IZation Labs

Below is a quick render of a military missile I’m working on for a new project. It was made in Blender 2.53, and is a first foray into UV texture unwrapping and mapping in the newest version of Blender. A few more adjustments are all that’s needed and I’ll be starting on some other aspects of the required scene. References images and concepts were found via a Google image search.

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-Lace

I’ve been doing a lot of research lately concerning CNC Mills, homemade ones in particular. Now, I won’t get too in depth before I give anything away, but I found some very interesting full size CNC machines with five axes of movement. What’s that mean?

Well, most entry level or home made CNC mills/routers have three axes of movement. X, Y, and Z. What this means is that the movement of the cutting tool is to the ‘left and right’, ‘up and down’ and ‘in and out’. This creates a decent range of movement, and works especially well on mostly two dimensional parts.

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So I spent an hour on the phone with various repair centers and official Apple tech support today. I’ve got to hand it to them, Apple’s tech support handled it rather well. I was treated gingerly by the man on the other end of the line until we saw eye to eye on the fact that I actually knew what a Hard Drive failure was and how to identify it. In the end I saved a lot of time because I already knew what the problem was, and only had to do a little checking for him booting from the OS X installer discs.

After a 20 minute or less conversation with him, we had agreed that the hard drive would need to be replaced, and that it wouldn’t cost me a cent, as it is still under warranty. I settled for somewhere between option one and two. Rather than send it to Apple and wait 2 or 3 weeks and never see the broken drive again, I took it to a Apple certified store in Columbus, Ohio, called Computer Site Columbus, or CSC.

CSC was very professional and informative, I was greeted by an open room and multiple people where they took down all of my information, serial number, and Apple support ticket number. The bench time should only be 5 or 6 days, which means I should have it back by mid week. As an added bonus, since I took it to a privately owned store instead of sending it to Apple, I will also get to have my broken HDD returned to me when I go to get my laptop. Possible data recovery, anyone? All’s well that ends well, I suppose.

On a side note, hopefully in a day or two I’ll post a picture of a car model that College-Now grad Matt Spring has been working on in Blender!

–Lace