It’s a day to be thankful towards the end of a most stressful year. I’m thankful for the roof over my head and family and friends and hoping that my brain holds out long enough to get a degree:)
Blog
-
3D – Initial Print
So after you get the printer assembled, it’s time to test print. Here is your introduction to print bed leveling. This is probably the most important part of setting up the printer, and get used to it, aside from the initial adjustment, you will be doing a lot of this leveling thing so get used to it. I don’t know that I will ever buy another printer that doesn’t have auto leveling.
After leveling, we test print. There was enough filament to print the owl pairs which were provided with the memory card. This took a couple of hours but they came out nice and did a good job showcasing what it can do.
-
3D – Printer
So I broke down and got a 3D printer. I didn’t do as much research as I should have and I should have shopped around a bit more because it seems to have gone on sale since I’ve unpacked mine, but different company and there would have been shipping so sour grapes.
I settled on the AnyCubic Mega Pro from Amazon for $369, as I said I should have waited as it’s on sale for black Friday for about $50 less. Out of the box it was an easy setup, basically just install the upright portion and plug in some plugs. Then the real fun starts.
AllCubic Mega Pro -
School Progress
So school can be extremely difficult for me. If I’m not digging the class or assignment it’s easier to pull teeth than to make myself get it done. I’m happy to say I finally submitted my paper for one of those classes and with any luck starting my last non-computer class next week. I need to start meditating and concentrating on getting to the end goal.
-
More Linux Love
So building on the email/imap server success. I’ve finally learned how to host multiple domains on Apache!!! Yes I know I haven’t reinvented the wheel and I’m pretty sure that I would have figured it out had I needed it earlier but still it’s bad ass to be able to do so. That in and of itself is pretty cool but what’s more amazing is the fact that using SSL is now free and accessible to the masses thanks to LetsEncrypt. For those of you who don’t know, just a few years ago having a secure site (i.e. a SSL/TLS certificate to secure traffic to and from your site) meant having to fork over $50 bucks a pop per year for each domain. Hosting sites like GoDaddy have been screwing clients for years with this. Enter LetsEncrypt, a consortium of industry heavy weights now offer free certs, they are only 90 day but thanks to Linux the update process it automated. Life is good!
-
Love me some Linux
So everyone knows that Linux is the ultimate toy for computer geeks, it can do anything, do it well and do it free. It was a little over two years ago I broke down and bought a Dell PowerEdge T30. I know, it’s about as entry level as you can get. 8Gb of RAM and 1 TB hard drive but it is sporting a 4x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1225 v5 @ 3.30GHz. I did upgrade the RAM to 16Gb (wow ECC memory is steep). And the coup de grace was finding 3Tb SAS drives on New Egg for $50 apiece. Bought 4 of those bad boys and spent $30 for a h310 card and have a RAID 5 striped 8Tb volume to play with. Only have mounted 1Tb and still have tons of room.
In any case, I’m super excited to have the email piece up and running using postfix and dovecot. Some people say “big deal, it’s email”, to which I just sigh. The fact that email is ubiquitous belies the complexity of actually getting one of these set up and functioning. With that said I’m super excited to say I’ve got it up and running for multiple domains both sending and receiving. OK, it’s still using flat files to map users but I’m working on getting it setup on MySQL so more to come on that end.
-
New Chop Saw
So we’re doing some work in the spare bedroom closet and I needed a way to cut a long board in equal length pieces for shelving. Yes I could have done it free hand with a circular saw or jig saw but for truly professional cuts, you want a miter saw, or even better a compound double miter saw! So I dropped about $300 on a miter saw and stand.
So I know this is a bit overkill for half a dozen shelves but this provides the tools to fill a deeper need. I really want to build something, I’ve settled on a shed, a big shed (12×16) and yes I make enough that I could hire someone to do it and have a shed built in about a week. But I want to build it, I want to learn how to fabricate it, I want to be able to say look at this, I built it. So now that I have the primary tool to do this I’m eliminating my excuses to get it built.
