Meh. ABS is an alright material and it's pretty tough. It's not unlike the stuff cafeteria trays are made out of. A 3D extruded-noodle case will never be as tough as a case made through injection molding due to the inherent sheer weakness between the fused layers. That being said, in my very unscientific and shoddy testing with vice grips, shop scissors and hammers applied to borked pieces, 3D prints are pretty tough to break. A rectangle of say 50x50x5 mm printed with an infill of 50% is surprisingly dense and difficult to crack by hand. I had to use a two pair of vice grips to snap it in half.

As far as protection, I wouldn't count on the ABS providing much in the way of fall protection. Fall protection is all about DV/DT (acceleration), or rather the change in velocity over time. A phone wrapped in a pillow dropped from 1 meter will experience a much lower acceleration than a phone wrapped in a rock when it hits the ground. ABS is definitely squishier than a rock, but it can't compete with something like silicone.

If you're just interested in surface protection, ABS is a pretty solid choice as it's relatively soft and won't bite into the phone finish too much and should offer a bit of protection from your pocket. A 3D printed case won't have quite the same finish that an extruded case has and definitely needs morem cleanup at the end.

I haven't worked much with PLA, but the little that i have worked with it, it appears to be stronger but more brittle (think glass versus steel). Probably not what you want in a case as Apple discovered with their magnificent glass backs...

Though I'm not a fan of "the use it the way we intended, or die a death of 1,000 cuts through our inflexible configuration" mentality of Apple, they do make some awesome decisions when it comes to marketing. For quite some time they have been providing specs on their devices for case designers. I suspect this is to help encourage the whole Apple ecosystem. You can find all the specs over at the Apple Developers Page

A quick search over at The Thingiverse yields many printable cases based on these specs.

I wish other manufactuers such as Samsung, HTC and LG would release their designs specs. Instead I'm left here with my vernie calipers and a crapload of guessing.

CyanogenMod breathed a whole new life into my 2 year old Nexus one. It was snappier, appeared to get battery life and had a whole host of awesome new features. The only reason I finally upgraded to a newer phone was because the power button broke (again!) and the headphone jack wore out. If you're sitting on an older Android device, consider trying CM. It really turns your phone into a geeksphone.

AFRAID NOT! Touchdown Confirmed!!

As many as it takes until we know what happens to this awesome nuclear powered rover with frikin lasers on another frikin planet!

I've tried the freezer trick to help what sounded like an ailing bearing , but with limited success. No amount of freezing seemed to help. To make things worse, when I took the drive out of the freezer, moisture started condensing immediately on the cold PCB. I tried to place it on a sponge to help sop up the water, but I can't imagine this helped the drive at all.

I have some friends that swear by this, but I am extremely doubtful especially because of the condensation problem. I feel like this is an a apocryphal bit of "knowledge" that has been passed down from a time when drivers were larger, slower and had less precise bearings. I can imagine that on a big old drive freezing the drive *may* have helped. But then again, perhaps it's something like throwing a pinch of spilled salt over your shoulder or touching wood--something your grandma told you to do, but doesn't actually do anything.

And once again we are reminded that using the same password on every site is a terrible idea for just this reason. I know I'm guilty of recycling a generic password on sites I don't care about, but I fear that my family members are even worse. I'd say there's an 80% chance that my family recycles the same password on both social and banking sites.

It doesn't help that many password validation routines choke on spaces. Being able to use a passphrase is way easier than trying to remember some random group of characters that just happen to have a high entropy. The Correct Horse Battery Staple model is my new favorite for any site that will accept spaces. Sadly, one bank that I have done business with won't even allow a password that is more than 8 characters and only accepts letters and numbers. They try to shore this up with some bogus security questions on the following page, but I don't feel really "secure."

What other password strategies do you all use to make sure you keep reasonably secure? I eventually gave in to using KeePass to keep my less frequently but more important passwords secure.

My first job in Norway after a 6 month wait for a visa was with a brewery. I was simply excited to be working after six months of forced unemployment. I really enjoyed learning all of the processes and my coworkers were fantastic. The perks were definitely awesome too: I had an endless supply of new beers to evaluate and a sweet employee discount on packaged beer.

I worked at a fairly small brewery so I had a chance to do almost every job from brewing to packaging. Most of my responsibility was wrestling our packaging line while trying not to get any limbs amputate and cleaning. Oh the cleaning.

After about six months of the brewery, I landed a teaching gig and felt a whole lot more satisfied. It's what I actually trained to do and enjoy. The pay is slightly better, but it definitely lacks in delicious samples of adult beverages. I also can't swear as much.

Here's a nifty time-lapse from a rotten day of packaging cans: http://youtu.be/aMm31zgIDLY

Geek can be a style! Check out this amazing Nixi Tube Watch. It's awesome, geeky and pretty great to look at. It doesn't go too well with an Armani suit, and it isn't quite classy enough to flash around a funeral, but it sure would score you some points at a geeky interview.

Watching my wife play Katamari is almost as much fun as playing myself. Sometimes it makes me want to hurl, but it's fun to watch all the subtle and hilarious entities get rolled up when you don't have to focus too much on where to go next.

Are you a professional gamer, developer, or debugger? Or have you found some genius way to monazite putting a dent in a couch in a basement somewhere? If you have, can you please elaborate?

I have some fond memories of dragging my full-sized P3 Tower all over hell and creation to build a BNC network in a friend's basement. I sure am glad that I don't have that heavy sucker any more.

But as you say, my hobbies have drifted farther and farther from gaming. I'd much rather build something or create something. Though I do enjoy a few hours of BLOWIN' STUFF UP in Ratchet and Clank (probably the funniest FPS ever made). I enjoyed playing Portal 2 in single player mode, but I don't have the patience to spend hours playing on line so I can keep up with the caffeine fueled thirteen-year-olds on line.

I would much rather spend a lazy Sunday afternoon modeling and 3D printing a toy these days. I also find myself spending less and less time in front of the screen and more time reading or spending time outside as I get older. Maybe I'm making up for a mis-spent youth.

You mean oil?

No! Black Blood of the Earth

Man I love Big Trouble in Little China