Rambles that are fluffy, by fluffy
>>> import datetime >>> apollo = datetime.datetime(1969,7,20,20,17) >>> delta = datetime.datetime.now() - apollo >>> apollo + delta / 2 datetime.datetime(1996, 10, 13, 20, 57, 7, 893840)
Anything that happened on or before October 13, 1996 is now closer in history to the Apollo 11 moon landing than it is to today.
It’s way too easy to get heated while in the thick of things and for bad-faith interpretations to take over from the point anyone’s trying to make, and that is absolutely a two-way street.1
For now I’ve removed Toot! from my phone and DNS-blocked plush.city from my home network, so hopefully any posts I make to Mastodon are just from my automatic crossposter (like this one). I’ll still (eventually) see replies to my blog posts that come in as Webmentions, but hopefully not being Always So Online will be better for my mental health, which hasn’t been great as of late and I’m definitely lashing out at others much more than I would like.
I forgot to check up on my previous annual goals post, but better late than never, right?
Notes to self:
Oh well, it was a good learning experience, as long as I actually learned from it.
Oh yeah, earlier today the original contractor came by to look at things. He’s agreed to do the finishing-up work for free, and also will be reimbursing me for the plumbing expenses, which is very kind of him. When I showed him what his previous plumber had done he was incredibly shocked by it.
Hopefully the work will be finished up sometime in the next month; unfortunately he’s traveling soon and won’t be back for a few weeks, but he said he will hopefully be able to schedule someone to do the patching-up.
Everyone else is doing one so I’d might as well too.
Oh yeah, today the replacement heat bed sensor cable arrived. It was a major pain in the ass to replace. I ended up routing it differently than the manufacturer intended because the factory routing is clearly what causes the conductors to wear down and fail, and anyway doing it the right way would have required basically disassembling the entire printer.
But anyway I have a working main printer again and so I’ve resumed my production run. The current thing I’m making has TPU parts on it and that filament needs to print slowly so I’m keeping the old printer busy with it (since it’s not like the X1C can make it go any faster anyway). During the downtime I did do a couple of prints of the main PETG part and got a reminder of just how bad the old printer is at printing PETG (slow, lots of stringing, etc.) but it at least let me validate the correctness of the threaded insert.
I also have all of my plaster slip casting equipment and material now, so tomorrow I’ll probably print a calibration cube to make a slip cast mold of (and I guess that would be fun to fire as well). It’ll be fun to have anoter tool for creating things, and it’s nice that slip casting can go entirely in parallel with 3D printing aside from printing the templates.
Oh except I just realized I never bought plasticine, but I can get that at Target. I also still need to get the oil soap as well (which I can also get there).
Anyway, based on how obnoxious it was to fix the X1C, I think if I get a third printer for my print farm it’ll be the A1. It’s just as fast as the P1P and is WAY easier to maintain. The downside is that being a bed-slinger it’s still prone to some of the more annoying print defects inherent to that (especially ring artifacts). Also its AMS takes up a hell of a lot of desk space, but I wasn’t planning on getting a second AMS anyway. I mostly use my X1C’s as a fancy dry box, and there’s much cheaper dry boxes out there. It does mean that my multimaterial prints can only happen on the X1C, though, unless I go through the hassle of getting the Palette working again.
Turns out it’s kind of hard to do???1
The fireplace work has finished, and conveniently today my firewood storage rack also arrived. The fellow recommended that I wait another 24 hours before lighting it up, though, as the cement needs time to cure.
I’m wondering what to do with the decorative logs that were left in the fireplace all this time. They were just like. Cutesy logs that were used as part of the home staging and got left behind.
I think these are them and the description says:
This is a natural product with zero chemical treatments or additives. This is a decorative product and not intended for burning, which could expose user to soot and carbon monoxide.
so I’m getting mixed messages here.
Plumbing was supposed to happen today but they somehow forgot to put me on the schedule. Which I found out when I’d called the plumber to find out when they were intending to start, and they had some more questions for me anyway, and it turns out they’d meant to send a new estimate based on what I’d figured out. Hopefully it’ll happen soon.
Fireplace work started today, but the fireplace folks still hadn’t gotten the liner purchased (and couldn’t get it because all the suppliers are still closed), so now I have a chimney with flashing and a crown but no cap, which means if it rains tonight there will be water inside, because for some reason the dude in his infinite wisdom didn’t even cover it with a tarp. Sigh. This particular fireplace contractor isn’t so great at the communicating.
But anyway the old chimney cap did come down and it’s incredibly rusted and shoddy and was very much falling apart so yeah, I’m glad this work got done when it did, before things got way, way worse.
I was about to start a production run of the tamping stations, and my printer decided that this would be a perfect time for its bed leveling sensor to fail. So I switched back to my old Artillery Genius for now (oh god it is so slow and the bed is so small1) and spent all day trying to troubleshoot the sensor. Apparently there’s a pretty common problem with the X1C where the sensor’s cable (a $4 part) tends to fail weirdly. In this case, I think that when it recalibrated because of the firmware update, a marginal connection got shaken loose.
Anyway, so I ordered a $4 cable which had $7 shipping on it, so I ended up ordering a bunch of filament, and then discovered that I apparently have a Bambu filament membership? I’m not sure when I ended up with that. Was it something Bambu gave me for being a Kickstarter backer? I’m not finding any records in my email of having subscribed or being given it. Well, in any case, it means that Bambu’s branded filament is currently cheaper than my usual supplier anyway. But gosh I have a lot of filament now.
In any case, I’m thinking of ramping up my production which means it’d actually be beneficial for me to build an actual print farm, and I’m considering getting a Bambu P1P or P1S to supplement my X1C. But if I do end up pivoting into ceramics I don’t think more printers would be useful, since there my limiting factor is how many plaster molds I have in service and how much stuff I can load up in the kiln up the street.
Oh, and I got my first Etsy sale today! I hope the buyer is happy with their new Timemore catch cup.
