Saturday I decided to visit Techshop over in Menlo park area which is 20min or so down the 101 from me. They are one of these Hackerspaces or membership run workshops. They had an open day on saturday so I toddled along.
They have an impressive array of machinery for members to use everything from hand tools, to electronics gear like soldering irons or oscilloscopes, to milling machines and lathes of metal or wood variety, to the more advance tools like CNC miling, plasma cutters, or even a Dimension SST 3d printer. They run classes in how to operate the various machines safely but once certified you can just use them as you see fit. It seemed to me like the perfect way to get access to tools and more advanced workshop stuff as mostly it’s too expensive or too large or just too dangerous to have in the home. I signed up and have a few courses lined up I’m doing arduino electronics and programming this weekend and then a woodworking course sometime next month.
I had this idea to make some of the generic furniture I need but haven’t bought yet myself. With access to high end woodworking tools and people to show me how to do it I suspect I could manage some simple things like shelves or small tables. Where I’ll put the microprocessor in those I’m not sure.
I then sorted out a car, a lease car to be precise. I’m going to be leasing a VW golf for the next two years, the price was affordable probably would be less if I had a credit history and my visa was valid for longer but it’s at a level I can afford. I picked up the car today a brand new golf automatic with sunroof which seems to drive pretty well. The people at the dealership were nice enough to follow me to the airport to drop off the hirecar I had and pick me up and take me back making getting rid of the hire car a touch easier.
Next on the list is a US drivers licence, I can use my UK one but the price of insurance on it is prohibitive (since they can’t track violations on a international licence they basically assume you have at least one by default bumping the price up). I’ll start brushing up on the California highway code and try and get the test done soon ish tried out the online tests and passed most of them I heard the actual driving portion of the test is fairly easy when compared to the rigorous UK version but we shall see.
