Aside from decarbonising my house, I’ve been designing and printing various things for many years. While I have been sharing a few of these designs on Thingiverse, that’s becoming less and less pleasant. It seems like those in charge over at Thingiverse have been reading Cory Doctorow, because they’re a textbook example of enshitification. The ads and garbage added to the site over time, and especially recently, have made it unpleasant and pretty much unusable. I wouldn’t be surprised if Thingiverse just devolves in to a recursively looping crypto ad someday (soon).
I was so frustrated with Thingivese that I’m developing another WordPress plugin, WoollyPrints, the sixth of my Woolly.dev data vis plugins. WoollyPrints builds galleries and manages downloads for 3D models with no ads, no tracking, no popups, nothing. This one isn’t strictly data visualisation, but also isn’t not data visualisation as I’m sure you could fill a gallery with topo maps and bar chart models for data that is somehow better communicated as small plastic bits.
Taking a step back and recognising the often repeated pattern of the destruction and enshitificaiton of social media and other shared resources (commons?), I think leaning more heavily on self-sufficiency and owning your own data as seen in WoolyPrints, this blog, or perhaps even an electrified house, are a good moves these days. However, it’s probably a good idea to do these things, like most others, in moderation. We wouldn’t want to end up off grid writing blog posts in a cabin in the middle of Montana.
Woolly
Cable Guide for 10mm Rack
Brake and Shift Cable Clips
Chainstay Shift Cable Guide for Lynskey R300
Vertical Dock for UniFi Cloud Gateway Ultra and Lite 8 PoE Switch
Door Meeting Sign
RJ45 Block Off
Whatever the case, here’s a demo with a few of my favourite things (or at least things that were easy enough to find and upload). Don’t be surprised if WoollyPrints morphs into something else. I’m actively developing this one, we can all see that I’m not great at limiting the scope of projects, and WoollyPrints may still undergo some major changes. I’ll post a follow up when this one is available for download at woolly.dev and in the WordPress Plugin Directory.
In the meantime, here’s a rotating Woolly.
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