Posts from @makerhacks

3D Printing Fans Get Free Stuff

makerhacks — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 13:13:00 GMT

This is a cross post of @makerhacks/3d-printing-fans-get-free-stuff by @makerhacks.

I've made around $185 from Bambu Lab by just doing 3D printing stuff that I would ordinarily do!

3D Printing Fans Get Free Stuff

makerhacks — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 13:06:06 GMT

[](https://makerworld.com/en/@makerhacks)

Did you know you can get free stuff from 3D printing companies just by doing the things you normally would do anyway?

On Bambu Lab's MakerWorld I have gotten free PLA filament and their electronics kits. I have enough on the Prusa equivalent to get some free filament or resin.

To get you started, just completing your user profile gets you a bunch of reward points.

Of course this is all to promote usage and materials within the companies own ecosystems, but as I say we get rewarded for doing things we probably would do already.

The main way I have been rewarded is from uploading 3D models, which I did for years on Thingiverse until it became pretty poop. Now on MakerWorld I get reward points that I can cash in for gift cards.

You don't have to upload models, though, as MakerWorld encourages you to upload tested print profiles to models too. The more people who use your profile to print, the more points you get. Think how many times you downloaded a model or sent something to print but you realised there were better ways to orient or configure the print for speed or quality?

If you are on MakerWorld, let's connect!

Thinking about "Moats" and how AI erodes them

makerhacks — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 11:47:39 GMT

Ever heard the phrase "moat" used in business context? For example "they have no moat" or "build a moat" or even "what's your moat"?

In that context it is kind of akin to barrier to entry, but it is more than that. A moat tends to be built intentionally, as in the classic castle moat that was a physical ditch around your walls to keep folks out, or perhaps to keep prisoners in.

Warren Buffett popularized the term, comparing a strong business to a medieval castle surrounded by a protective water ditch.

Cartoons might even have crocidiles in the moat for added effect. No idea if anyone really had predatory animals in their moat. Fun to think about.

What is the point?

I am seeing so many people going all-in on AI, and I think it is stopping most people from even being able to build a moat, let alone maintain one.

This is one of those situations where a thought has been nagging at me for a while and I had nowhere else to put it. It's not "business advice", it's not tech per se, it's ... I don't know. So you lovely people get to see it!

Consider the scenario. In the past someone would have a bright idea and either build it or would pay someone else to build it. The building is a barrier, or at least the funding to pay someone to build it.

As a programmer on the internet I would repeatedly get folks with the amazing pitch "you do the work for no pay and we split the profits when it is successful". Uh ... nope.

Often their brilliant idea would be "Facebook for pets" or some drivel.

Now those people ask groxchat and it slops out the result.

But once another slop-haver sees it they can ask their own AI friend to do the same thing. Even better, they can just say "hey gruckx make that but for me!".

Where's the moat?

Unrelated aside: The photo is the moat in Wells, UK. As it happens it was the filming location for Hot Fuzz. Amazing movie if you haven't seen it. We didn't know until we visited during our trip to TNMOC in Bletchley.

E-Begging

makerhacks — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:13:09 GMT

Back in the early days of blogging, since before it was called that, there was a strong community distaste for "monetization", aka earning money from your creations.

That seemed to go away in recent years, as every influencer has some sort of "hustle" (I hate that term, but then I grew up in a time where that was the name of a prominent porn magazine).

With that in mind, I am now shocked to hear that the sentiment has returned but aimed at YouTubers.

Don't get me wrong, there are a LOT of scams out there. I won't name them but even in the retro gaming community, a community of mostly older guys, there are a few infamous examples of influencers taking the hustle into grift territory.

But for the most case it is just people wanting to keep going with their efforts without the bailiffs being called.

For my own part it has made me try to avoid any kind of compensation, but the costs associated with my online tools, especially the server-side costs associated with my online IDE, has made me dip my toes into the water. Google+AI have really stripped back the income I can make from my websites and affiliate commissions, and apparently people don't buy books or courses anymore (I guess they just ask ChatGPT). What is left?

I will try Ko-fi for now, but it really does look like the end of creators getting support from their communities, and the hope for Hive to make anyone a reasonable income vanished with the alt-coin crash!

Gobblin Procreate Drawing

makerhacks — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 11:20:06 GMT

https://youtube.com/shorts/et0CVN4vS88?feature=share

Quick video showing my drawing process. Lately I have been trying out Procreate on the iPad using a stylus. I am not fully comfy with it but I discovered it automatically records timelapse so thought why not share!

This guy will feature on the title screen of the C64 BASIC series part 8, and also will get shrunk down and pixel arted for game graphics.

I tend on higher-resolution platforms to start off big, shrink down, then tweak pixel by pixel. On 8-bit systems etc I work right from the pixels directly.

I need to block out my character shapes more carefully next time, as a kid I just intuitively knew proportions etc from practice but I have lost that.

Finished Piece (Before Pixeling)

Slopportunities or Robot Fren?

makerhacks — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:47:12 GMT

My social network has been split pretty much 50-50 recently, most glaringly on LinkedIn but it is starting to creep into others such as the retro games community.

The split is pro or anti AI in creative pursuits. You can see which side of the fence you are on by your reaction to this image that has been going around lately

Looking at all the issues with the image, I feel like it might be mocking the AI maximalist folks. Hope so, anyway.

Surely they could have at least fixed the sleeve? And to finish on "everyone clapped"? Embarassing.

As you might have already gathered, I have a nuanced interest in the subject. Like most technology things, as soon as a topic comes on my radar as potentially important, like it or not I feel like I have to learn about it.

It was the same with crypto, which didn't pay off very well, but I was an early adopter of the WWW as far as the UK goes and that did pay off.

While I don't trust it to code for me, I've found Cursor a great help in coding for the "auto completion", debugging, and things like CI/automations. Last night I helped two different friends with transcriptions of their videos using MacWhisper (uses local LLM so no datacenters involved).

With AI there are also a lot of bad things about it that can get solved given the will, things like the massive amount of power and water, the noisy data centers, the pollution they pump into the water table, all of that.

They could also make some reparations to the IP they stole for training.

My grumble today though is about all the people who are claiming to have made/created/built things when all they did was talk to a chatbot.

If you get a drink from a vending machine, even if you were very specific about exactly the beverage you want, that doesn't make you a barrista, it doesn't even mean you made the drink. You asked for a drink to be made for you.

That said, I do think there is a threshold where vibe coding crosses into programming. After all, programming is asking a computer to do something for you in exacting detail.

Not sure where that line is drawn yet ...

30-Year Freelancing Anniversary and Domaining

makerhacks — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 11:43:42 GMT

Re-upping my hoard of domains every year costs a fortune, even after transferring them to a cheaper domain registrar, because I have so many.

I've even let a lot lapse over the years, some really nice ones.

But I hoard the remaining domains like a dragon sleeping on his gold.

My first domain registration was in 1996. I had started a side gig creating websites for businesses in the region. Back then I was going as "CG Internet Services" and I got the domain CGIS.co.uk which I thought was cool because of the double-meaning (CGI = Common Gateway Interface, how back-end programming was added to websites in the day).

When I got serious about the side-gig, I quickly realised that people weren't hiring me because they believed it was an agency, they wanted to work with a person, so I registered chrisg.com and I kept that ever since. I also radically updated my prices because the original pricing was pretty much based upon my "can you help me fix my inkjet printer" hourly rate, and as you can expect those were wildly wrong!

I did have other "company" names over the years, in particular RealWorldASP.net was a good one. That, as the name suggests, was when I specialised in ASP.NET development!

What is surprising to me is there are still 5 letter .com domains available. Perhaps there are so many domain LTDs now the gold rush is over?

=== AVAILABLE ===
bpahd.com cusmp.com dllzp.com dyfoc.com gmrgl.com gwnsw.com imhfb.com irvpu.com mrqsj.com qykma.com tscuo.com ufpcp.com vnrzo.com vrmkx.com xvheh.com

Retro Roguelike Dungeon Crawler (Long Overdue Updates)

makerhacks — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 08:34:36 GMT

Last time I did a devlog it was to say the code was refactored and cross-platform.

Big new changes are procedural generation is back and I added "fog of war", with conditional compilation. This means if it doesn't fit, those features can be disabled. It's more work that way but means I can reach more target computers. For eg. perhaps even those with 16KB of RAM.

If you are not familiar, procedural generation in this context means game mazes that are random but using an algorithm so they are always "solvable" (no dead-ends trapping the player).

Fog of war is the maze will be revealed as you move around.

If I was working only on a specific target computer I could have used a simpler approach, say using colour RAM to turn character cells from black on black into visible. This is cross-platform so I have to find ways to make the actual drawing quick regardless which machine it is running on. I realised after first screen draw only the new cells need to be drawn until I get to redevelop for Raylib for modern systems. The Raylib (game library with graphics) version has a kind of light halo for atmosphere, the 8-bit systems certainly do not!

Dogfooding and the joys of building a cross-platform IDE

Of course for compilation and testing in emulators I have been using my web-based IDE. I do have desktop emulators too, such as Vice for commodore systems, ZEsarUX (how is that pronounced??) for Amstrad/Speccy, etc, which is handy when I break the web based one.

A striking example of that is when C compilation worked perfectly for small programs but anything over 16KB started borking in execution. What I hadn't realised is in my haste to try different configurations, for example moving the start and end of memory banks etc, I had multiple copies of configs and varying versions of compilers, plus some compilers run on my linux server and others are in WASM. Days were lost through my own idiocy.

Fortunately the game now fits almost everywhere apart from BBC Micro (!?) - which being a 32KB system is strange, considering the game works fine on expanded Vic 20 which has less memory ... I think I might have to get my calculator out on that one ...

Procedural generation is even working on 48kb ZX Spectrum, though with 32 column screen.

Problem is, this is the bare-bones game, not the full finished thing, and there is no wiggle room for added features ... so fat-trimming continues.

As well as trying to get the thing to fit, I was able to move onto some cosmetics. Most of the target platforms do allow custom character sets, which will be nice on those where there is remaining 2kb+ of space, and many have colour in modes that fit the available memory, but good colour palettes with only 3 colours plus black are still challenging.

Turns out I had been using the wrong colour hex values for the Amstrad and had been blaming my compilation workflow. Still not the best colour choices even now but at least these are ones I chose!

Interested in coding software and games for retro computers and games consoles?

I now have a Retro Game Coders channel in the Retro Software Discord server:

https://discord.gg/eEsuHp3rYt

Claude is both the best and the worst

makerhacks — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:54:27 GMT

Oh Claude why? WHY?

Claude managed to fix something very complex for me that I, as a human, thought was impossible for me to fix.

But it has taken days because Anthropic have weird processes and policies.

If you check out social media and the unofficial user groups, you can see that people hit their usage limits, even on the upper-tier plans, really quickly. It does depend on which model you use, your prompts, how long the chat has gone on for, etc etc, but it is super easy to keep hitting that wall.

And it is super frustrating.

The conclusion many people are coming to is ... just use Claude less.

That can't be good for the company.

They also cut off, at the system prompt level, a whole growing use case. You might have heard about thousands of people buying Mac Mini computers to run OpenClaw and other personal assistant agent systems like it. OpenClaw users have their bots essentially run their lives and businesses, and Anthropic doesn't like that.

Mention OpenClaw in your prompt or request headers, and they return an error. Not only that, but using the CLI, they try to steer you back to using it just for software development!

Of course, the solution to both issues is to pay Anthropic even more money. If you add to your pay-as-you-go budget these issues magically go away, but you also run up huge bills.

There is another workaround, and that is to use any other LLM tool for daily, routine stuff and only use Claude when the other can't/won't/isn't capable.

I prefer Cursor for coding tasks, mainly because I use the "guess the next word" feature in the IDE and sometimes the 'cloud' tool is amazingly handy. Codex from OpenAI is a good CLI tool for running stuff in the terminal too.

This leaves Claude with just the Cowork "run my browser for me logged in as my user and click these buttons" stuff ... which, of course, means the others will catch up and eat Claude's lunch.

LLM-Assisted Debugging Rollercoaster

makerhacks — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:39:06 GMT

Forget Vibe Coding, Bots Are for Bug Squashing

For the last couple of weeks I have been experiencing software development synchronicities of the most horrible kind.

Normally what happens is bug gets spotted, bug gets investigated, bug gets squashed.

Unfortunately there is a flavour of software bug that defies investigation because once you observe it the darned thing hides.

That is frustrating enough when it happens during a project but it has happened during three projects simultaneously which can only mean the fault is the observer (me).

I am failing to find the lesson I am being nudged by the universe to see, but my (overly) friendly robot programming helper has come in very handy.

Up until now I have mostly done my LLM toe-dipping using the chat or IDE interfaces, but Cursor introduced these cloud Agent thingies. That is cool, but the hidden benefit is they can, if you wish, have full virtual environments including web browser and stuff.

This means you don't have to resort to sending screenshots, pleading "See? See? It doesn't work!" but can say "Check it out for yourself if you don't believe me stupid argumentative toaster!".

Another nice thing about them being "Cloud" agents, aka running on Cursor's servers, is you can set it going and walk away to do other stuff. Pretty good for things like "Find anywhere XYZ is used and refactor". It can even ping you on Slack when it is done!

I was pretty annoyed a tool decided it was a co-author of my project on Github but you know what? I think the clanker actually deserves this one.