Welcome

and now for the recent news...

from the Grauniad: 418.5 (it's not going down...) Atmospheric CO2 in parts per million, 21 March 2023 Source: NOAA

surrounded by boxes, part cabinets, I am refurbing a shelf with a distinct lean forward...will rearrange while I am at it.

from the Grauniad: 418.5 (it's creeping up) Atmospheric CO2 in parts per million, 7 March 2023 Source: NOAA

At last, the end of the radiation sessions was yesterday! now 4-8 weeks till all the swelling and pain vanishes; still another dose of the hormone injections to go..

from the Grauniad: 418.3
Atmospheric CO2 in parts per million, 4 January 2023 Source: NOAA

after today's session, halfway through the radiation therapy...

why we don't allow gerbils into the wide brown land!

from the Grauniad: The most important number of the climate crisis: 418.2 ppm Atmospheric CO2 at 12 December 2022 Source: NOAA

a blast from the past!! some pix of my workbench from many years back with a eurorack mounted original Acorn computers setup!

tomorrow, pre-radiation CT and MRI scans...

had the gold markers and the spacer blanket installed; all go now for the radiation therapy: 5 days a week for 5-6 weeks in Moreland...

and from the Grauniad...Atmospheric CO2 in parts per million is 418ppm (safe level is 350ppm), 6 November 2022 Source: NOAA

1st sunny day for weeks! large parts of rural NSW and Vic are under water still and more rain is forecast..

and from the Grauniad...Atmospheric CO2 in parts per million is 417.9ppm (safe level is 350ppm), 15 November 2022 Source: NOAA

Today is bookshop day!!

The Thonny devs are supporting Ukraine!

The Queen is dead, long live the King!

I can barely remember the previous king, the queen was on the UK throne for so long...and now a king will ascend, brought up on the Goon Show (all of whom are long dead..)

Crikey are up against the evil Murdoch empire; they need help now!!!

everything is covered in a tenacious layer of dirt/clay/cement dust; will be hard to get rid of until the restumping/underpinning is all finished!

Nature Physics journal; an editorial directed at researchers to appreciate the amazing scientific instruments available to them _and_ the people who make the kit...

started on a bench cleanup several hours ago, barely made a dent in the mess!

Hooray! am out of the RMH Wound clinic from today; they are happy about the healed up leg issues.
While this is all going on, Spare a thought for all those every day Ukrainians, including very small children, babies, and the elderly that are being bombed, rocketted and shot at by Russian troops at the behest of a former KGB agent, Vladimir Putin...and the doctors and health workers trying to keep them alive.

I have a new site, gerbilator.com, it will be for some more commercial activities; stay tuned.

Here is a picture of my ArduPSU board powered RPM counter for the mini lathe..

the only issue is the counter doesn't detect zero revolutions..

Australia Day or if you are a First Nations person, Invasion Day...

The adaptor plate arrived from LittleMachineShop in the US; fast delivery (at a cost!) It is now fitted to the MiniLathe (see pic..) will need to check for runout, but looks OK.

now I can machine odd shaped stuff!

The right arm pain turned into painful blotches; trip to doctor, who suggested shingles [which may have eruped as a result of the immune system dealing with the Pfizer jab], and a path sample which came back positive for shingles (herpes zoster). Had a course of antivirals(valacyclovir) and pregabalin for the nerve pain.. will get the vaccination at the end of February..

Waiting on a adaptor plate to fit a 4 jaw 100mm chuck to my mini-lathe. It's heavy; the shipping cost is twice the item cost!

I am really over the Covid thing...had a booster (Pfizer) and now my right arm is very painful..

The James Webb Space Telescope is making its way to an L2 orbit, while arranging its mirrors - here is where it is at the moment; It is a testament to science and engineering on a grand scale.

The WhamBam PEX mats need at least 70C bed temp for PLA; I will have to reslice some files..

The RPM display ArduPSU board mods are more extensive than I thought: new PCB? The display is working, now for the optointerrupter end on the lathe..

Some more useful attachments for the mini-lathe: QC tool holder

and keyless chuck..

last week, my Mini-lathe arrived! It came in a solid wooden crate, and has now been setup on the old table in the shed..

It cleaned up OK, and doesn't appear to have suffered during shipment, so a quick test on a piece of aluminium tubing with a tool bit worked, but needs proper lubrication. What it really needs is a RPM indicator conveniently mounted on the headstock control cover.. the grander lathe models have this, some with slotted discs on the drive shaft, others with magnetic detectors. The Ender 5 was pressed into service to produce a suitable 10 slot disk (the magic of OpenSCAD and 3D printing!), and fitted to the drive shaft OK. There isn't much space to play with with the cover on..

Now for the electronics and display [optointerrupter and Arduino nano with LCD or OLED display] in a suitable [3D printed ] case! I have some designs here, somewhere, that I did a while back (rummages through hard disk).

The WhamBam systems PEX mats for the Ender 5 arrived quickly last week; now to try them out..

Well, finally out of lockdown 6!! (Melbourne now has the unenvied record of having more lockdown days than anywhere else in the world! The phone works now, (more or less). The Ender 5 magnetic surface mat has decided to give up after a lot of printing; tried various cleaning treatments: isopropyl alcohol wash, hot soapy water wash and thorough drying, even the very fine wet-and-dry emery paper with Isoprop as a lubricant. That last helped a bit, but it's probably time for a new mat..

And we are in another lockdown! (number 5 for Melbourne..) Mind you, things are worse in Sinny, where they haven't quite got the hang of how to do a proper lockdown yet. Meanwhile we are halfway through the vaccination process, waiting on the 2nd AZ needle in August.

the house phone still isn't working properly, despite the heroic efforts of the Newsprout support dudes!!

Dealing with climate change denier/delayers; this comic presentation is interesting...

The house phone finally works; Voip still a bit wonky, but minor problem. it can be lived with. The only modem/router device that works properly (for us) is the TPLink VR1600v...

updated Cassandra's business from FB to Crak'd Organics (see side menus)

just a quick menu update..

we have successfully renewed our Let's Encrypts certs!

And we're back on the intertubes, due to the great efforts of the folk at NewSprout!!!

now doing self-signed certs to support https; mainly to appease Firefox...

since all our ssl certs expired and I can't renew them; have to rebuild apache on bungalow to serve plain http pages, but bloody firefox keeps trying to load expired stuff...

nobody outside our own [203.28.174.0/24] IP network will see anything here since 20 May last when the NBN (FTTC) arrived at 1130am and broke everything (the ADSL2+ was working just fine until then), iiNet unable/unwilling to fix it. Now working with Telstra to restore the phones, connect us properly to NBN, and advertise a route from the internet back to us again..

This may take a while; the Telstra guy said 6-8 weeks; they have very few staff left in offices, many are working from home, and there is a backlog.. keeping my fingers crossed..

one of my nephews has started a design business: GherkinPress I hope it goes well for him, following the rest of his enterprising and artistic family!

the latest bezel has M2.5 tappable standoffs, writing on the front, and M3 screwholes in the corners with recess space for pan-head screws..

just waiting on the print to finish..

got the standoff positions right for the DMC20481 bezel! made some more of my home-brew boxes in different colours. Must move the radio in the shed DAB+ signal very weedy, lots of dropouts

yet another revision [5.4]; didn't allow enough space when doing the standoffs (out by 1mm on Y axis). another print is happening now..grrr.

We have had a serious preview of winter for the past 4 or 5 days; it isn't actually raining at present, but very cold for early May. Despite that, the Ender 5 keeps on trucking, finished a 16 hour print this morning (one of my screw trays). Now doing a new revision [5.3] of the LCD bezel with increased height, to remove the 1mm gap when fitted to the matching box..

Now to do OpenSCAD designs for bezels for other models of displays...

got all the standoffs in exactly the right place, hooray, in iteration 5.1. It (the LCD) fits perfectly..

Might look at a box to match..

now printing iteration 3 of the LCD bezel; adjustments to standoff positions..

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still printing things on the Ender 5, the latest is a home OpenSCAD coded LCD bezel with mounting standoffs for the Winstar WH1602A LCD; none of the thingiverse ones fitted! Meanwhile, the Y axis plastic bed on the old Duinotech has warped and appears to be cracked! May be time to salvage the parts for a different design..

Frank is working on a convenient program to automate zipping and unzipping stuff: DLMUP project

The lockdown continues...

The Ender 5 has been printing up a storm! ran a multi item print yesterday, took 9 hours, but the items were really well made..Today, I am making some of Geoff's 1mm screwdriver handles. The coronaviruses keep on doing their virussy thing..

the Ender 5 is running a print as we speak...Hooray!

good site with coronavirus/Covid-19 stats worldwide..

Hooray!, my Creality Ender 5 printer arrived today; now to clear enough space to assemble/test it!

finally ironed the bugs out of the GerbClock code; DS1307 data reading..

a belated replacement for old blogger blog: Woozle Words. It will be the non-tech stuff.

This is being edited with EmEditor, nice text editor from Japan, can't seem to open another file when split window is enabled; probably a tricky key combo; EmEditor opens a new undocked window..

nearly finished converting my Hurricane canless air blower to LiIon cells (3 x 18650 salvaged from dead laptop battery); just have to wire up the cell charger cable for the balanced charger.

Tronixlabs.com (John Boxall's online store) has closed down; a pity they had some interesting gear, be interesting to see what John does next..

Have just finished 'updating' our windows 7 boxes (which worked just fine, until MS eol patches started to mess things up!) to Windows 10 (aargh...) To be sure, the upgrades now work reasonably well, (they bloody well ought to, MS have had enough time to fix them!) and on machines with moderate grunt and a _lot_ of RAM, Win 10 seems to work ok. O&O software's ShutUp10 has calmed the more frenetic spyware components down - tip o' the hat to Geoff Cohen for that suggestion!

I get where this guy is coming from..

interesting: Thought it was a minor bug with jquery, now I think its Firefox refusing to update includes if index.html or other calling pages aren't updated..

for those of a technical bent..please look at ardubot for updates on my pictiva interface project..

No less than The Economist are weighing in on climate change! BTW, it was the hottest September night in Melbourne last night (min 20.1C) since 1999!

Today is the winter solstice; it's really cold outside (12C) but this infographic from showyourstripes.info is a graphic representation of global warming - temperature averages in Australia from 1901 to 2018. A sobering picture..

data source for graphic: Annual average temperatures for Australia from 1901-2018 using data from Berkeley Earth.

BoM have shown a gradual upgrade in minimum and maximum daily temperatures since 1970 on the ABC nightly weather forecast...

We've all had the flu, despite having flu injections! (Influenza A) should be over it soon..

there is a link on the side menu to Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools site..love the amazing stuff that people use for real work!

testing local jquery live..

The JQuery stuff works! It makes life easier for global changes for the menus, etc..

tweak the side menu a bit.. looking at changes...using jQuery

On Xmaxx day, got to try Rooney's new single malts; an old Talisker and a Macallan Enigma, both excellent drops! (didn't have any other alcohol all day.) However, when we eventually got home, half the front fence had fallen into the street; required all of us to heave it on to the front lawn (such as it is..). Now we really need a new fence!

The Prusa i3 needed new plastic parts to accommodate 8mm leadscrews for the Z axis steppers; the original M5 threaded rod kept binding..

Construction of the Sintron Prusa i3 variant is underway; the supplied instructions are of very limited value..I am using previous experience with my old RepRap Prusa Mendel built here.

I have hacked up a Mk8 style direct drive extruder to go in the new printer.

ardubot page just updated (Pictiva display..)

The little Duinotech 3D printer is still giving trouble with levelling (and wonky Z axis limit switching!). I am looking at a Prusa i3 kit unit..

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