Lab/spaces reorg/reevaluation

So, I finally gave up and bought a new 3D printer. These Chinese imports have gotten better and cheaper every month and it looked like a good time to jump. But all of the new printers use the smaller filament sizes, so I have to unload all my old filament. I found a buyer already.

The old printer will be a test platform for some things I've wanted to try for years but never wanted to risk leaving myself with no running printer and no way to fix the printer without a running printer...

It got me to clearing out stuff and that lead to the urge to really dig down and decide what needs to stay and go. I've put half a dozen things on eBay in the last 24 hours with more to come.

I'm also supposed to be doing some unspecified thing for Musecon. At this point I don't know if that'll happen or not. I guess I do have the new printer, I can give a review of a ridiculously cheap 3D printer. I'm going to try to document the out-of-the-box experience, and try to look at it from a newbie point of view, whether someone without any prior printing experience would have a lot of trouble with this or not. I suppose that means NOT immediately starting to change things on the printer. Oh well.

[Dragonfly DIY] New printer on its way

I've been keeping an eye on the 3D printers showing up on eBay out of China. The prices have been extremely good, but anyone who has done DIY 3D printers knows that it would be easy to cut corners that would result in a very frustrating printer.

I finally saw one I liked for a ridiculously good price, and I ordered it up this past week. Should be here next week.

I plan to do a pretty full review, trying to keep in mind how a person with no experience would do with it, which I guess means just following directions and using their software.

I fully plan to almost certainly just toss their software and whatever else, and use my existing toolchain, but for the sake of the review I think I will stick to what's in the box at first.

Then maybe I'll do suggestions.

FWIW this printer seems to be pretty much a clone of the Makerbot Replicator 2. A couple of years ago I'd have been outraged and would never do business with them for having ripped off a good member of the open hardware community, but Makerbot has burned every bridge they had, and I can't be arsed to give a shit who's ripping them off at this point.

Mean time, I've made plans to repurpose my current i3 as an experimental platform, and have sold off all the 3mm filament I have sitting around.

So anyway, watch this space, this will probably be at least 2, maybe more articles. The first one will be unboxing up through first print. It MIGHT be next weekend, maybe a little later.

Book finished: Abaddon's Gate

Abaddon's Gate by James S.A. Corey

★★★★☆

Good continuation of the series. Lots of suspense and action. Got a bit slow about halfway through but picked up and turned into a page turner for the last third or so. Got a few fun new characters in the universe, ones I can care about.

A couple of favorite passages:

As she walked across a wide empty plain of steel that should have been covered in topsoil and crops, she thought that this audaciousness was exactly what humanity had lost somewhere in the last couple of centuries. When ancient maritime explorers had climbed into their creaking wooden ships and tried to find ways to cross the great oceans of Earth, had their voyage been any less dangerous than the one the Mormons had been planning to attempt? The end point any less mysterioous? But in both cases, they'd been driven to find out what was on the other side of the long trip. Driven by a need to see shores no one else had ever seen before. Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many doors she finds, she'll be haunted by what might be behind it. A few people liked to pain this drive as a weakness. A failing of the species. Humanity as the virus. The creature that never stops filling up its available living space.


Hector seemed to be moving over to that view, based on their last conversation. But Anna rejected that idea. If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they'd all still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another's fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She'd looked up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She'd tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity, that had put her there. Looking at the tiny world spinning around her, she knew one day it would give them the stars as well.

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Heroism is a label most people get for doing shit they'd never do if the were really thinking about it.