Blogs

As is tradition (or will quickly become one), in the off-season I tend to start painting en masse, as the weather and lack of daylight keeps me from training.

PLA proved a lot of trouble it tended to jam the extruder once to the extent I had to dismantle it. Also getting quality objects out of it was difficult the retained heat proved to be a problem in that objects would stay hot enough to be flexible far longer than with ABS and thus deform while building.

When not bilious, each week I send out an email offering to run a roleplaying game. It used to be Icar, recently we've been playing Cloudship Atlantis. It's pretty good fun, we have an excellent vibe. However I really need 3 players to play - 2 is just too little. Over the years players have come and gone depending on their work commitments or waning interest in play or leaving Uni.

Time relativity is an odd thing. On one hand, it doesn't seem like 13 months ago that Felix landed. On the other, so much has happened in those 13 months that it feels like a lifetime. I can't quite understand why a time can seem like a long period and short period at the same time, must be something to do with relativity and context.

So I had a bash at getting PLA going last night one thing I discovered is the filament storage box (which has a sort of reel + lazy susan connected to a low friction pipe running the filament to the extruder) is not well designed for changing out the reels. I had to unscrew everything and then found most of it wouldn’t go back together with the new reel in.

So after my bike ride last night I ran up the makerbot and began experimenting with the settings in skeinforge according to some helpful guides someone had put up recently. Skeinforge is a very powerful bit of software that can take an STL model and slice it into layers for the makerbot to build but it’s also something of a enigma in terms of user friendlyness.

I’ve been playing with my makerbot off and on but mainly adding various new bits of hardware to it. When I got the kit I ordered it with the heated build platform but at the time I wasn’t getting good enough prints out of the thing to feel it worth the effort of building and installing the thing.

I’ve been getting into the cycling of late. After a rough start where I had my bike nicked after only a couple of weeks of owning it and then the requisit wait to see if anyone would return the thing I got another identical model from the shop.

On Saturday morning I bought and installed Minecraft, mainly to see what all the fuss was about.

During the entire month of November, I'm going to have this lunacy sprouting out of my face: