Found this morning

Look what was on my printer when I woke up this morning!

Here's a story idea for free: computer virus finds 3D printers left idle, uses them to build machines for some nefarious purpose. Clearly a more sophisticated 3D printer than what we have now but if we had Star Trek replicators without some kind of antivirus protection, your food replicator might make poison, or you might have killbots flying out of the thing and taking out the entire mess hall.



I've got a project that's going to have me loading every color I have in the printer over the next few weeks, and I thought as long as the colors are loaded anyway, I'd build myself a little army.

TechCrap: Ultimachine 4043D PLA, 10% infill, 0 extra shells

Useful software notification

I had a PowerPoint 2007 file that needed to be displayed on the church's machine, which only had PowerPoint 2003 installed. I threw on PP2007 Reader which was fine but wouldn't go on the 2nd monitor. This is a known long term issue that MS refuses to fix, probably because they want you to buy a copy of PP even for display-only machines like this one.

After some Googling, I found a program called WinWarden which sits in memory, has an INI file by which you can tell it "whenever a window is created with a name that matches this pattern, shove it over 1024 pixels to the right" which makes it go to the 2nd monitor.

WinWarden is actually capable of a ton more than just that, but it solved this problem for me. We don't use PP that often, we have dedicated software for this machine but a couple of times a year it'll be useful.

Book NOT finished

The Kif Strike Back by C.J. Cherryh

I've only ever just given up and abandoned maybe 3 or 4 books in my life. This is one more.

Having already finished the first two books in the trilogy (of which there are actually 4 or 5 books I guess) and not really gotten into them, I got about halfway through this one and realized that I give absolutely zero shits about this book. I don't care what happens, not to anyone, any race, or any individual. And nothing was happening. Nothing had been steadfastly happening for chapters. Maybe something would have started happening on the very next page, but I didn't really care.

Screw it. My reader has a dozen books I am really excited to read. Life is too short to read books you aren't enjoying.

Surprisingly good deal

One of the things I had to buy for car repair this week was a new headlight for the Malibu. I found that the going rate on eBay was about $28 shipped. That seemed like a great price but when it got here it was even better - it came with both headlight bulbs already installed. The cheapest version of these bulbs go for $12 at local stores.

I was at the auto parts store just before coming home to find it there, but didn't buy the bulb I needed because I hadn't written down the number. Just as well, as it turns out.

The headlight seems to be absolutely fine, a perfect match though obviously from different molds (slightly different corner rounding and mold seams on the inside, identical looking on the outside, all the mounting points and everything are in the same places).