Today, Comcast had a nice wide area outage across Sacramento and Elk Grove, and the result was, uh, beautiful: with no home internet over every area where they have a rock solid monopoly, mobile data was, uhhhhh, totally usable. Trying to place a phone call took several minutes followed by it just silently failing. I hit the speed test button in Fing out of sick curiosity and much to my amazement, it was actually able to run the test, with comical results:
This is rounded up – as the test was running, it was showing 10-15 kilobits, but for whatever reason the final test results screen insists on reading in megabits. I guess they (sensibly) figured it’d never get used on a connection this slow.
Eventually Comcast came back to life and everything was restored, but it’s still another one of those harsh reminders of how close we always are to having to wonder just how many of our friends are also ham radio operators…..
And with that: the usual caliber of quality posting begins.
This is the worst X11 window manager ever, it’s just clunky and unresponsive.
Straight out of the Mewsroom. On that note, my company has a slack channel named mewsroom and it’s glorious.
I forget what discussion of shitty electronics prompted me to look up the infamous Cellmate but it’s worth noting it’s got a successor which is even dumber 😀
Why did SacRT Route 1 wind up being shaped like this? Is it the concatenation of two older routes? Weird.
First, these three pictures of early stage tri-color foaming wax
Yeah— so I did the config all wrong for this server. Virtual host declarations aren’t in the files they should logically be in and things overlap and I just accidentally found some way to get a horribly blank directory listing to load instead of this page! Very weird, I think I just need to make a backup copy and rewrite the stuff. My apologies if you catch things broken as I’m doing it.
Pictures from The Cloud:
This is the top of the tower elevator and the inside of the tower top hut on Transtower. The lower level is really weird and basically was built by and for Gumby.
My brother sends me regular updates on this kitty named Luna being a cutie peets.
A newborn car wash? I think it’s a Mark VII system.Hurgusburgus The ham shack as seen in “Akiba’s Trip”Rainbow jugsUseful memeMrow
So I made a previous silly post about this Weston 622 milliammeter… It’s pretty interesting. Inside that removable plug, sealed in place with beeswax, are some kind of heating element and one side of a thermocouple. The other side of the thermocouple is in the meter body. This is actually really similar to the platinum RTD RF power measurement technique that’s the gold standard for average power level measurements on signals that have a varying peak to average power ratio (PAPR). It measures the RMS, “heating value” of the input by….. measuring its heating value! I tested it with DC because that was convenient and the 60+ year old meter agreed with a modern Fluke DMM.
I haven’t come across a ton of info or any original manuals on this meter, but it’s a little different than most I’ve seen when just searching the web or looking at eBay listings (it’s fairly common!). Mine has the thermocouple and heater in an interchangable plug, whereas most have it buried inside the meter case. This suggests that at some point Weston intended it to be used with different detectors. I wonder if there was to be one with 50 ohm coaxial input? A passive thermal RF power meter would be pretty cute!!
It occurs to me that someone, no one in particular, may look up my callsign and land here, so rest assured what you’ve found is pure silliness, as follows:
What in the actual HELL was I thinking when I wrote up the Apache2 configs for this server
HOLY HECK THIS IS A MESS
Things are overlapping and smashing each other and nothing really actually works entirely right
I have this LED blacklight bulb in a desk lamp at my bench at work and it normally makes my hair glow nicely. In case you’re wondering— it’s thanks to the Iroiro Colors 300 series dyes. Neon Yellow, Neon Red, and Neon Pink are probably the brightest. I’m always tempted to just throw Neon Pink over my whole head because it looks so nice, but I am absolutely incapable of deciding on just one color so I continue to be a rainbow.
Anyway, this is what I get when it’s working:
I don’t turn the blacklight off, so it was just kinda cooking there for over a year. Eventually it became a dark purple light that didn’t make any magic.
New bulbOld bulb
The most noticeable difference is that the encapsulant on the “filament” arrays has darkened right over each emitter.
Old bulb, Well DoneNew bulb, the encapsulant is water clear
I had read a while back that some of the nasty but revolutionary UV-A emitters from Nichia, when they first came on the market, were using a metal TO-18 can with a quartz end window to avoid this.
I wonder how many other LED products may still suffer this degradation? I will say I got a good amount of life out of this $12 bulb so I’m not exactly mad, but I feel like if whoever made the “filaments” had used a better goopus on top of the array, it’d still be working fine.
As for the old bulb, I still like its weird violet glow and might try to scrounge up another weird fixture to put it in like this funky 3d printer-activated flicker lamp. I swear I can also see the HVAC chiller out back cycling in its brightness level.
I used to hate this thing but it’s slowly grown on me
* If you’re just here for kitty silliness, scroll down.
No one in particular: “Desktop 3d printing will revolutionize everything! We will have limitless access to rapid prototyping and production of vital parts where and when needed and the resulting advances in technology will be amazing!”
Really now?
Absolutely no one in particular: “But people will print untraceable weapons and… terror!!! aaaahh!”
So I made a bit of a silly mistake. I saw that Micro Swiss had this sexy new NG extruder for the Creality CR-10 and Ender 3, and I’d just bought this Geeetech A10M which had a COMPLETELY AWFUL extruder and hotend that had an incurable case of plasti-slobber that more or less made it incapable of skipping and resuming extrusion — retraction doesn’t even stop it AT ALL. I figured, hey, this would fit on the Geeetech too, right?
….the answer is, kind of, if you replace a LOT OF CRAP 😀
I do not recommend this if you’re not dedicated and/or kinda in need of a severe distraction from the trials and tribulations of the outside world like I am. Start with an Ender 3 instead if you want to get up and running on this sexy extruder system quickly. (As of when I wrote this the extruder is out of stock – I hope it’ll be back soon, because it’s SO NICE.)
So, what I found it needed:
* New belt. The belt comes up like 1/2 inch short.
this is a footlong not a bun length frank!
* New heater. Not only is the stock heater a weird size, but… it SUCKS!!! The stock heater is only 30 watts. I don’t understand why they did this but it explains why I was never able to get the thing to heat above 215C without timing out and Marlin screaming “Heeeeyyyy, I’m halting now and just wanted to let you know I might be on fire over here” at me. I replaced it with a 60 watt 24 volt heater which works just fine (don’t forget to PID tune again!)
* New fan. The shroud that comes with the Micro Swiss NG is sized for the 40mm fan on an Ender 3, but more importantly, the (20? 30?) mm sleeve bearing fans that come on the Geeetech are terrible. 😀
Amazingly, the print cooling fan which is a 4010 blower can stay – that is identical to what comes on the Ender 3 so it transfers over.
I spliced the wires on the fans to use the original JST plugs because they’re weird and I wanted to keep the neat little carriage board.
* Lots of random Metric screws!!
The original Geeetech mixing extruder is a hot sloppy soup sandwich of failure and it just had to go. This is what it looked like as I was disassembling it. Also, the “3dTouch” probe is a wobbly shaky mess with poor repeatability and has been replaced with a real BLTouch. Only buy the 3dTouch if you really really like having to mess with the Babystep Z function EVERY DAMN TIME you want to print something. Argh!
…also the default config for Marlin 2 on this mainboard does not enable babystep! WHY? Enable this!!! HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH—-
And now……. the new, beautiful little extruder…..
Tool marks on the Micro Swiss
First off, I found it necessary to add washers and different length screws to secure the rollers to the carriage. The washers were needed because I guess the wheels Geeetech uses are thinner than the Ender’s wheels and the carriage scraped the rail.
Washer behind the roller
The spacing of the mounting holes in the carriage board on the Geeetech are the same as the mounting holes in the stepper. I mounted it around the top of the stepper with a couple of longer screws and spacers. Please note the pinout of the probe – this is documented exactly nowhere by Geeetech aside from a very poorly made video. The pinout from left to right (facing the heater plug) is brown, red, orange, black, white. Also note that the heater wire fell out, it was not tightened correctly at the factory and I’m sure that helped that 30 watt heater warm up even faster! Uh, no.
Remove Before Yeet
So, the Micro Swiss is kinda cool but boy, can it ever develop extruder pressure – if you have the first layer too high, it will buckle *violently*, catch on the nozzle, and result in the print getting yeeted right off the bed!!! So, if you get lumps, bumps, buckling, waves, etc, STEP UP! I’m used to the behavior of cheaper Bowden extruders where the extruder doesn’t have reduction gears and will just skip steps when the pressure gets high, combined with the spring action of the filament in the Bowden tube – you can get away with having the first layer too tight and it will mostly print accompanied by thumping noises. This one will not let you get away with it, the print will get yeeted! 😀
Anyway, that’s dialed in and it’s printing a tiny Waffle House. Good times.
Now, as for that feline silliness: This is Gingy being all like “HOW ABSOLUTE DARE” over having to share her dish with a wild turkey. The turkey would be absolutely fine with sharing, but Gingy doesn’t trust him.
