Lenses sure can be expensive for mirrorless cameras. When I first bought a Nikon Z camera, I picked up the versatile 24-70mm F2.8 S to go with it, and that fabulous lens tied me over for a few years until I could afford a second one.

Recently, I have been able to pick up a few more optics because I have found an affordable alternative that doesn’t compromise on quality, and that’s Viltrox.

Our slow-moving queue curves around a two-story wooden boathouse filled with props from explorations through distant lands. At the front of the line, a Disney cast member dressed in khaki helps us step onto a quaint little boat for a tour around the jungle.

This is Disneyland’s world-famous Jungle Cruise, filled with animatronic animals and painful puns from your skipper, and old-world set pieces depicting scenes straight out of the Amazon, Congo, Mekong and Nile rivers. It’s a ride that Walt Disney himself had a hand in developing, but something new is coming that separates it from its 1950s origins: a 3D-printed prop.

You may have seen small-scale 3D printing being done by hobbyists at home. But that’s child’s play compared to what industrial-scale 3D-printing workshops can do.

Haddy, a 3D-printing business based in Florida, says it can build worlds. More specifically, Jay Rogers, co-founder and CEO, tells me the company is installing its first boat in a Disney park.

“It’s in the Jungle Cruise ride,” he says during Disney Demo Day at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California, at the end of last year.

3D printing burst onto the scene in the mid-2010s. These printers take little pellets or strands of polymer or liquid resin and turn them into fully fleshed-out designs, like the purple toy octopus and Prada purse that my 3-year-old daughter got from her Uncle Zach for her recent birthday. Using a digital file, you can send a project to the printer to produce — whether it’s a small octopus or an armchair.

Advertisement

You can buy small 3D printers, priced between $180 and $400, for home projects, while larger operations require enormous machines that churn out items as big as cafe counters and even houses. 

And, yes, boats.

Haddy’s Jungle Cruise boat is a prop canoe that has now been placed on the ride at Disneyland, becoming part of the scenic journey alongside those fake animals on the banks of the Amazon-Congo-Nile-Mekong river.

Walt Disney Imagineering collaborated closely with the Haddy team to adapt the plans for the boat, ensuring it captured the spirit of the existing props while using 3D-printing technology.

“We had the old boat, and we did do a 3D scan in order to get it dimensionally,” Chris Hill, associate R&D imagineer for Disney, said in January when Disneyland installed the canoe right across from the loading dock. “For the creative part of it, we had a photo of the boat from the 1960s, and so using the dimensions from the 3D scan, I modeled the new boat, which is what we used to 3D print the boat.”

Do 3D-printed boats have that Disney whimsy?

Founded in 2022, Haddy creates home decor like planters, and furniture like outdoor benches, chairs and tables. Its gig of working with Disney’s Imagineers came about after it was selected as one of the four startups to receive financing, platforming and mentoring via the 2025 Disney Accelerator Program.

Rogers says Haddy can quickly transform imagination into reality, saving a lot of time (and presumably money, although the companies wouldn’t provide specifics). This is in addition to being able to recycle any 3D-printed material for new objects, because once a prop reaches the end of its life, it can be melted down and 3D-printed again into something new.

A 20-foot boat made by a traditional boat-maker can take 1,000 human hours, but not so for the Jungle Cruise canoe prop, says Rogers. “It’s not just faster to make, it’s faster to develop.”

He describes the traditional process, which unfolds over weeks and months: designing the boat, creating and securing a master mold, repeating the mold-making process an average of 30 times per boat and then manufacturing the parts that go onto the boat. 

By comparison, it would take Haddy 70 robot hours in manufacturing. Both processes use a digital file as a starting point. The difference is that Haddy can simply make tweaks to the file and reprint the boat if there are any problems with the final product — no more mold-making necessary.

Nick Blackburn, executive of technical business operations at Disney, says his team went to a series of conventions and conferences to find the right company to partner with on 3D printing. 

“This project right now is the premiere project that we’re working on to show that we can use advanced fabrication, robotic manufacturing and new materials to bring parks to life faster and more effectively,” Blackburn says.

Still, how much of the whimsy remains? Can a 3D-printed boat evoke the same feelings of nostalgia and fantasy as the ride’s existing set pieces? 

During Disney’s Demo Day, I spot what appears to be a wrought iron fence leaning against a tree, and Rogers says it was 3D-printed. Maybe guests won’t even notice if a boat is made of polymer instead of fiberglass-reinforced plastic, and printed by a robot.

Even the light fixtures in the Main Theatre at Walt Disney Studios, where I had just watched a video showcasing various new technologies being used by startups backed by Disney, were made by Haddy for this event. (I had assumed the intricate, glowing blue lights were a remnant of when Frozen 2 was being workshopped in the theater.)

Perhaps 3D-printed objects have a whimsy of their own? CNET Senior Editor James Bricknell, an expert on 3D printing, says yes. The canoe would not only have all the whimsy that an Imagineer can conjure, but would also be manufactured faster and in a far less expensive way — and would definitely float.

“It’s a brilliant idea,” Bricknell says. “You can make them look any way you like, just like the normal boats, but instead of injection molding, you can make each one individual for much less cost.”

Disney’s Imagineers are continually seeking new technologies to incorporate into the parks and on Disney cruise ships.

Walt Disney Imagineering is “the tip of the spear when it comes to emerging technologies” like AI, robotics and drones, according to Michael Hundgen, portfolio executive creative producer of Walt Disney Imagineering.

With Haddy, Imagineers are exploring the creation of set pieces for attractions in Disney’s theme parks. Beyond the Jungle Cruise, these products could also include closet doors from Monstropolis — for the new Monsters, Inc. ride being constructed at Walt Disney World — and rock work for various lands, such as Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. There might even be the creation of furniture for thousands of hotel rooms across the Orlando property.

“We’re not just creating technology for technology’s sake; we’re doing it to help our creative teams bring the stories from the company to life,” Hundgen says.

So now it’s out with the fiberglass-reinforced plastic and in with the polymer pellets. We’ll have to see whether guests truly can tell the difference between the old props and the new.

Google has just updated the Deep Think mode for its Gemini 3 model, and it’s a massive step forward for chores involving 3D printing. For the unaware, Deep Think mode focuses on enhanced multimodal understanding and reasoning, and its latest upgrade pushes it further for engineering, research, and scientific tasks. The core focus is going from theoretical to practical applications. One of those application areas is 3D printing.

Essentially, Gemini 3 Deep Think is going to turn your rough sketches into a proper 3D model and generate a file ready for feeding to a 3D printer. What you have here is a tool that can basically take a look at physical objects or a 2D image, and turn them into a 3D blueprint while making changes you request in natural language.

Why is this a big step forward?

For anyone interested in 3D printing, even for personal usage, going from idea to execution is a hassle. You must know CAD modeling, own the right software, and have a powerful computing machine to turn those ideas into a 3D file. The whole process is pretty intensive and time-consuming, in addition to posing a steep learning curve. And when it comes to product prototyping in engineering labs, or even companies testing new products, the whole ordeal of physics modeling and prototyping ends up taking a lot of time and resources.

With Gemini 3 Deep Think, Google wants to replace those technical challenges, letting users go from ideas to the 3D printing stage without having to deal with complex physics-based modeling and software. But it’s not just the sheer convenience of turning drawings into 3D files that is going to speed things up.

Iterating on an existing design is an equally crucial step, and Gemini 3 Deep Think is aiming to ease that, as well. The benefits are huge, not just for DIY enthusiasts but also for material scientists, engineers, and product developers.

A huge practical shift for AI

“I used it to engineer new metamaterials and a spider-web inspired bridge design, 3D printed it, then validated the structural integrity with a @nvidia DGX Spark load test. A mind-blowing example of the future of material and architecture design – image in, fabrication-ready design out,” Markus Buehler, an engineering professor at MIT, wrote on X.

Taking a conversation approach to fixing and tweaking the complex models of objects, and then having a CAD model ready for printing in minutes, is a huge step forward. Gemini 3 Deep Think is available to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app, and it will also be made available via API for the first time to interested companies and researchers.

The lovely thing about the x86 architecture is its decades of backwards compatibility, which makes it possible to run 1990s operating systems on modern-day hardware, with relatively few obstacles in the way. Recently [Yeo Kheng Meng] did just that with Windows 98 SE on a 2020 ThinkPad P12s Gen 1, booting it alongside Windows 11 and Linux from the same NVMe drive.

Naturally, after previously getting MS-DOS 6.22 from 1994 running on a 2020 ThinkPad X13, the step to doing the same with Windows 98 SE wasn’t that large. The main obstacles that you face come in the form of UEFI and hardware driver support.

Both ThinkPad laptops have in common that they support UEFI-CSM mode, also known as ‘classical BIOS’, as UEFI boot wasn’t even a glimmer yet in some drunk engineer’s eye when Win98 was released. After this everything is about getting as many hardware drivers scrounged together as possible.

[Yeo] ended up having to bodge on a USB 2.0 expansion card via a Thunderbolt dock as Win98 doesn’t have xHCI (USB 3.0) support. With that issue successfully bodged around using a veritable tower of adapters, installing Windows 98 was as easy as nuking Secure Boot in the BIOS, enabling UEFI-CSM along with Thunderbolt BIOS assist mode and disable Kernel DMA protection.

Because UEFI-CSM implementations tend to be buggy, the CREGFIX DOS driver was used to smooth things over. Another issue is the same that we chuckled about back in the day, as Windows 98 cannot address more than 512 MB of RAM by default. Fortunately patches by [Rudolph Loew] helped to fix this and some other smaller issues.

Unfortunately neither Intel nor NVIDIA have released Win98 drivers for quite some time, so there’s no graphics acceleration beyond basic VESA support and the SoftGPU driver. Disk access goes via the BIOS too rather than using an NVMe driver, so it’s not as zippy as it could be, but for Win9x it’s quite usable.

Finally ACPI wasn’t recognized by Win98, but it’s only fair to blame that on the complete flaming train wreck that is ACPI rather than anything to do with Windows. This particular issue was worked around by configuring the BIOS to support S3 power state and with that making Win98 happy again.

It’s honestly quite a shame that UEFI-CSM is largely ignored by new systems, as it makes installing even Windows 7 basically impossible, and thus creating probably the largest split within the x86 ecosystem since the arrival of AMD64/x86_64.

Musician Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies are like a Tarot card deck full of whimsical ideas meant to break up a creative-block situation, particularly in the recording studio. They’re loads of fun to pick one at random and actually try to follow the advice, as intended, but some of them are just plain good advice for creatives.

One that keeps haunting me is “Honor thy error as a hidden intention”, which basically boils down to taking a “mistake” and seeing where it leads you if you had meant to do it. I was just now putting the finishing touches on this week’s Hackaday Podcast, and noticed that we have been honoring a mistake for the past 350-something shows. Here’s how it happened.

When Mike and I recorded the first-ever podcast, I had no idea how to go about doing it. But I grew up in Nashville, and know my way around the inside of a music studio, and I’ve also got more 1990s-era music equipment than I probably need. So rather than do the reasonable thing, like edit the recording on the computer, we recorded to an archaic Roland VS-880 “Digital Studio” which is basically the glorified descendant of those old four-track cassette Portastudios.

If you edit audio in hardware, you can’t really see what you’re doing – you have to listen to it. And so, when I failed to notice that Mike and I were saying “OK, are you ready?” and “Sure, let’s go!”, it got mixed in with the lead-in music before we started the show off for real. But somehow, we said it exactly in time with the music, and it actually sounded good. So we had a short laugh about it and kept it.

And that’s why, eight years later, we toss random snippets of conversations into the intro music to spice it up. It was a mistake that worked. Had we been editing on the computer, we would have noticed the extra audio and erased it with a swift click of the mouse, but because we had to go back and listen to it, we invented a new tradition. Honor thy error indeed.