The inevitable

Took the day off for J's birthday today. So of course, after an entire summer of no problems, our data center had a major switch malfunction this morning, gumming up several of my servers and killing a lot of the services that I provide to other systems. AND my domain password expired today so I couldn't VPN and had to drive in. So today I logged 8 hours of vacation and 3 hours of OT.

Things and things and things

I've been browsing Thingiverse for a few days, and the number of things on my "build this" list is getting huge.
I found the shower bracket replacement part that I couldn't buy last year, causing me to spend $70 on a whole new bracket. I've found all kinds of stuff that would be cool, and I've thought up some other things that I'm definitely going to be building to solve irritating little problems.

Inspiration

Looking into the RepRap design and variants is inspiring me. One thing I hadn't realized is the widespread availability of 608 (skateboard) bearings for almost nothing, and the Pololu stepper drivers are crazy cheap and easy to use.
One of the reasons I never built an equitorial platform was a combination of being too lazy to find and order proper bearings, and building the circuitry to run the motors. With 608 bearings just a couple of buck each on ebay and Pololu drivers for $14 and easy to drive with anything, even a 555, an equitorial platform comes down to maybe $30 to $40 in parts and an afternoon with a router, some glue and screws.
I think that it might be interesting to design a 3D printed set of parts for an EQ platform.
( G+ comments below the cut )

Audiobook finished

Debt of Bones by Terry Goodkind

Sword of Truth prequel/short story (128 pages)

Acronis True Image

Bought my copy of Acronis True Image Home (3 PC license). It's already saved me a ton of work once and I'm sure it will in the future too.

It has one feature that I have no idea what kind of black magic they're doing - they claim that they can restore a Windows boot image to a completely different machine - like with totally different hardware. I don't know if they're somehow triggering Windows Setup to redetect and install drivers for new hardware or what. And I don't know if this circumvents Windows' re-registration if too much hardware changes. I'm intrigued anyway. Seems like magic.