A Nueva York Cari and I spent the 4th of July weekend in New York at her sister’s house. My mother-in-law has been staying with us since early March (she came down for Dominic and Elvira’s wedding), and it was finally time for her Florida vacation to come to an end. She won’t fly, doesn’t drive, and is getting up there in years, so a solo train ride isn’t happening either. So, driving is the only real option. Here’s a run-down of the trip: Wednesday, July 1: Dominic and Elvira picked me up around 5:00pm and dropped me off at the rental car company, which has a branch in the Brandon mall. I got a black Mazda CX50, which is a crossover SUV. For a road trip with three people and a bunch of luggage, it’s decent. After driving it back to the house, we all packed and prepared to...
Category: 3D Printing
Some Semblance of Order
Studio Organization After printing, assembling, and mounting the left-hand unit, the side-cabinet project is now complete. I found that the methodology for attaching the mounting buttons to the side of the organizer was very cumbersome, even after making some adjustments to the cabinet design before printing this second unit. I need to spend more time refining this before releasing the designs to the public, as it’s a big point of frustration. All-in-all, I’m very happy with the results and the clean look vs. old, ugly, open shelves is a big improvement. Retro Computing As mentioned in a previous post, I obtained and backed up about 200 floppy disks for the ST. I finally spent time going through all the disks, of which there were about 120 that weren’t bad. The data has been dropped on the hard drive of my STE and is roughly cataloged. The only thing left to...
Side Cabinet, Side Trip
Not much of an update his week as I had a bunch of dental work done Monday morning and I was down for the count until Thursday. I'm back to normal now, though. Akro-Mils Side Cabinet Success! After a pretty extensive workout, my Bambu Lab P1P finished printing all of the pieces for my first cabinet. I was able to design all of the parts so they didn't require supports, which kept the print time down. The cabinet sections took the longest; about 36 hours of printing. Designing them to not need supports really helped that time be as low as possible. Printed parts weren't the only things needed. I had some hardware left over from a previous project and I purposefully designed the cabinets to use them. Here's what it takes: (Qty. 4) 3D printed cabinet sections (Qty. 4) 3D printed cabinet doors (Qty. 2) 3D printed shelves (Qty....
Archiving and Organizing
The Annals I've officially added an archive feature to the site. It's VERY early and there's only a single, silly item in there, but if you want to check it out, visit the Annals. As new things get added, they'll be mentioned in the Miscellany section of this blog. Video Games Another Atari ST boxed game arrived this week: Droid: The Definitive Collection published by Bitmap Soft. Although the original Droid and it's follow-up, Droid II, were released back in the '90s, there's recently been an enhanced version created of the first game by Jamie Hamshere that adds support for the Atari STE hardware as well as provides quality-of-life improvements to the gameplay. All of these are bundled into this boxed release. All of the materials for the box have been scanned, so I just need some time to get it into online archives. Studio Organization A while back I...
Draining
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...
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...
