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This is why I spend weeks working on printing terribly frustrating models for my Son-in-law. He got me this for xmas

I’ve put together quite a few Lego sets over the years, but this series is next level. Its kind of a shame how much crazy stuff isn’t visible once completed. That’s why I’m saving parts of my build here.

Just amazing.

It will now go up on my wall next to the Porche

Making a gift for my son-in-law. Coloring these was much harder than I expected, and cleanup was a bear removing all the supports. The results were awesome though. color swaps were minimal though, so waste was not as bad as expected.

Bambulabs just released a new A series of printers, and I just could not pass up the deal. I grabbed an A1 mini with 4 spool AMS for $150

I had to give the prusa back to my son in law, so this fills the gap and lets me play with the bambulabs tools a bit and try AMS printing.

The first thing I tried was coloring and printing a dragon model I’ve had for a while. I think it came out pretty well.

And I love printing magnets

Overall not too bad so far, but the waste is just terrible. Every color switch feels like losing entire layers of filament. On layers that use all 4 colors its really aweful. Speed is hit badly as well. But the results are what matter, and the prints look excellent.

I was playing around with vase mode and some simple threads. Came up a nice cheap coin tube.

I have been working on a modular lighting kit for building hexagonal grids. These little bow ties lock them all together. With this design, I can build an unlimited sized array with only three parts.

Here are a few smaller strips printing out and lighting up.

I have been considering upgrading my old infrant chassis for a while now. It works great, but it’s painfully slow. Its been efficient and very reliable for me. Netgear continues to update the firmware to this day with new features and bug fixes. It has been a great investment.

That being said, spending 600 dollars on a new chassis is more expensive than actually building a full machine and tossing the drives in it. Believe me, I fully understand the cost tradeoffs here. I understand there is a lot to be said the the dividends and time savings on the backend. Still, I have held off.

Then, this christmas the family was especially generous. I picked up a few Newegg gift cards, and decided to redeem them for a Thermaltake level 10 gt. It has a ton more space than my original chassis from over two years ago, along with numerous hot swap drive bays.
I had a few drives kicking around, so I tossed them in the extra slots and played around with setting up a software array in OS X. It worked out fine, but the redundancy options were limited to RAID 1. I looked around for something more interesting.

Today I came back across an old project I had completely forgot about, ZFS. If you are not familiar with it, you should go look it up. Its possibly one of the best fundamental technologies out there for hard drive systems. Apple was working on embedding it into OS X for a few years, but had to abandoned the idea after licensing fell through after the Oracle/Sun Merger. I found there was an open source port of what apple had been working on, and that a prepackaged installer was available.
I went ahead and downloaded it and tossed my spare drives at it. Soon after, I had a nice large pool of raid5 equivalent storage just beckoning for my data. I started tossing files at it and was quite surprised at the performance. Using 4 drives I’m pushing over 200 mb a sec through the array on write. Considering this is all running in software, its pretty good.

ZFS supports tons of advanced features, and easily allows for in-place expansion using larger drives.

I may have finally found a very interesting infrant replacement.

I had quite a little scare here that I forgot to write about. I bought an iPod photo last month for my trip to china in august. Unfortunately for me… the battery started acting up two weeks after I got it… I started to freak out thinking that maybe my car adaptor was frying batteries or something. It would charge ok, but the charge would only last for 6-8 hours, and if I left it over night it would be deadthe next day. I sent it off to Apple to see what they could come up with. I was quite concerned when the dispatch showed up as returning the original item. But the pack arrived today, and my ipod was inside, fully charged. Yea! Maybe I messed up the charging profile or something. I’m just happy to have my iPod back!

So… My new iPod is on the way. I have been watching the repair site, and was suprised to see that Apple was actually manufacturing me a new iPod. Cool. Dell could learn a lot from this.

I’ll start this off with some background. I have owned three iPods. I bought the first of the first gen when they came out. I was still happy with it when my wife go it in the divorce. The battery was still working well after almost three years of use. The nthen got a shuffle and then a second gen mini a few months back. The shuffle was great, but it did not have an internal clock…

The mini has been a really nice gadget. The battery life has been great, the screen is wonderful, the size is acceptable. Then something happened. I still don’t really understand what. On tuesday, the unit stopped “charging”. I don’t know how else to describe it. I left the thing plugged in all night, but it never showed a complete charge. The next morning, I started listening, and got a low battery error. I plugged it back in, worrying that my battery might have died. It still never showed a complete charge. The next day, I took it and reset it after it shut down. The battery indicator showed empty, but then slowly started to fill, and then actually got up to almost 70%. After a few hours of playback, it again showed the low battery error. I reset it again, and am still listening to it without charging tonight, four days later. The battery has showed empty for at least the last six hours of play time. I fugure I’ll plug it in to charge after it will no longer boot.

It almost looks like there is a history function that got confused. I do have a charging dock in my car that it gets dropped into regularly. I’ll be in touch.

BTW, Wow Wee, the makers of the Robosapien sent me a new remote! goodie! Nice to have our little buddy mobile again!