Addicted to 3D Printing

I wrote about 3D printing a few months ago and at the time was using a DaVinci 3D printer. Unfortunately the printer didn't last long and despite my best efforts, I couldn't get it to keep printing; it was making a grinding noise while feeding and the cost to replace the hot end with shipping was about 1/3 the cost of a new, low-end printer. I decided to cut my losses and purchased a Monoprice Select Mini Pro. This printer cost me about $180 and when it arrived, I was printing pretty quickly.

The Select Mini Pro, unlike the DaVinci printer, requires a bit more tinkering to go from a model to a print. Printing requires a process called slicing and one of the more popular programs is called Cura which exposes a ton of options to control the print. As I didn't want to have to copy the files to the SD card to print, I setup OctoPrint running on a Raspberry Pi 2. This put the printer on the network and made it easier to monitor the printer.

I've been printing things like crazy and as I may have already mentioned, I'm addicted! I added a camera to the Raspberry Pi and can now see the progress of my prints without being next to the machine.

With all the success I've had, I've also had a number of failures. Sometimes these failures have been my fault (I ran the nozzle into the bed and damaged the bed and nozzle and when replacing the nozzle I didn't screw it in when everything was hot leading to oozing of material) and sometimes not my fault (the coupling holding in the feed tube broke).

I've learned a number of things about this hobby with the first thing being that everyone has a different opinion on how to fix things! Something that is a recurring topic on Reddit is how to get the prints to adhere to the print bed with lots of different suggestions. I started using blue painter's tape and had great success with that. Then I moved my printer to the garage and found I needed to use a glue stick in addition to the painter's tape. The day after I was printing some whistles, the prints stopped sticking to the bed no matter what I tried. Then it dawned on me that the garage temperature dipped a few degrees; this was enough to cause a problem. I returned from Home Depot with some rigid polystyrene foam insulation and built an enclosure for the printer. With this enclosure, I decided to try printing right on the print bed without the tape; this worked quite well now that I had more control over the temperature of the print bed. With every problem, there is a solution, but it requires some research and a lot of trial and error!

The bottom line is that 3D printing is a hobby and if you're not comfortable futzing and repairing things, then the consumer grade printers are definitely not for you!

A year of meditation

A number of years ago, a friend of mine suggested I start meditating to help with stress. He said he used an app called headspace. I gave it a try for awhile and was trying to do it pretty consistently. However, I stopped as soon as my stress went away and I really got bored of the meditations. Also, the narrator's voice wore on me. Since then, I tried an app called Calm and really enjoyed the Daily Calm meditation as it was different each day and wasn't repetitive. The next time stress entered my life, I picked up meditation again and like my first try at regular meditation, I stopped when my stress levels decreased.

Last year, I had two flare ups of my ulcerative colitis both requiring me to consult my gastroenterologist. After the second flare up, I decided to consider meditation just like a medication that I had to take daily. I figured it couldn't hurt because my colitis issues almost always were caused by some type of stress. When I visited my doctor after I started meditation and told him about it, he said "yeah, I've been meditating for 40 years and there is definitely a connection between the brain and the gut". I really didn't need his confirmation about meditation, but it was good to know that my doctor was on the same page with not quite an alternative treatment (I'm still on a daily medication), but an additional way to help.

Throughout the last year, I've meditated for about 10 minutes a day mostly using the Daily Calm. While meditating longer might help, I feel good about doing the ten minutes. There have been times that I didn't have cell coverage to get the Daily Calm, so I had to use another meditation that I downloaded. While not as enjoyable as the Daily Calm, it had to do.

Now that I've passed 365 consecutive days of daily meditation, I think I can say that it is part of my life. I don't have a particular time that I meditate, but it is usually towards the end of my workday.

Thank you Calm for helping me achieve this and integrate meditation into my life!

Broken Health Care System

While almost everyone knows that our health care system in the United States is broken, I just got the explanation of benefits for our flu shots. We paid $0 out of pocket for the shots. I went to CVS Pharmacy, my wife and son went to a flu clinic at their medical group. Insurance paid $20 for my shot, $90.05 for my wife's shot and $81.74 for my son's shot. The insurance plan basically overpaid $130 for flu shots for my family. The insurance plans need to find a way to bring costs down and maybe one of the ways is to tell us EXACTLY where to get certain services or give us some financial incentive to go a cheaper route. I'm not sure CVS does flu shots for kids, but for my wife it would have been cheaper for them.

Silence Unknown Callers - Great in theory, problematic in reality

We've all suffered with telemarketers and scammers calling our phones and have had limited success in blocking those calls. In iOS 13, Apple added an option to "Silence Unknown Callers" which sounds like a great feature on the surface. I turned the feature on and then quickly turned it off as I realized that there are a number of cases where I need to receive calls from unknown callers. Some might be thinking that it is fine to let them goto voicemail, but it's not that simple.

A few months back, we stopped at the scene of an accident to help out. The injured party wanted to call a friend, but her phone battery was almost depleted, so a bystander let the person use her phone. The friend would have gotten a call from an unknown number and with the silence option, it would have gone to voicemail and potentially ignored. Granted some people ignore unknown callers anyway, but the option wouldn't have given the friend the opportunity to answer the phone.

If the emergency situation is too extreme in your thinking, another case arose for me this past Wednesday. My son went on a field trip and the bus bringing the students back to school was late, so he used his teacher's phone to call me. I received the call from an unknown number right as I was about to get to his school to pick him up. If I hadn't gotten the call and my son didn't leave a message, I would have been sitting around wondering where he was. Eventually I would have gone into the school office to see what was up, but that would have been after waiting awhile.

Without using this feature, I unfortunately have to live with the telemarketers and scammers. Who knows if the STIR/SHAKEN will work to block many of these calls. We can only hope. One thing that could definitely help which I have no idea why it never got implemented is caller name as part of caller ID on cell phones; I've wondered this for years.