What did you do today?

[twistsol]

I had a junior high science teacher once tell me they could only be seen if you were north of the arctic circle. Clearly that was incorrect. If you are anywhere near civilization, you would just assume initially that it is light from a distant city. My son in law did say that Reykjavík Iceland was the best place he's ever seen them.

[nicer20]

Oh I thought one needs to visit places like Norway or Sweden to see the northern lights. Didn't know they are visible from the Northern US too.

[twistsol]

This weekend went up north to Superior to help kids prep deck for staining, rearranged a bunch of furniture and stripped and painted a dresser and bookcase.

Saturday night after dinner someone mentioned that it was supposed to be a good night to see the northern lights, so we packed up the truck and laid on Superior's south beach until 11:30. The light show was awesome. It was the first time I'd ever seen them despite living in states that border Canada my entire life. Later that night around 1:00 AM, the rare purple and even more red colors were showing, but we missed that.

[dbhost]

This is going to sound funny, but I went looking for Aqua Net hairspray. Back in college in the digital photography class, color laser prints needed a budget "fixative" to keep the colors from getting rubbed off and Aqua Net is what our instructors had us use. My build plate surface is probably not up to 100% snuff on the 3D printer, and rumor has it that stuff, if I flip the glass plate around, will help PLA hold onto the build plate.

The reason I am wanting this is I have prints for upper and lower halves of a case for a Raspberry Pi that I need to print out.

I am watching for a Raspberry Pi 4B 8BG to come up, due to the chip shortage they are badly back ordered, but I digress. My old TrendNet router is slow as sin, and since I upgraded from cable to fiber internet, and they gave me a pair of Eero Pro 6 WiFi 6 routers, I lost the function of DD-WRT, so I no longer have local DNS, inlcuding the DNS for my LAN, and I no longer have DNLA server service, so no more streaming my own movies at home I.E. I need to actually dig out the DVDs to watch a movie if it isn't on a streaming service, and since pretty much almost all the old stuff I like is not on streaming, I kind of have no choice....

Anyway the case I printed with a raft will work, but it is ugly. I might be able to hone it down and smooth it out, but the black PLA will become gray on the very top and very bottom.

I did thread the lower for the case for 6-32 and made sure it bolts together well, it does.

Not sure if I mentioned the ethernet cable clips I printed the other day, but I printed up a mess of safety orange 4 and 16 cable clips and organized my cables. My Network setup is I can almost guarantee more complex than most, but it serves a purpose.

Working on some automation scripts / fettling rust off of my BASH scripting skills etc...

Lots more of that coming along...

[LCHIEN]

Yeah. It was a ships excursion and you had three options.. pack on ice to take with you or pack and ship home ($250). Or pack on ice and give it to the ships staff at the dock with paperwork your cabin no. The day you wanted it and the dining time and how you wanted it prepared. This was Holland America. Man it was really super good and normally salmon is not my first choice fish. They also had some super good halibut fish and chips for lunch.

[capncarl]

Nice catch!
The “ships chef”, as in the cruse ship chef? I didn’t see that option on our last
Alaska cruise. That would have been great!

[dbhost]

Wife is under the weather a bit today, might have finally caught the 'rona but test says no... Letting her rest, made a half batch of Caldo De Pollo and currently making Spanish rice. I'm going to eventually get her to make chicken schnitzel and haus fries as fair play turnaround...

[LCHIEN]

Unlike Chr's we just went on a cruise with the grandsons. 7 and 11 YO.
It was a bit hectic... imagine 2 70 year olds and two rambunctious boys in a small room for a week.
But it was nice but not as relaxing as our regular cruising. This is our first cruise since 2019.
Alaska in the 50's and 60's beats Houston in the 100's of degrees.
The boys parents and baby sister were in another room so we had plenty of help nearby,



Couple of Alaskan salmon I caught. The ships' chefs cooked them for our party. (one was more than enough to feed the whole group) and it tasted great.

[twistsol]

My wife and three daughters are on a cruise so I've had grandpa duty for the past few days. I've accomplished nothing but done alot and I'm exhausted. I think grandkids bedtime and mine are going to be much closer together tonight.

[dbhost]

Congratulations on the upcoming wedding! And for being "just pine" those frames are just beautiful. Never underestimate pine projects. I love working with the stuff as it has interesting grain, and can be had cheap if not free depending on what you need...

[furthermore]

Been a while since I dropped by! It's been super busy here as we're getting married at the end of the month, but I found some time to make a couple of picture frames for these two prints I've had. Just pine, finished with a wipe of Tung oil. I've made a lot of shop upgrades, too, maybe I'll save that for another post

[dbhost]

Working, but aside from that.... My 3/8" mortise chisel has lost its plastic safety cap, and I get REALLY nervous reaching around the mortise chisels to turn on / off the air compressor. So I deigned a set of replacements in Sketchup, exported the STL sliced it up in cura and am now printing my replacements, in white. After I started the print, I thought gee I have safety orange filament... Oh well maybe when I lose the next one!

I am definately having adhesion issues on the glass build surface. I see that I believe it is Creality offers a flexible steel build plate for the Ender 3, which would work perfectly with my Voxelab Aquila, and not have the adhesion issues glass build plates do...

I got both Eero Pro 6 routers wall mounted, will work as time permits on building custom length cables to tidy the install up. It is getting congested in my network closet. I guess I could have gone much simpler, but I started this project before AWS was getting to be a big thing... and was using it to crash course on bare metal technologies. I can do the same thing I am doing with this old huge hardware by using Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB SOC computers... Except for the RAM thing... So sad...

[dbhost]

Installed the revamped ceiling fan into my wifes office today. Had to run out and grab some new blade to motor screws from Home Depot. The originals were stripped out... New blades, new blade arms, and the shakey shakey that has been going on in my office for years goes away... Gee thanks...


So at least for now, fan armageddon is avoided. I have 2 left to do, both in the master suite. Bleh...

The first 3D printed wall bracket for my Eero Pro 6 router is installed in the master bath, out of the way, out of harms way, and located to where it puts signal exactly where I need it.

Working on printing the 2nd for the main one in the office. One thing 3D printing is not, is fast...

My wife wants me to detail paint the Tie Fighter echo dot holder I printed for her office before glueing the pieces up, so I guess I need to go to the hobby shop and get some model paint for that.

With the exception of her office, and the master suite all the Echo dots are housed in proper mounts, which is awesome as I no longer have them sucking up counter top space, and they actually look like, well built in tech now... Except for of course the power wires..

Not even considering looking at my shop until temps outside get under 96 deg F. I can deal with the shop at 80 degrees, but not much more... And the AC only does so much...

[nicer20]

SWMBO last week complained the dishwasher door doesn't stay open partially and falls down. Indeed that was true.

Jumped onto eBay and ordered friction pads which arrived last night in the mail.

So promptly spent the morning replacing these. One side was completely missing. Requires unscrewing the dishwasher to pull it forward. Luckily I am the one who installed it in the first place so remembered the hoops I had jumped through. It requires me to remove flooring panel to get the clearance. Patting my own back since last time during installation I took the time and had used my router to cut two notches on the hidden edge where I can slip my fingers to pull it up.

Job done - Hopefully now, Happy Wife Happy Life.

[dbhost]

Almost done with my network upgrades. Home automation hub still on the old router, but I have it set on DHCP, just need to move it over and reboot, should get the fresh IP and be good...

Got the new ceiling fan in the middle bedroom / office, a funky earth / space theme, and it works perfectly.

Printed out the wall mount for the home automation hub. I am using Alien Tape to mount it to the entertainment center / credenza. Not sure I am going to use the actual bracket, but I kind of wanted it easier to get to...

Printing out the bracket for the cable modem. Going to take a good long time to print... It's tall...

Once that is done, I get to print out the wall brackets for the Eero Pro 6 mesh routers...

Have not mounted up the fan for the back bedroom / office. The new blades won't fit the arms. I need to go to Home Depot and see if they have some white arms that will fit the new blades...

Update, went to Home Depot and go the new blade arms. Holes were still slightly too narrow, Stacked the blades and drilled the new holes anyway, Mounted up blade arms to blades, will be ready to install the ceiling fan tomorrow.

Lots of studying to do tomorrow. The job market for me is SCREAMING for AWS certification, and I am cramming for it. Getting hung up on the RDB (databases) portion of it so I am going to go over that again tomorrow...