About 15 years ago, we had an excellent resource in my town. Its name was Kinko's, and its design was centered around self service with full service options. The floor room comprised of many printer/work stations where a customer could walk in, approach an available station, and commence with all sorts of fun.
I made countless posters from PDFs and GIMP projects. My wall displayed a mosaic of laminated posters made at this facility, including several artistic periodic charts, Vim cheatsheats, Linux commands, Python reference charts and even the 10 commandments of logical fallacies.
Functional reference art is dear to me. Alas my eyes have degraded so much that a readable, sufficiently sized poster now exceeds my budget. And such self-service resources are now unknown to me. I know many online services exist to accomplish similar things. It doesn't appeal to me though.
jwtorres•5mo ago
Kinko's I believe was bought out by Fedex. The one near me basically changed names but still offers the same services.
Not here. All the services moved behind the counter and the prices went full Weimar. Maybe they changed it again since my last visit. I'll hava look.
brudgers•5mo ago
Maybe buy a used large format printer?
Because if you can print whenever for relatively little money, you might be able to live without laminating and a used large format printer can pay for itself across not terribly many prints.
And even if you don’t save money in absolute dollars, you can still get a lot more stuff printed, do more proofing, and many other things.
eth0up•5mo ago
If I was healthy and hopeful, this suggestion would be my official plan of choice. These days, I'm the sun bleached, scorched multicolored paper on the sidewalk, no fewer months from than toward the next sparse event where audible, scintillating sparkles and afterwaft of celebratory smoke would warrant a calorie spent to twist one's neck in wonder.
The days of inspiration and need for such references have passsed. I've wanted a globe for years, but remind myself for each impulse to acquire one that the world isn't round after all - it's an amorphous impression, delusions beleaguered by dumb bone steadily resembling flattened surface where the debris of a once vibrant flurry of wonder has settled lazily upon.
If it isn't cheap or free, it's a cod fondling carrot smirking on the end of a stick crusted with the scabs of bludgeoned ambition. One less bean and grain of rice in my dirty bowl, in exchange for a pearly bauble dangling before a confused and sessile swine.
A pound of pennies burns brighter than an ounce of silver in this fool's kitsch eyes.
southernplaces7•5mo ago
Can't have a post about a periodic table with actual elements without referrencig this absolute gem of comedy (the wordpress PDF link in the very first comment below the reddit post deletion image)
Frey Scientific used to sell a nice big poster like this.
ThrowawayTestr•5mo ago
I like the pictures of people for elements that can't be synthesized in bulk
zokier•5mo ago
Interesting that they are apparently selling physical collection sets of elements in a box that shows all 118 elements. Somehow I suspect they possibly can not contain all the elements, due to scarcity/half-life/regulations?
That site is misleading. Even putting aside regulations for many of the elements, everything after plutonium does not occur in nature and is made synthetically in individual atomic amounts that usually decay in hours to milliseconds. There is no way to see them, let alone sell them as a commercial product.
grues-dinner•5mo ago
So much better than the AI slop cutting cubes and sphere of elements that has been all over LinkedIn recently.
meindnoch•5mo ago
Everything is gray.
metalman•5mo ago
lusterous grey, which got me to look for anything that wasn't, promethium sticks out, and is interesting for it's natural rarity, estimated at 600 grams on the whole planet, but it's reasonably easy to make, so it is made, for certain comercial/industrial/scientific purposes
the truth is that we carry detectable amounts of a large chunk of the periodic table around in our bodys, most of course not in amounts that would be visible even under magnification, but there
dhosek•5mo ago
Theodore Gray (the guy behind this site) has done some really cool stuff around the periodic table, although my favorite was the sodium party:
eth0up•5mo ago
I made countless posters from PDFs and GIMP projects. My wall displayed a mosaic of laminated posters made at this facility, including several artistic periodic charts, Vim cheatsheats, Linux commands, Python reference charts and even the 10 commandments of logical fallacies.
Functional reference art is dear to me. Alas my eyes have degraded so much that a readable, sufficiently sized poster now exceeds my budget. And such self-service resources are now unknown to me. I know many online services exist to accomplish similar things. It doesn't appeal to me though.
jwtorres•5mo ago
ape4•5mo ago
eth0up•5mo ago
brudgers•5mo ago
Because if you can print whenever for relatively little money, you might be able to live without laminating and a used large format printer can pay for itself across not terribly many prints.
And even if you don’t save money in absolute dollars, you can still get a lot more stuff printed, do more proofing, and many other things.
eth0up•5mo ago
The days of inspiration and need for such references have passsed. I've wanted a globe for years, but remind myself for each impulse to acquire one that the world isn't round after all - it's an amorphous impression, delusions beleaguered by dumb bone steadily resembling flattened surface where the debris of a once vibrant flurry of wonder has settled lazily upon.
If it isn't cheap or free, it's a cod fondling carrot smirking on the end of a stick crusted with the scabs of bludgeoned ambition. One less bean and grain of rice in my dirty bowl, in exchange for a pearly bauble dangling before a confused and sessile swine.
A pound of pennies burns brighter than an ounce of silver in this fool's kitsch eyes.