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....
Category: General
Flopping and Thrusting
I'm going to try to do a weekly round-up. Try to establish consistency and all that... Retro Computing As part of trying to do my small part in preserving Atari ST history, I figured that it doesn't take too much time or energy to find batches of floppies out there in the world and see if there is interesting source code or software that needs to be preserved. I recently won an online auction for very cheap that had 200+ disks. The shipment arrived this week. It looks like the majority of the disks are ST-related, with some being Windows/PC-related. I hooked up my external floppy drive/Greaseweazle enclosure and imaged the disks to my hard drive. I still need to go through each disk to see their actual contents, and from there, will determine if there's anything that needs to be archived online. The Adventures of Johnny Thrust I've begun...
Sneaking Up On 2026
The last six weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. In early November, I took a couple days off work and ended up pinching a nerve/pulling a muscle in my lower lumbar. This probably happens every few years when I tweak something back there and I'm down-and-out for a day or two. Lucky me, this was a two weeklong ordeal. As the end of November approached, and I couldn't really shake the pain and immobility, I decided to go to a massage therapist and see if they could work it out. And they did, just a few days before we were scheduled to fly to New York for Thanksgiving. In general, being in New York was great, but after only a day or two, my back decided to rebel. I’m pretty sure it was a result of sleeping on a different bed than I wasn’t used to. My bed...
New Section: Projects
For quite some time, I've been running a website on my internal LAN where I document all sorts of projects I'm working on. Since I'm the only one who sees it (my wife can too, but she has no interest), I feel like I've been curating this as more of a personal diary than anything else. Today, the Projects section of the chewbode.com site goes live. I'll be posting everything I'm working on. My goal with this is two-fold: To hopefully inspire and motivate others, and also add more frequent content to this site. I update the internal site pretty regularly, and that steals energy away from blogging here. Why should I spend all this time documenting and posting internal blog entries then turn around and do it all again on the public website? So, I don't. Or, I haven't. By moving projects to here, I can consolidate this energy.
Rethought This
Let’s continue forward with the discussion of whether or not writing for this blog makes sense. I’ve spent some offline time thinking, and even today I was talking to my friend, Carl King, about it. I feel like I’ve settled on a direction. The thought of writing a blog is an ill-defined, long-term task. You never really get to the end; you never really finish. Even when you’re about to die, there’s a good chance that you won’t have the time, or possibly even the inclination, to “wrap up your life story in the blog”. It’s like an open-ended MMO video game. Never complete. Always grinding. That all sounds daunting, doesn’t it? Yeah, I guess it does. So, if it’s that bad, then why do it? Well, that’s the profound question I’m asking myself, especially when viewing it as writing for the sake of writing. But I’ve come to realize...
Rethinking This
Once again, months have slipped by since I've last blogged. And there's no good reason I haven't posted. As I sit here typing this, I'm thinking in real-time why it is that I don't do this more often. You see, I have a Saturday morning reminder in my phone that pops up every week, but I end up placing it at the very bottom of my priority list in my mind. So, by the time Sunday slips away and the week rolls around, I see it as an annoying, undone task and I ultimately mark it as Completed just to declutter my list. I'm not sure why I do this. Part of me likes the idea of spending a little time each week to document my life, if for no other reason than for posterity. I envision that the posts will be informative and paint a picture of my day-to-day...
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...
Post-Ian, Pre-Dominican Republic
I figured I'd finally post up here to let everyone know we made it through hurricane Ian just fine. Since the storm shifted trajectory at the last minute, we dodged the majority of the winds and water. As a result, there was no damage to the house. The only mishap we had was that several trees in the preserve out back fell over in a domino effect, with the last tree landing in our back yard. Since we have nothing in the backyard, there was no damage to anything. The tree still needs to be removed, but since it originate from off-property, the CDD is expected to remove it. I reached out to them on October 9. I suspect it'll be a little bit before they can make it around. A view from the treeline. The opposite view, from the lanai. The trees covering the walkway in the preserve. Carl...
Waiting out the Storm
Ian just made landfall down in the Punta Gorda area. So far, all is good here except for some heavy wind gusts. Friends nearby, including us, have had some power flickers over the past couple of hours, so I think it's inevitable we'll lose power for a bit at some point. I'm the blue dot. Getting a little dirty out there.
The Ian Shuffle
Things are looking better for us with the storm. It has decided to shift and go more easterly which means it'll make landfall about 200 miles south of us. Downside is that, since it's been slowing down and soaking up so much warm water, there's a good chance that it'll turn into a Category 5 hurricane. Here are some of the latest diagrams. We were able to get all of the storm shutters on the house yesterday. All outside items have been stowed in the garage. All hurricane prep-items are at the ready. Generator's ready with 25 gals of extra fuel. All-in-all, we're looking quite good.
