At university there was an old 1st gen Makerbot 3D printer and if you took away one of it’s prints that were displayed around it, all of your prints would fail, even if you replaced it the printer held a grudge. And never EVER say a 100% certainty statement that the print would succeed like “it is printing ok, it will be finished in an hour”. Only say things like “the print is doing ok so far”.
The electronics lab was throwing out five old Cathode Ray Oscilloscopes so our little maker group took them in and two were working fine. The other three weren’t displaying the trace on the screen. One of our members, a chap from Romania who in his youth spent his time fixing old TVs in his home country, said to let him have a look. I swear down he plugged them in, leant his ear against it, said to the scopes “shh it’s ok, we’ll look after you”, and gave them gentle taps on top just behind the screen, and all three jumped back into life in perfect calibration.
And finally, my girlfriend at the time had a 1st gen iPod that would, at the most inopportune moments randomly wake itself up, play a few seconds of a random song, then shut itself down.
Yep. Ghosts in Machines are real.
I have witnessed it first hand multiple times.
At university there was an old 1st gen Makerbot 3D printer and if you took away one of it’s prints that were displayed around it, all of your prints would fail, even if you replaced it the printer held a grudge. And never EVER say a 100% certainty statement that the print would succeed like “it is printing ok, it will be finished in an hour”. Only say things like “the print is doing ok so far”.
The electronics lab was throwing out five old Cathode Ray Oscilloscopes so our little maker group took them in and two were working fine. The other three weren’t displaying the trace on the screen. One of our members, a chap from Romania who in his youth spent his time fixing old TVs in his home country, said to let him have a look. I swear down he plugged them in, leant his ear against it, said to the scopes “shh it’s ok, we’ll look after you”, and gave them gentle taps on top just behind the screen, and all three jumped back into life in perfect calibration.
And finally, my girlfriend at the time had a 1st gen iPod that would, at the most inopportune moments randomly wake itself up, play a few seconds of a random song, then shut itself down.
The Machine Spirit requires the utmost respect. Failure to do so is heresy of the highest order.
I like to think the praying is a pep talk for the machine spirit.
01010000 01110010 01100001 01101001 01110011 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01001111 01101101 01101110 01101001 01110011 01110011 01101001 01100001 01101000 00100001I can verify that Makerbots are both fussy and haunted.
People with little mechanical sympathy definitely have less luck with equipment