This summer has been hot and we've had the air conditioning running a lot. That's a pretty normal thing in Florida, but I've also switched to working from home for four out of five work days, so I need it cool so my brain doesn't bake. With the extra cooling, came an unfortunate incident where the condensation pan of my HVAC unit filled and overflowed. The result was water spillage that took a few days to dry out. The root cause was the drain line to the outside world got clogged with calcification. Subsequently, the leak detector in the pan (the one that comes with the A/C unit) didn't work and didn't shut off the unit. So, double-fail. I cleared the line with my Shop-Vac and replaced the PVC "S"-shaped trap on the outside of the house, which was easily re-built with new components. But, along with buying an IoT...
Category: 3D Printing
Re-Organizing the Organizers
Oh, how good it feels to have a few days off. In addition to the long Labor Day weekend, I took two additional days off, today and tomorrow. So, if you count Friday night, that's five and one quarter days to relax and enjoy myself. In such situations, someone might watch a movie (at home or in the theater, I don't judge), get lost in a good book, touch base with friends, or just get out into the quiet bliss of nature by hiking or fishing. I think most people want something that derails their mind and calms it; makes it so they don't have to think of things they might normally consider responsibilities. Me? Nope. I come up with another project and hyper-focus on it "while I have the free time to get it done." Of course it's around the subject of organizing things. Or rather, re-organizing things. Over...
Rebuilding
A good friend of mine, Dale Lewis, has been going through a tough spell medically, so me and some friends are trying to raise some money to get him a mobility scooter through GoFundMe. Please take a moment to read Dale’s story and donate if you can. If you can’t donate, please help us spread the word. Thank you! Over the past several months, I’ve gotten back into buying and reading comic books. One of the roadblocks that I had before was time. And that was two-fold as it takes time every week to get in the car, drive over to the local comic book store and pick up your subscriptions, then haul it all back home. As much as I want to support local businesses, I found that Midtown Comics in New York was able to ship out subscriptions monthly. So, I started getting my books through them and...
A Needed Break
I took Thursday and Friday off this past week to have a long, four-day weekend. And for the first time in quite a while, I went into this break with very little planned. Resting, consuming entertainment, and generally clearing my mind were the top priorities. So as I write this in the middle of the afternoon on Sunday, I feel like this was a successful break. But, that doesn't mean that I did nothing. As we slide into the cooler fall weather, I've had a hankerin' for some goulash the last few weeks. It had been so long since I made it, I dug around the internet to find a recipe, and stumbled across this one (original link at the bottom of the page). I made a double batch and have been eating it every day. I did a couple of small projects around the house too. I fixed a...
TinyTV and Weekend Plans
Cari is away in Miami for the weekend and I have a bunch of little household projects I want to complete. Out in the yard, I need to replace the old garden hoses and sprayers, pull some weeds, apply lawn fertilizer, and trim the palm tree and Bird of Paradise in the front yard. In the garage, I have a few tool holders to hang and need to recycle some old rotors and a car battery. Inside there are some pieces of iron artwork I need to hang, as well as some normal chores such as laundry. And, if I can get all of those things done, I have some work to do on the DeLorean and some more organization to do in the office. I recently saw a YouTube video from Norman Chan of Tested.com reviewing the TinyTV from TinyCircuits. Instantly, I needed (and ordered) one. It arrived a...
A New Year
I feel lucky that all of the craziness that began in 2020 has barely affected me and Cari. What's missed the most is hanging out with friends, both near and far, and not being with them during the holidays. Other than that, every once in a while I get the craving to go out to a restaurant. We have not eaten out since the pandemic started, and that's not really an issue with online ordering as it is these days. I'm also not blinded by the fact that an arbitrary number on a piece of paper now says it's a different year and things will be different. Sure, I'm hopeful that maybe things will be much more normal by the end of 2021, but I fear that the narrow-mindedness of people who think that everything bad died with the turn of the calendar will once again push us into a...
Happy Holidays
I think it's starting to sound cliche to say that I've been very busy in my day job lately, which is why I have been posting regularly. But, I'm gonna say it anyway. Over the past couple of months I've been able to re-build how my department works. As a result, projects are getting completed quicker and the team is getting happier as they see see their efforts bear fruit. I think we're on a great track for 2021. I've been experimenting with creating a schedule for my free time. I have so many interests and things I need to complete that, if I don't organize and strucutre, the time will get wasted. For me, the approach to this will be identifying the things I need to do (projects), scheduling them, and then fitting in things I want to do around that. I'll post more on this as I get...
Preparing for 2021
I've decided to focus on deep cleaning, organizing, and purging inventory in the studio. I'm halting all of my own projects until this is complete, with the hopes I can resume everything again on Jan 1st. To that end, about a month ago I started planning out drawer organizers using foam core boards held together with hot glue. Yesterday, I was able to complete two of them. Combination of foam boards and custom 3-D printed holders (left side). There are still two more drawers in that credenza, and eight drawers in my main desk pedestals that need to be done. I hope to be able to do two drawers per week. I also took the time to completely empty off my desk (computer monitors, charging stations, etc.) and dusted and wiped everything down. I rearranged and relocated a lot of things on the desktop to a point where I could...
Studio Organizing
Cleaning up and organizing the studio has been a high priority this weekend. It's started with some smaller projects like going through the literally cleaning, week's mail, going over finances, and ripping movies. It's now progressed into making forward movement on some small projects and looking at the space here and organizing. I heard Adam Savage recently reiterate a saying has: "drawers are where things go to die." And I would agree. But he reminded me that there's a particularly interesting way to organize drawers to prevent that, which is to build an insert with custom dividers out of foam-core. With that in mind, I started looking at all the drawers in the studio and now have it on the docket to properly organize, and subsequently clean out, the drawers. This will include organizing some items, such as spare external and internal hard drives, into caddies, which I currently have...
Upgrades
A few days ago, I attempted to upgrade my Ender 3 3D printer from the stock motherboard from Creality to a new revision of the board. The original one doesn't have a bootloader or the ability to easily flash the firmware, but a newer rev does. So back in October of 2019 I picked up a v1.1.5 board (mine was v1.1.4) and finally installed it this past weekend. After installing it, I realized the printer's Z-axis was "broken", in that the carriage with the nozzle/extruder would go up but not come down. I did a bunch of troubleshooting and thought it was the new board. So, I ordered another board, but this time, decided to upgrade to a 32-bit processor and move from the Arduino-based platform from Creality. So, I got a BigTree Tech SKR Mini E3 v2.0. That arrived last night and I installed it, and the Z axis...
