3D Printed Hungarian Cross

The Hungarian coat of arms features an iconic cross with two horizontal beams. In Hungarian it’s called “Kettős Kereszt” which translates to “Double Cross”, usually called the Patriarchal cross in English. This cross is present on other emblems around the area of Central and Eastern Europe too and has been featured on the Hungarian coat of arms at least since the reign of King Saint Stephen of Hungary.

3D model of the patriarchal cross as shown on the Hungarian coat of arms

3D model of the patriarchal cross as shown on the Hungarian coat of arms

Seeing as it’s a Hungarian national holiday today, in memory of the heroes and martyrs of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, everyone has their Hungarian flags out. I decided to do something Hungarian too, while trying out some tools for preparing models for 3D printing. So far I’ve been using Blender, because I have some experience with it, but it’s for creating 3D scenes and although you can use it to design 3D models for printing, it’s not CAD software. This time I tried Autodesk’s web-based program Tinkercad, which although lacking many of the features you’d get in a full-blown CAD program, is plenty enough for me to design simple things like this. Not being a mechanical engineer, I probably wouldn’t even know what features I’m missing!

photo collage of 3D printed "Kettős Kereszt" painted in the colours of the Hungarian flag

3D printed “Kettős Kereszt” painted in the colours of the Hungarian flag

The program is very intuitive to use. I put a few cubes on the workplane, stretched them out into intersecting rectangular boxes and exported an STL file for printing within minutes. You can see a screenshot of the result above. I also made a version with a hole cut out of the top so you could hang it on a key chain. That turned out to be as easy as putting a cylinder in one of the boxes, stretching it out of the top and bottom box faces and marking it as a “hole” in the model.

After scaling the model down to 30% so it fits on my print bed, the final print came out as shown in this photo. It took less than 10 minutes to print at 30% in-fill and seems pretty rigid. I’ve painted on the red, white and green of the Hungarian flag and will hang this up somewhere, who knows, maybe it’ll even be good for a Christmas decoration. If you’d like to print your own Hungarian cross you can download both of my STL files here:

In honour of the heroes! Tisztelet a hősöknek!

Use HOME as your GOPATH

How and why I normalised my Go paths and personal/local home paths.

Like many people, I have my own scripts and stuff in a bin directory in my home directory. Actually it’s a symlink to ~/.local/bin because I saw there was a ~/.local/share which some programs use to store user-specific things and I wanted to be consistent.

Then I saw some people have ~/bin and ~/src and I thought that looked like a Continue reading

Vim “fake fullscreen”: open split windows in a new tab

Since I use a lot of split windows in Vim, for example when exploring the git log or editing closely related files, a pattern I noticed is I often want to make one of the smaller windows full screen momentarily so I can read more at once without scrolling and then close it when I’m done. I made a really simple mapping to simulate this “full screen” idea:

:nnoremap <Leader>f :tabe %<CR>

This opens the current window’s buffer in a new tab (fake full screen ?) and when I close it I’m back to tab one with my split windows.

To demonstrate, here’s a gif in which I inspect the git blame for a file, open a patch and then open it “full screen” in a new tab:

Vim fake fullscreen demo gif

Vim fake fullscreen demo gif


Browsing the git log isn’t the best example because fugitive’s blame window already has an O mapping which opens the patch in a tab instead of a split and the necessity for this would be clearer with bigger files like those I edit at work.

This is one of the few things I use tabs for since I’m mostly jumping through buffers. Hopefully it’s useful for you too!