Category: MakerBlock

All things MakerBlock: RepRap, MakerBot, Cupcake CNC, open source, and plastic building toys!

Windows and Tabs

My FireFox tabs were getting out of control.  I had about 50 tabs all stacked up and I couldn’t really quite keep them all straight.

Why so many?  I had about a dozen tabs for things like Gmail, Twitter, a few random sites/blog posts I’d been meaning to read/scan, two YouTube videos I wanted to watch, and a few things I wanted to blog here.  Another dozen tabs were devoted to things related to a business/blog/website – images I wanted to use in posts, post drafts, etc.  And, about two dozen consisted of awesome stuff in Thingiverse and around the web I wanted to blog over at MakerBot.

For someone who gets easily1 distracted like myself, having so many tabs across so many different topics makes it very easy for me to get sidetracked.  It occurred to me that I could just open up a few FireFox windows and drag and drop my mess of tabs into three broad categories.  I opened up two additional windows, which makes one for MakerBot blog post drafts, business/blog post drafts, and a third for miscellaneous stuff. 2

So far I’ve been able to clear out a bunch of tabs – which feels great.  One interesting and satisfying side effect is that when you close the last tab in a FireFox window, the window closes!

  1. Ohh!  Shiny! [↩]
  2. Like this post! [↩]

Two new DrawBot links! And an update!

Thanks to Dan Royer, I’ve added two new links to my really huge list of DrawBots.  That brings the total to 28 drawing robots! 1  That’s a really incredible number of people who have shared documentation for their hard work.  Six months ago I wouldn’t have guessed there were more than a dozen such projects on the ‘net.  Clearly, the six-month-younger version of me is a fool.  Thank god I know better, eh?

So, Dan appears to be using an Arduino + Adafruit motor shield, much like I’m using, but he’s running custom Gcode software with a Java GUI.  It looks like Dan was wrestling with the problem of how to maximize drawing speed without causing his ‘bot to hang over the serial connection.  If he gets some decent speed out of his setup, I’m definitely going to give that a shot.

Unfortunately, I haven’t done much in the way of robotic drawings lately.  After experimenting with TSP drawings and finding out they would take an excruciatingly long time I set my drawbot aside for a little while.  Fortunately, Sandy’s been on the case and has worked out a new firmware version that might prove to be twice as fast as the one I’m currently using.

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  1. <queue thunder and lightning> 28! 28 drawing robots!  Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! [↩]

Yup, just three

My daughter asked me the other day about Indiana Jones.  She must have seen an ad or something.  I told her it was a series of movies about an archeologist adventurer.  She asked how many.  I said that no matter what anyone said, there were only three of them.  And none of them had anything to do with aliens.

Funny dream the other night

In the dream I had a few GREAT ideas, so, naturally, I wrote them down.  When I have ideas in a dream and write them down, I find that about 75% of the time the ideas don’t make any sense in the full light of day.

I’ve heard that keeping a dream log helps with lucid dreaming.  I’ve also heard that jotting down ideas helps one keep new ideas flowing.  I’m in the habit of carrying a pen and small pad of paper at just about all times.  Most outgoing e-mails from my phone consist of little notes to myself – half-baked ideas and whatnot.

This particular incident the other night was an amusing combination of the two – jotting down dreams and jotting down ideas.

Except, I jotted down my great ideas in my notebook in my dream.  When I woke up I had no recollection of the ideas themselves, just that they were good enough to have written down.

Well, I thought it was funny anyhow.  :)