(an ongoing post)
Laser Love and Beer! Continuing my hopeful inclusion in North Bay Python.
I paid for my Laser cutter right before NBay Python 2024, while I was frantically and frenetically working on my talk about cocktail robotics.
It was in the period I defined as the great laser interregnum. This was between BLC (before laser cutter) and ALC (after laser cutter). I then went on a two week trip and thought and talked often about the coming ALC period.
And then I came home, and that following Sunday was able to move the laser cutter from its underappreciated home to its new and very appreciated home!
I had spent a lot of time worrying about how to power the laser cutter. Did I need to run a new 220 line? But then my awesome son in law showed me how he powers his pretty grand CNC machine. With a dryer splitter.
I went to Mendo Mills, the local hardware store, and asked for a dryer outlet splitter. And the older experienced fellow said that they wouldn't have anything like that.
Probably because while it is electrically fine in most cases it is also canonically a bad idea to be splitting your 220 outlet!
But the laser and blower and air compressor and chiller don't draw that much current. A 220 volt 20 amp circuit is all it asks for, and I don't think that they come close to drawing 20 amps.
So I ordered a splitter on Amazon, and bought what I needed to get the laser working as soon as possible!
My work was interrupted by needing to go help sweetie at the Moose Lodge (image of moose coaster) but we got back and I had first (laser) light by 9:29. And impulsively the first thing that I cut was the words 'Laser Love and Beer' in the cardboard of a Hazy Little Thing twelve back.
And Sweetie like the phrase, and then magically a domain was reserved, and pointed at my Hetzner host in Germany, and through some efforts I created a Pelican powered static blog.
Why? Because (again, I insist on quoting Simon) you should create things, and then write about them.
Getting Pelican to work the way that I wanted was/is a bit of a challenge.
I would like a static blog generator that has as its first commandment that all text will be published, somehow! Multiple pages resolve to the same slug, and file name? Just add numbers and make them unique! Can't find a parameter in an HTML file? Just make it up.
I worked on the GigaPan project at NASA Ames Research Center. And I was taught by engineers who had worked on the Spirt and Opportunity Mars Rovers. The lesson I learned was that communications are at best a hope. And so the GigaPan tile uploader was designed with the philosophy that connectivity was at best a hope, and you should just keep trying to do the right danged thing.
Of local interest, I've seen posts by the Fire Watch app creator that the app similarly is designed to use just the merest whiff of connectivity to keep people informed during the most stressful times of their life.
A static blog generator should be more like that. Provide resources and reports about how non-optimal your site is, how the names are janky, and there arn't titles or categories for everything, but just put the site up!
Well, today, July 28th, 2024, I got an invigorating email from NBay Python. It is a wonderful document.
"We looked through our calendars and historical weather reports and found
a remarkable two whole weekends per year where it's not obscenely hot, not
in Northern California's famously relentless rainy season, [not in the
fire season that almost derailed 2019](https://buttondown.email/northbaypython/archive/2019-videos-available-and-the-future-of-north-bay/),
and not within two weeks of PyCon US. Of those two, we are excited to have
chosen the weekend that's probably not the same as [Petaluma's Butter And
Egg Days Parade](https://petalumadowntown.com/butter-eggs-parade.html)
(though you should totally visit for that as well).
But the date is April 26th and 27th! Nine months away!
As of today, Sunday July 28th, 2024, I've had the laser cutter for two weeks.
Two weeks! And I have cut a fair number of things.
And got back into OpenSCAD, and have been organizing the garage to be more a space of creation and less of a place of destructive storage.
--
I was just interrupted with an accusation of 'chemical warfare.' Which probably means that I need to cut when sweetie isn't here (seldom!) or that I handle fume extraction in a better way.