standing still."
"Your fear must be named before you can banish it."
"Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action." -Benjamin Disraeli
"Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: 'is this the condition that I feared?'" -Seneca
"What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do." -Tim Ferriss
"A person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have."
"No hurry, no pause."
"Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast."
"Being busy is a form of laziness- lazy thinking and indiscriminate action."
"Never confuse motion with action." -Benjamin Franklin
"E pur si muove (and yet it moves)" -Galileo Galilei
"If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed." -William McRaven
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."
"It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic." -Winston Churchill
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." -Winston Churchill
"You never can tell whether bad luck may not after all turn out to be good luck." -Winston Churchill
"One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse; or that when you make some great mistake, it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision." -Winston Churchill
"None of us can change the things we've done, but we can all change what we do next."
"It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable."
"Your level of training dictates how much equipment you have. Your level of being able to suck it up dictates how much equipment you have to have. I don't need anything, I can get by with nothing." -Karl, TacticalRiflemen
"Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people they don't like." -George Carlin
"Ego is false confidence, self respect is true confidence." -Naval Ravikant
“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena”
“There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen” -Vladimir Lenin
“Done is better than perfect”
“Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.” -William Shakespeare
“I have not failed 10,000 times. I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” -Thomas Edison (in reference to experimenting on the lightbulb)
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.” -Heraclitus
“Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” -Gandalf/J.R.R. Tolkien
“What you did does not matter. What matters is what you do now.”
“Take a simple idea and take it seriously.” -Charlie Munger
“New ideas are fragile. Since they originate in the messy madness of intuition and the fringes of society, they don't carry the crisp edges that rational critics look for. Forgetting this, we beat precious but unconventional ideas out of people before they have time to blossom.” -David Perrell
“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.” -Mark Twain
“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not” -Albert Einstein
“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.” -T.E. Lawrence
“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.” -Aristotle
“Chips on shoulders put chips in pockets” -Josh Wolfe
“There is no courage without fear.”
“If you are afraid to make a mistake, you have already made one.”
“Knowledge is useless without the courage to execute.”
“There's a thousand things you could be doing and only one of them is the most important. Do the most important thing!" -Paul Graham
“A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.” -J. P. Morgan
“Perfect is the enemy of good” -Voltaire
“Belief in the unreal can comfort the human mind, but it also weakens it.”
“If you don’t have time to do something right, when will you have time to do it over?”
“Fear is the mind-killer” -Frank Herbert
“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” -Thomas Edison
“Try and fail but don’t fail to try.”
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” -E. B. White
“If you have the right heroes in life you’re 90% of the way home.” -Warren Buffett
“About the world, I learn a bit. About myself, I learn a lot.” -Derek Sivers
“Trying to get rich quick is often how a person ends up poor.”
“A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.” -Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Make till you miss, miss till you make.”
“Do you know why I never became a drunkard? Because I never took the first drink.” -John D. Rockefeller
“Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.”
“Some mistakes will be made along the way. That’s good. Because at least some decisions are being made.” -Steve Jobs
“Charity is the virtue that unites men and inspires their noblest efforts.” -Conrad Hilton
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” -Arthur C. Clarke
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” -Arthur C. Clarke
“Success requires a persistent misreading of the odds.” -Tom Peters
“Judge talent at its best but character at its worst.” -Lord Acton
“Tradition is less of a guide, not just because things change faster, but because the space of possibilities is so large. The more complicated the world gets, the more valuable it is to be willing to look like a fool.” -Paul Graham
“Insiders who daren't walk through the mud in their nice clothes will never make it to the solid ground on the other side.” -Paul Graham
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” -Benjamin Franklin
“Good stories deserve embellishment.” -J.R.R. Tolkien
“If you say that you're going to ‘try’ to do something, you've already built in the possibility of failure.”
“Go where the fish are, not the fishermen.”
“No tree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” -Carl Jung
“Never ask your barber if he thinks you need a haircut” -Warren Buffett
“There’s no certainty, only opportunity” -V (V for Vendetta)
“All progress depends on the unreasonable man” -George Bernard Shaw
“If you succeed too quickly you won’t have any good stories.”
“Because they believe we are weak, we have the power to be audacious.”
“Float to the top or sink to the bottom. Everything in the middle is the churn.”
“The gap between the life you are living and the life you could live is called focus.”
“Misery loves company, but so does hope.”
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week” -George S. Patton
“Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk” -Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“I do know how to apply trial and error, mostly error” -Adam Savage
“I’m pushing my skill limit, and when you do that is when you make the mistakes that are useful” -Adam Savage
“It's easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.” -Clayton Christensen
“Be tough on yourself and understanding of others” -Marcus Aurelius
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” -Mark Twain
“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” -Mark Twain
“Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today.” -Benjamin Franklin
“Opportunity expands as focus narrows”
“The unexamined life is not worth living” -Socrates
“First you learn to pull an oar, then you may take the helm” -Sulla
“No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full” -Sulla
“Not in a thousand years would man ever fly” -Wilbur Wright, 1901
“More people worship the rising than the setting sun.” -Pompey the Great
“Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they’re doing.” -Warren Buffett
“You must always have a knife in the darkness.”
"Anybody who doesn't change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world we live in.” -Jeff Bezos
“Make fear a tailwind instead of a headwind.” -Jimmy Iovine
“A person's sense of cold is relative to their experience”
“Humans have habits so they don't have to think.”
“We grow strong through pity and generosity.” -Julius Caesar
“Fantasy is easy and effort is punishing. Seeming is always easier than being.” -Ava Huang
“Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.” -Seneca
““The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what is in Fortune's control and abandoning what lies in yours. The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately” -Seneca
“Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”
“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize until you have tried to make it precise.” -Bertrand Russell
“I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion” -Alexander the Great
“To give light, one must first endure burning.” -Victor Frankl
“Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask.” -Tim Ferriss
“Hope is not a strategy.”
“Alea iacta est.” (The die has been cast.) -Julius Caesar
“When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept suffering as his task; his single and unique task. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.” -Victor Frankl
“Words should be weighed, not counted.”
“You are the beneficiary of the struggles of a million generations of survivors who came before you.”
Source: Twitter Thread