収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

I’ve been overwhelmed with stuff lately and that’s meant not getting much done that’s not interrupt-forced. Like today (Sunday), sure, I did Monsterdon, and I did bagel baking, and I even got a tiny bit started on the bike cargo trailer.

But what I spent all night doing was surprise rebuilding the oven after it decided to break in yet another way, this time involving heat protective glass on the one remaining working oven. (It’s a double oven. The second one works but can’t be controlled sanely if at all.)

So tonight I had to disassemble almost all of the front panel including both doors and that didn’t take long at all now did it, ugh.

Anyway that’s back together though I can’t test it until Monday (today, for you) but we should be limping along again. I don’t know for how long because the control panel and system continues to degrade – this is why we can’t use the lower oven at all, or the timer anymore, or a bunch of other functionality – and I’m totally thinking that even though we don’t have any money right now we should use savings and replace it because frankly I don’t know that it’s possible to get this oven into a really safe configuration at this point.

But what I said I was going to write about is my dumb little minimal key holders.

For reasons I have too many keys. These are dumb reasons but they are reasons and I can’t do anything about them, and it’s always a problem in my purse – they get tangled, they’re hard to separate without looking, and so on.

Then I saw a Laura Kampf video where she briefly showed off how she’d made a minimal key holder by filing down the heads and putting all the keys on a single axis, and how it all folds down into something like a single-ended pocketknife, and I knew what I needed to do.

I’ve made three versions so far. (They’re on Thingiverse.) The first version was really only good if you didn’t want to file down your key heads at all, because sometimes you can’t do that – well, that’s a little unfair. It was good enough that I wanted to improve it and definitely didn’t want to go back to normal keychains.

Then I made version two – for my bike keys – and they’re all a standard size and the heads are just plastic so it was really easy to make that happen and after a week I was like “WHELP I need to make a filed-key-head version of version one” and went at it:

Version two is the pinkish-purple one with the bike pictogram on the side. (I came up with that too, very pleased with it.) Version three turned out to be best with two axes and between that and the little taps I added to the key head wrappers I’m really, really happy with it.

It’s really nice being able to tell them apart trivially by touch and being able to flick out the keys needed. Flick flick flick flick flick flick flick 😀

It’s also nice to have so much more space in my little purse – which, oh yeah, is what got me started on this whole project to begin with.

Anyway that’s one thing I’ve been doing and meaning to post about for ages. Hopefully I can post more soon.

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YEP IT COLD

But it’s also dry and exceptionally clear. The low “overnight” was like at 10:30AM which is kinda nuts, at roughly -9°C, which is not as bad as they got on the other side of the border but is still Cold Enough For Me, Thanks.

Mostly the last couple of days tho’ I’ve been at the 3D printer, because Anna got me a device called a BL-Touch, which is a sensor that lets the printer discover the print bed level – and any irregularities in it – by itself, using a little probe that goes around the print bed in a grid making measurements.. (BL-Touch = Bed Level by Touch, you see. I have to explain that because BL has rather different meanings in some places, particularly Japan I am just saying, and it’s always a little yikes to me as a result.)

I also replaced three failed bearing wheels that absolutely should not have failed but did, and in the unlikely event you’re one of the nontrivial number of people who downloaded my nozzle size dial, you’ll want to know that I had to make a new one that’s BL-Touch compatible. I found this out by not knowing my old design wasn’t BL-Touch compatible, turning the printer on, having it start a level pass, and then slamming the hot end continuously against the far left side of the hot end gantry in a way that sounded like a garbage disposal eating its own bearings until I could turn the stupid thing off.

So that was exciting.

The printer is fine, thankfully. The BL Touch is really nice and I’ve managed to improve the flatness of my printer bed using aluminium foil as a spacer, thanks to being able to see the irregularities. I was able to get it to 0.05mm, which I think is pretty good.

Anyway, I’ve got enough material for a few Fascism Watches, I’ll drop more soon. Also this is the first test of my edited “can we make Featured Images look less stupid on Dreamwidth?” functionality. Let’s see how it looks!

eta: TALL HOLY SHIT TALL let’s see if I can fix that lol

eta2: YAY I can! Okay, I think this’ll do. ^_^

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So I’ve had this winter rain jacket since before Lower Decks came out that Lower Decks turned into some kind of away team jacket retroactively?

I mean seriously it really did, science blue, bright stripe, black top, all of it

or almost all of it

I finally gave in and made a lower decks combadge and um…

…it’s perfect, and I’m kinda mad about it.

I’m also pretty sure I figured out exactly how they made the Lower Decks-style combadges in Strange New Worlds, just because once you start printing it as a two-part object that fits together, well, if you’re familiar with 3D printing and its effects and how to minimise them where you want to and utilise them where you can, you get… exactly what it looks like on the actual show.

(Silk white printed at a particular weird angle you’ll find if you look for it, matte black printed flat on the plate for the frame, I used glossy and sanded because that’s what I had and it worked out, all slow and at minimum layer heights of course.)

So yeah that happened. Guess I’m back in Starfleet… ugh… again…

(more pics at the original thread on Mastodon)

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One year ago I put three test objects left over from another experiment – two PLA, one PHA – outside in a flower pot mostly-buried, just the ends sticking out into daylight to see how they would do. They were placed outside with full exposure to weather and about half-day exposure to sun, sunrise to midday.

On October 27th, I brought them inside! I posted about it live on Mastodon, with a lot of photos if you’re into that sort of report. But to summarise!

The white PLA remained largely unchanged. This was mostly as expected; we don’t get very hot here, and it wasn’t a particularly hot summer but has been a dry year by our standards. Similarly, the control piece of wood showed very little tendency towards compost, and mostly changed colour more than anything else.

The 20% wood-filled PLA was much more strongly affected, though I think more by the sun than being buried. In particular, the sun-exposed areas showed lots of fading and felt a little brittle in comparison. Also, while I didn’t notice it during the retrieval, there was a little bit of layer compression in those areas. The buried areas showed less change.

The 20% wood-filled PHA was the most affected, with substantially more layer compression on the sun-exposed portion of the piece. But also, it was the only filament to show self-composting breakdown! This is rather in line with my expectations, and meets the advertised property of being more easily compostable than PLA.

It was also interesting that the PHA showed very little bleaching in the sun exposed portion but much more so from underground, the opposite of the PLA test piece.

So while this wasn’t intended as a composting test – and shouldn’t be taken as one – it does show that at our latitude (near the 49th parallel) and our climate, PLA is indeed hardy outdoors, and PHA… isn’t nearly as much so. A substantial portion of that is definitely water and soil-contact related, as opposed to simple sunlight; the 20% wood-infill PHA in some ways did better in the sun than the 20% wood-filled PLA, a surprising result. But the layer distortion was significant.

I’ve had plenty of objects in both materials survive unchanged indoors over the same time period, so I’m not seeing anything to worry about on that front.

I rather want to stage this test again with pure PHA (no wood infill) to see how they compare, but I haven’t had time to set it up yet. If things calm down, though, I’ll give it a go – and of course post about it here. ^_^

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I never did write up a final followup report on the clothes dryer heat recovery system, did I? A writeup on Version 3.2, which I promised over a year ago when writing up Version 3.1.

Well: it works! It works really well, honestly. The house is more comfortable with a little more retained humidity in the winter but never gets at at all damp – if anything, what we need is more humidity reclamation, not less.

We also successfully reclaim a noticeable amount of heat, same notation. I don’t have any reason to change my numbers, so it even works out to a net operational profit! It even saves money, on top of everything else.

It really does all just work. We got to use it from November until May’s heat wave, even longer than we did last year, thanks to last winter’s particular weather. The very minor strengthening was all it needed, though honestly I’m not sure it needed even that.

The way to “close” it for summer pressure testing turned out to be really simple: a thin sheet of cooking silicone cut to the right size, slipped inside the door to cover the filter intake, held in place by the friction of the door itself and air pressure. It worked perfectly; we had no sign of leakage, the rigid air ducts I used to connect it to the dryer and outside vent never built up abnormal amounts of lint, in short: the pressure testing over summer showed no issues.

Once actively in use this past winter I cleaned it weekly, but I could’ve easily cleaned it every second or third week, based on the amount of lint build-up on the inside of the filter. The furnace filter is still good and can still be used again for another year, no question; I think the charcoal should be replaced more than once a winter, since we did get more laundry smell over time.

Which gets me to why I’m probably not really likely to reinstall it this coming autumn.

Over winter, one of my housemates switched back to scented laundry supplies. They did so for specific reasons which are pretty reasonable, honestly. I couldn’t even criticise it if I wanted to. But… even with the charcoal filter layer, those scents started becoming more and more of a presence. Most of the time just in the laundry room, but when their laundry was drying it’d creep out to other parts of the house, and even when it wasn’t their laundry, you’d still get some of the smell just from accumulated build-up inside the vents.

And I don’t like those scents. I use unscented laundry supplies for reasons. It’s not nasty or something, but it’s artificial and perfumey and I just really dislike it. On clothing, the amount left behind is hardly noticeable – but in the air, it really kinda is.

So in the end: this is a solved problem. Version 3.2 works and works well. I have no meaningful new notes or plans version a version 3.3, much less a version 4, because… it’s done! It works! It saves money and energy and helps keep the house from getting too dry in the winter and it’s low maintenance and safe! It’s genuinely quite nice!

Unless if you have people using scented laundry supplies, and you don’t like the scents. Then… it’s not as nice.

You never know. Maybe I’ll reinstall it anyway. Try changing the charcoal layer every month or something nuts like that. Particularly if it starts getting really really dry, come January.

We’ll see.

eta: This post includes a bunch of photos showing the design. This is of Version 3, but the only differences between versions 3 and version 3.2 are more bolts tying everything together better. Refinements, not replacements. Air comes in the right side, mostly goes out the front panel, excess pressure goes out the left and out of the building, and that’s also the safety release in case somehow everyone forgets to clean the system for several months.

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