Queensland sees the light! © PJ Croft 2015

What a good weekend.

It seems Queensland voters saw the light, saw the LNP government for what it was, a government of lies, harshness, cronyism, interference in judicial matters, carelessness about the environment and taking the state on a fast track back to the days of Joh’s utterly corrupt LNP. When someone of the stature of Tony Fitzgerald QC feels the need to come out of retirement to warn about the Newman LNP government’s moves in the direction of corruption, people should have taken notice, and it seems they did, thank goodness.

This result, along with the Victorian result a couple of months ago, should show that it is possible and OK to turf out bad governments after just one term. There’s no need to give them the benefit of the doubt, when the doubt is so clear. Now for this harsh, deceitful, law-breaking LNP federal government, led by an utter incompetent. By September next year, out with them!

Second, although I’m by no means a soccer follower, I was happy to see the Aussies win on Saturday night. It’s a big boost. Soccer is the world’s football game. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be just as prominent in Australia.

Finally, the release of Peter Greste from Egypt was bloody good news. Now it can be said: what a crap country is Egypt! What a nest of incompetent, lying, corrupt, evil bastards. I will never go near the place, or any of those terrible Arab countries. If they want tourists, they know the answer.

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Rain! It rained steadily from about 6.30pm until around 11pm last night. Not heavy, but easily enough to soak the lawns and garden bed. Plenty of lightning to go with it. Wow. More please.

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Ever since 3D printing came on the scene, I’ve wondered what the hell it’s for. Why would I want to make plastic cups or toys? Well, I’ve bought my first 3D printed products:

This is a set of items clipped to a base, those rods at the bottom. There are six items of different purpose.

The black one below is a duplicate of one of the set above. What are they?

They’re designed for a wooden ruler to slip through the gap. See the notches at the bottom? They are spaced at 9mm, the spacing of N-gauge model railway tracks.

You slip the ruler between the uprights and use a lackey band over the top to apply pressure to hold it in place on the ruler. You slide the gauge along the ruler to the curve radius you want (about 500mm for my layout), and fix one end of the ruler at the pivot point (hmmm, it’s not clear how). Then you place the gauge on the track, in the grooves, and rotate the ruler/gauge to produce the curved track.

In the white set, the first one with the cylindrical thing at the top is a pencil holder, so that you can draw curves at your desired radius. The next five are different kinds of gauges, I’m not clear what but I’ll find out when they arrive in the next couple of weeks in the mail from the US.

The thing is, they are produced to order. I see it on the web, place my order and pay, they do the 3D print and send it to me.

It’s not cheap. The single black item was US$10 and the white set of six was US$45, plus US$15 for postage for the lot. That’s US$70, and with our dollar so low it came to about AU$90.

I can see that 3D printing would be useful to produce models and scenic items for a model railway, but at $1500 for a printer, I don’t feel the need.

But ther’s something no-one mentions – to make 3D printed models, you have to have a 3D plan or drawing in software. You don’t just see a picture on your screen and press “Print” and expect to see a 3D result. You have to have the proper plan in software to feed the printer. That’s not as easy as it seems.