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• Two more off the wall — Glyptica and Nazca

  Jeremiah • 09/13/2026 at 04:24 • 0 comments

  Log #1 said the scanner was next. It still is. What surfaced first is the pair that sat
  upstream and downstream of everything in that first log without their own names on the
  page.
  **Glyptica** is the module that turned a thirty-year-old pencil drawing into the sigils on
  the Obelisk. Photograph a page, click its four corners and it un-warps flat, the
  linework comes off the paper, you clean it and place it, and it hands you two things a
  machine can make: SVG linework for a laser or plasma cutter, and a carved STL in the
  artwork's own shape, intaglio or emboss, ready to print or to boolean onto a part in Structor. Named
  for
  glyptics, the old art of cutting figures into stone. Any Debian box, no GPU.
  **Nazca** is the viewer. Load the G-code your CAM wrote or the .ctb your slicer packed and
  walk the path in 3D before any iron moves or resin cures. It reads the file to tell
  what machine it's for, printer, router, laser or plasma, and colours every move by what
  it does: travel, cut, plunge, pierce, extrude, retract. Scrub by layer or by move, hide a
  class, play it through. Sliced resin files scrub and play layer by layer too, with a stack
  view that grows the print under the camera. It reads; it never writes.
  Named for the lines on the Peruvian plain that people walked as preparation.
  Both ship the way GilgaMESH did: working test prototypes with the rough edges in the
  release notes rather than hidden. Glyptica's photo detection is a mid-tone heuristic, so
  a very dark or very light page may need the Invert switch; its slab is flat, and curved
  faces are Structor's boolean job. Nazca walks G0 to G3 with arcs and doesn't simulate
  offset or incremental dialect codes, so a file leaning on those won't preview true.
  Both are pre-beta and may have issues. Say what breaks.
  Same night, all five modules got a reroll: one palette across the suite, and every
  window now sizes itself to the monitor it opens on. The 0.1.0 debs came up tiny on a 4K
  screen; that's fixed.
  With these two, the whole Obelisk path now runs on modules you can download. Dropping
  them together was deliberate: it clears the deck for Gorgon, the scanner, which needs
  more work than either of these did. No date on it.

  **Next log:** the scanner, when it earns it.
  Gallery: https://g54xyz0.com · Releases: https://github.com/3DJ77/Livyatan ·
  Glyptica: https://github.com/3DJ77/Livyatan/releases/tag/glyptica-v0.1.2" class="redactor-linkify-object">https://github.com/3DJ77/Livyatan/releases/tag/glyptica-v0.1.2 · Nazca: https://github.com
  3DJ77/Livyatan/releases/tag/nazca-v0.1.2 · Pages: https://g54xyz0.com/m/glyptica.html · https:/
  g54xyz0.com/m/nazca.html

• The suite got a home

  Jeremiah • 09/12/2026 at 16:57 • 0 comments

  Log #1 promised the scanner next. The scanner is still on the bench. What happened
  instead this week is less photogenic and matters more: the project stopped renting
  its own front door.
  Until now the wall lived on a GitHub subdomain, the newsletter signup handed
  addresses to a third-party service, and the visitor counter was somebody else's
  script. For a suite whose whole pitch is *your hardware, your files, no accounts*,
  that was a contradiction I'd been ignoring because the parts were free.
  So: **g54xyz0.com** is the address now. The name is a machinist's pun — G54 XYZ0 is
  the line that sets the work origin, the point everything else is measured from.
  *Start here.* The old links redirect, nothing you've bookmarked breaks.
  Behind it, three things moved onto a box in my shop in North Anson, Maine:
  - **The Herald**, the release newsletter, is now a small program I wrote that runs on
  my own machine — subscribers in a file I own, sent through mail I control. Nobody
  upstream gets to decide whether it goes out. The first issue is out now.
  - **The visitor counter** is self-hosted, first-party, no cookies. It counts pages,
  not people.
  - **The signup form** on the wall posts straight to that box. There is no service in
  the middle.
  None of this is a module — you can't download it. But it's the same idea the modules
  are built on, applied to the project's own internal infrastructure, and I didn't want to ask anyone
  to trust the first while the second phoned home.
  Also since log #1: the obelisk is on Printables twice — the calibration blanks under
  CC BY so you can carve your own marks into them, and the glyph obelisk as its own
  model. Both print support-free.
  **Next log:** still the scanner. It's closer.
  Gallery: https://g54xyz0.com · Releases: https://github.com/3DJ77/Livyatan ·
  Blanks: https://www.printables.com/model/1833053-the-obelisk-calibration-models

• The obelisk is the yardstick

  Jeremiah • 09/06/2026 at 13:02 • 0 comments

  A design suite is easy to demo and hard to prove. You can screenshot any one module
  looking competent. What you can't fake is one object going the whole length of the
  chain and coming out the far end as a part you can hold.

  So I picked the most boring object I could think of — an obelisk. Flat faces, hard
  edges, a taper, a carved face. Enough geometry to catch real errors, simple enough
  that when something comes back wrong I can see which stage did it. A dragon hides its
  defects in the scales; an obelisk has nowhere to put them.

  The glyphs are mine. Five sigils I drew in pencil almost thirty years ago, on paper
  that barely survived. The path from that page to a monument on the bench:

    idea → hand drawing → photograph → rectify the page → extract the linework as a
    mask → clean and place it on the stone face → emboss → weld watertight → slicer →
    print

  Over the past week or so I've had that running the whole way through, to slicing and
  to a printed object I can hold: Ender-3 Max, 0.2 mm, about two and a half hours,
  galaxy black PLA. The weld stage returned one watertight body.

  Three of those stages ship today. Structor built the obelisk body. GilgaMESH did the
  weld — `gilgamesh remesh`, a voxel remesh that resolves the carve and the body into a
  single watertight solid, which is what makes it sliceable rather than merely
  correct-looking. The rectify, extract and emboss stages are Nazca, which unveils later
  in the rollout.

  What the obelisk is *for* is the part I care about. It's a recurring calibration and
  first-test project: every module gets measured against the same object, every new
  module joins the run, and anyone learning the suite can walk the identical path
  instead of starting cold on their own hard part.

  Next log: closing the loop. Gorgon is a handheld 3D scanner I'm building so the
  printed obelisk can be scanned back into a model and compared against the one that
  went to the slicer. That's the step that turns this from a walkthrough into a
  fidelity measurement — a number for what each stage of the chain actually costs you.
  It's on the bench now, not shipped.

  Gallery: https://3dj77.github.io
  Downloads: https://github.com/3DJ77/Livyatan

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