Testing assumptions

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There’s still a lot of MSG discourse happening in certain pockets of the Internet; right now it’s mostly on food YouTube, where folks are primarily saying that people who claim an MSG sensitivity are racist and/or relying on bad pseudoscience. And, as usual, using the same two strawmen of

  1. Lots of foods have glutamate in it
  2. Did you know that American junk food has MSG in it too?

For 1, yes, lots of foods have glutamate in it, but not bound to sodium.

For 2, yes, that’s why it was eating junk food in college (Doritos and the chili-flavored Fritos, specifically) that led me to realize what was causing my near-daily sensory overload migraines.

Anyway, recently I bought some “country style” bulk sausage at a local butcher which ended up having MSG in it, and rather than throw it out or try to return it, I figured I’d use it to perform an (admittedly extremely unscientific) experiment. Namely, a couple days ago I fried up a small amount and ate it, and while I felt a bit of the classic MSG effects it seemed like it might have been psychosomatic. So today I made a full patty of it and ate it for breakfast… and holy hell that was a bad time. I’m still recovering from it a couple hours later.

So, yeah, I’m still pretty sure MSG causes me problems, and I’m still gonna keep avoiding it.

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Resin printer updates

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I’ve finally gotten a handle on my resin printer and have gotten some successful prints! Here’s some of what I did to get it to a good state:

  • Replaced the stock FEP sheet with an nFEP sheet (although that’s mostly because the stock one was leaking a little)
  • Added some PTFE lubricant to the LCD screen (to aid with cleanup in particular)
  • Increased the exposure times; first layers went from 30s to 45, and subsequent layers went from 2.5s to 4
  • Started using Chitubox on Linux because it performs way better than the Mac version (not really anything to do with the printer itself, but, y'know)
  • Ground down the build plate some more
  • Figured out a better way of angling prints

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The sorts of spam I attract

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Lately I’ve been getting a lot of spam comments from people (really, probably just one person) trying to pedal Kratom, an herbal hallucinogen which has extremely bad side effects.

I hope that it’s obvious that I am not, in fact, going to allow my site to be used as a vehicle for advertising this shit, so stop trying to post comments on every mental-health-related article about it, thanks.

My smart house addiction continues

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Today my Switchbot curtain robots arrived. They work pretty well, but getting them to the point of working well was a bit tricky. Here’s some notes, in case they help others:

  • The instructions for how tightly to clamp the robot to the rail are frustratingly vague. My recommendation is that if you have a telescoping rail, gently attach the robot to the thinner part of the rail, then while calibrating, increase the tension by one click at a time until it can move freely.
  • The telescoping rail shim works a LOT better if you make sure that the seam is on the back of the rail, rather than on the top or bottom (where it sometimes interferes with the motion of the wheels); at least this is the case with my grommet curtains. (This also happens to reduce the drag from the grommet ring to the shim, which is also quite important.)
  • The instructions and app don’t make it AT ALL clear about how to group two curtain units together! The answer is to set the curtain’s open direction to “open from the middle;” if you’ve already set them up as individual units, you can go into one curtain’s settings and change the opening direction.
  • Grouping curtains has pluses and minuses; on the plus side, it makes managing scenes easier, and it also fixes the asymmetrical delay issue that Techmoan ran into. On the minus side, it means that there’s no way to control them individually in HomeKit, if that’s a thing you want to do.
  • On that note, to get them to work with HomeKit (rather than using the “Siri shortcuts,” which suck), you need to enable the “cloud service” mode on the curtain(s), and run something like Homebridge and the homebridge-switchbot-openapi plugin to get HomeKit to see the device. And yes, you need a Switchbot Hub and a bridge to do this, and annoyingly enough, this all goes through Switchbot’s cloud servers, meaning if they ever go out of business, the dang things will probably stop working entirely. Why the hub can’t just talk locally is beyond me.

Anyway, having this set up was a lot of fun when my neighbor came by to help me finish hanging up my new TV; he suggested closing the curtains before verifying the TV tilt angle, so I said, “Hey Siri, close living room curtains,” and he said “No way!!!” and then the curtains closed.

And now I have a bunch of automations, like:

  • If I say “Hey Siri, game time,” the curtains close and all the living room lights turn on and the air purifier turns off
  • If I say “Hey Siri, movie time,” the curtains close, and the lights and air purifier turn off
  • In the morning, the curtains automatically open

I also have a few other automated lighting changes throughout the day, and the awesome one will be when my bedroom shades finally arrive — I’ll be able to automatically close them at midnight and open them at 8 AM, and maybe I’ll stop getting woken up at 6 AM by the sun shining on my face!

Save the date!

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Hey folks! That time of year is coming up… it’s my birthday in June! And what’s more, I have a new house to celebrate it at!

My plan this year is to have an outdoor cookout in my lovely new yard in White Center (a small town nestled in between Seattle and Burien) the afternoon/evening of June 13, 2021. I’m trying to get a headcount to see who’s going to be able to attend. Please register your interest by emailing me or posting a comment or RSVP webmention or whatever, and I’ll try to get a more formal invite when details start to coalesce better (ideally in a better format than a public blog post, obvs).

The format will probably be potluck-esque; I’ll definitely be providing a bunch of meat and veggies for grilling and some sides and drinks but it’d be great if other folks could bring stuff to grill and serve too! Also, due to COVID still being a thing I’d ask that people still maintain social distance and masking, and for non-vaccinated folks to limit their time indoors.

Regarding transport to my place, there’s a decent (but not unlimited) amount of street and on-property parking, and there are technically buses nearby but they aren’t the most convenient thing for folks coming from anywhere other than West Seattle or Burien or whatever.

But anyway it’d be lovely if folks could come! I’ve missed seeing everyone, and what better way to try to fix that?

Resin printing adventure

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So far I haven’t gotten a fully-successful resin print, but I’m inching closer and closer.

The current issue I keep running into is that it’s very difficult to separate a print from the bed, and I think I need to give up on having a good clean bed-adhered surface. It’s better to give all prints lift and support, probably, even if that means having more tiny surface defects on the side facing the build plate (which is better than having an entire shattered print when I inevitably resort to a hammer to separate it).

I also ran into a problem where somehow a bit of resin got underneath my FEP film (hopefully due to my own carelessness and not due to a leak I haven’t found on my vat!) and some resin got caked to the LCD. Fortunately, Phrozen’s suggestion of soaking it in 91% IPA and then using the plastic scraper to get it off worked just fine.

Anyway. For now I’m still stuck trying to sun-cure my prints, but hopefully I can figure out a decent cheap curing station setup. I’m thinking of building a curing box using UV LED strips but it’s so hard to find reliable parts for that sort of thing. I also ordered a cheap curing station off Amazon but I’m not expecting great results from it.

In the meantime, my FDM printer is working again, and now that I have a decent supply of isopropyl alcohol I can actually get prints to stick to the build plate!

I might have a problem

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I haven’t even put printer #3 through its paces yet, and I’ve just bought printer #4. Fortunately it’ll be a while before it gets here, and also I’ve been wanting a ceramic printer for even longer than I’ve been wanting a resin printer.

But, jeeze.

Anyway I both bought the printer and an extra bed, and also an extra extruder assembly with the notion of possibly converting a larger-format printer into ceramic printing. Or food printing, which this is apparently usable for too!

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More updates!

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  • My resin printer arrived today. It was a bit obnoxious to get a working print and holy heck it’s a messy process even when it does work, but this’ll be fun to mess with. (Yes, I now have three 3D printers. Only the resin one is actually operable right now, but the Artillery Genius has some repair parts on th eway, at least.)
  • I accepted an offer on my condo. It’s a lot less than I was hoping for but it’s still plenty of money. When that sells I can start working on building out the studio, which is the linchpin for getting a bunch of my other house ambitions underway.
  • I’m having one heck of a fibro flare and this makes it very hard for me to actually focus on work. But also there’s a stress factor involved. Hopefully that all sorts itself out soon.
  • Because of the aforementioned flare I’m also not making much progress on getting my living room or kitchen in any sort of order. But I’m still slowly chipping away at that glacier.
  • Cannabis isn’t really helping with the fibro right now, either.