Category: Blog

3D Printer

For Eli’s birthday (he turned 9!) we got him a 3D Printer.  We settled on the MonoPrice (MP) Mini 3D Printer V2.  It seemed to be the lowest cost entrant into the 3D printing world that also had good reviews.

Overall setup has been kinda a pain.  I had to download Cura and figure out the correct settings for the printer.  There’s no documentation, so I had to google it.  There’s actually a nice Reddit page for the printer that has been super helpful.  It took me several days to get things set up.

Printing time is a lot slower than I was expecting.  It’s typically 3-4 hours for a small figure.  Also, I’ve had the printer stop half way through for no apparent reason.  In general the firmware on the unit is a little buggy.

On the positive side, the quality of the printed items is awesome for the price.  This is going to be a great way for Eli to explore his engineering side.  Also, the Thingiverse site is great.

Overall this printer is definitely not ‘kid ready’.  Even once it’s setup, you have to download CAD from Thingiverse (or a similar site).  Import the CAD model into Cura, adjust it as necessary, apply the printer settings, save it to a file, put it on an SD card, start up the printer, preheat it, then start printing.

If someone came out with a fully integrated ‘itunes store’ where you could just click a print button it would be a huge step forward.  Maybe the printer can be integrated as a printer in chrome and you can print directly from the thingiverse site?

For now I’m having Eli just pick items out on Thingiverse and I’m taking care of the rest of it.

BBS Nostalgia

I just recently re-watched the documentary on BBS era computing called “BBS: The Documentary”.

You can watch the series on youtube here:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgE-9Sxs2IBVgJkY-1ZMj0tIFxsJ-vOkv

I found this movie to be a great summary of what it was like when I was growing up using a computer, before the Internet became popular.

It turns out there are still a great number of BBS’s running to this day.  You can connect to them via the telnet protocol.  An excellent telnet client for visiting BBS’s in “SyncTERM”, which is available here.

Once you have a client, you just need to get an address of a BBS.  There are various websites that have BBS listings, a good one is BBSlink, which is here.

It’s great to be able to log into these systems and play many of the games from the 80’s+90’s that I wasted countless hours on as a kid!  I have started to create some project pages (linked to from the top) which have some ANSI images from various BBS’s and programs I wrote back in the day.

I’m sure i’ll be posting a lot more about BBS’s in the future.

 

-40 degrees, no skiing this weekend

Wow, we thought last weekend was cold with a wind chill of -30.  Well, this weekend was even worse!  With wind chills of -40, it was a struggle just to get from the car to the cabin!  Some of the ski mountains were closed because of the cold, but Bretton Woods was open.

It was definitely impossible to bring the kids skiing.  Instead we took them into Littleton on Saturday, went to the candy and toy stores.  It was so cold out the water in my eyes froze solid walking from the car to the store.

Michele took the boys rock climbing at Bretton Woods while I hung back during Tommy’s nap time.  At night we made tacos, had a nerf gun battle, and celebrated Michele’s birthday.

It was so cold the cabin was having a hard time staying warm, we couldn’t get the temp above 60!  It’s looking like we’re going to get a good snow storm this week, so looking forward to some good skiing next weekend!

Car Breakdown and -30 degrees!

So Michele’s Highlander had been acting up the past couple weeks.  It was making this loud clanking noise (sounded like a bad bearing).  We booked an appointment for this Monday to have it looked at.  Besides the noise the car was running fine, so we’ve been continuing to use it on our weekend trips up to the whites.

On Friday we took a half day of work to get spend some time with Michele’s family who were all up at Bretton Woods for our annual ski weekend.  We loaded the kids and gear in the car and headed out around 2pm.  About 20 mins into the trip, all of a sudden the temp guage skyrocketed.  I pulled over as quickly as I could and smoke was leaked out from under the hood.  When I opened the hood there was pink liquid (antifreeze) sprayed all over the engine.  There was no way we could drive this thing.

We called AAA and had the car towed to the nearest dealership (luckily only 3 miles away!)  Then we had to call an Uber to transport the kids (car seats and all) to the dealer.  We got a rental car and continued on with the trip!  Unfortunately we didn’t make it up to our place until after 8pm, so didn’t get a chance to hang out with the family.

On Saturday the temps were by far the coldest they’ve been all season.  The high of the day hovered around 0 and the winds were roaring, with a wind chill of -30.  Skiing was almost impossible.  We’d do 1 run and by the end were all totally frozen.  Lots of crying ensued, frozen body parts, etc. so we called it early.

On Saturday night we hung out with Michele’s family, and the kids were happy to see Grampy, who came up from Florida, and Uncle Chris who came from California.

On Sunday the temps were about the same in the morning, but slowly warmed up throughout the day.  Luckily the dealership fixed Michele’s car, so we were able to return the rental on the way home.

Just another weekend in the whites!

 

Sugarloaf Weekend 2017

This weekend we did our annual visit to the Coughlin’s cabin at Sugarloaf in Maine.

Sugarloaf is our overall favorite mountain to ski in new england.  Granted there are a couple top mountains we haven’t been to yet (most notably Jay Peak and Sunday River, soon!)  but so far this one is our fav.

The only problem with this mountain is the distance.  It’s a good 4.5 hours (in good conditions) from our house.  It’s about 30 miles from the Canadian border.

Traffic wasn’t too bad and we got there around 11pm on Friday night.  Sugarloaf had been getting dumped on so conditions were set to be epic, some of the best ever!

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When you realize your kid is a better skier than you…

So, Bretton Woods is now fully open for the season.  As of today, they are 62/62 on trails and 28/35 on glades.

We’ve pretty much fully explored all the trails on the mountain and so now we are discovering the glades.  This weekend we’ve tried our first double black diamond trails.  These are the most challenging on the mountain.  Not for their overall steepness, but for the combination of steep and obstructions (i.e. trees, rocks, and water).

Some of the more challenging ones we tried this weekend were:

  • John Grave’s Glades – On the west mountain.  A nice long glade run compared to the shorter runs on rosebrook.
  • Hemlock – This thing was treacherous.  Short but extremely steep with trees everywhere.  I went down on my butt.  Eli fell and hit his chin on his skis.  Not doing this one again.
  • Lazy Man – Even though this was is rated higher than hemlock, I think hemlock was actually more difficult.  Both hemlock and lazy man are right next to each other.
  • Roz’s – Not much of a glade, more like a chute that connects many of the rosebrook glades together.  At the bottom of this run you had to navigate through pools of water on a narrow strip of a trail.  One wrong move and you’d be soaked!

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Cabo, Mexico Trip

This past weekend I had my company (ClearMotion) work retreat in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.  Each year we take the whole company (and spouses) on a getaway to an exotic location.  The purpose of the trip is twofold, one is as a reward/benefit to employees, and the other is team building.

Cabo is at the tip of Baja California, on the pacific coast in Mexico.  See below.  This was my first trip to Mexico and I was pretty excited!

My flight left @ 6am on Thursday, which meant I had to get up at 3am.  The flights themselves were uneventful.  I am happy to say that the Bose headphone purchase was totally worth it.  These things totally cancel out the engine noise on the plane, it’s almost eerily quiet and took some getting used to.  Also, the battery life is phenomenal.

Our plane landed around 1pm Cabo time (3pm EST).  Entering Mexico was a snap.  We got to deboard the plane via the rear, which was a first for me.  I love how the warmer climate airports have you exit the plane right onto the tarmac.

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