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.

Fixing a broken printer

Yesterday my wife came home and said she picked up a free, broken printer and wanted to know if I could take a look at it as she'd love it for her classroom. It was an EPSON ET-4750 which is the big brother to the EPSON ET-2750 that we've had for a year and been quite happy with the purchase.

Of course, I said sure I'd take a look and asked if I got it going could I swap out printers? She didn't hesitate and agreed. The problem, I was told, was that the printer wouldn't feed the paper. I opened up the back of the printer which has the feed mechanism and saw some broken plastic. Upon further inspection, I saw the broken gear where the plastic was supposed to go. Uggh, I thought. I looked at the back of our printer and it had a similar door to get to the feed mechanism, so I took it off in hopes that I could just replace it and be done. No such luck. However, looking at the broken gear I saw that our printer had the same gear on the feed mechanism. I was able to pull off the gear and put it on the broken printer and it fit! So at least I got a new printer for me 😀 That, of course, wasn't going to help my wife.

As I indicated in my post about 3D printing, I've always envisioned just being able to print spare parts and be able to prolong the life of things. A search online didn't find the gear I needed, but I did find sites that could generate gear files. I asked my wife to count the teeth on the gear and I started playing around with a site that let me enter parameters and made the gear. I tried a few parameters and tried to make the gear look what I had. I printed a test gear (the site gave me an STL file that I needed to modify a bit) and while not perfect, I thought I could make it work.

After a bit of work with TinkerCAD, I printed a working gear. While it isn't an OEM part and could be a little more precise, I'm pretty impressed with what I made. Part of the issue may just be that the 3D printer isn't precise enough to make a true replacement.

I've published my work on TinkerCAD for others to enjoy.

If you find this helpful, please let me know. Also if there is a way to start convincing companies to publish STL files for parts and you have ideas on this, let me know.