2017
December
- Merry Grootmas
Another Groot print.. This time for my sister (she is obsessed with Groot, and who doesn’t love plastic nick-nacks!?) These models are by dav88 on Thingiverse. I printed them at quite a small scale, due to time constraints and demoing the 3D printer to the family.
- Is this art?
Well it could be. The printer needs more calibration. It’s colder now, so maybe the temperature is affecting things. I’ve added some cardboard to try and keep the heat in, and stop any cool drafts from interfering.
November
- My Birthday and Problems Printing Spidey
It’s my Birthday, so I’ve been printing things for other people (as a way to justify printing stuff!)
- Xenomorph Gift and Box
It was my friend Dave’s birthday, and he loves the Alien movie franchise. I found a nice model of a Xenomorph Guard on Thingiverse and using Tinkercad stuck it on a base with his name.
- Tablet Mounting Brackets from Scratch
Having my printer tethered to my PC is less than ideal, it means the printer has to be quite close to the PC because of the length of the USB cable, so I’ve been exploring other options. I’ve got a Windows-powered tablet (the Chuwi Vi10 Plus that I reviewed back in 2016) that isn’t doing very much these days, so I thought why not use that with the printer?
- Garden Bin Hinge Pin
The first practical print that I’ve done. I used Tinkercad to model this hinge pin for my garden bin to replace one that has been missing from the bin as long as I can recall.
- Pug, Alpaca, Hodor.
I’ve been going a bit overboard with printing novelty models from Thingiverse lately.
- I am Groot.
I printed a Groot! Another great model from Thingiverse. This Groot model prints in two pieces, which are then slotted together.
- Print in Place Elephant
I’m enjoying printing some great models from Thingiverse. This little elephant is an articulated print-in-place model. It prints in one piece, and then the legs sort of snap to become moveable.
- Dialing in the Anycubic Kossel
Delta style 3D printers can be very fast and accurate, but to get that point you have to do a lot of calibration and “dialing in”. I’ve had a number of problems over the past week, starting with general inexperience, followed up with a failed calibration sensor.
October
- The start of a new hobby
I bought a 3D printer! I’ve gone with the Anycubic Kossel Plus with linear rails.
August
- The Deepoon DPVR E3 Virtual Reality Headset
Today I’m reviewing the DPVR E3. This is a Virtual Reality headset with a high resolution display, comfortable straps and an experience that’s similar to the Oculus Rift.
- VPN Connection Indication on Windows
As of tomorrow I’m going to be switching to working remotely. Same job, just from the comfort of my home office (and without 2-3 hours of commute daily!). With this change I figure I’ll have about 8-10 hours of extra time per week to work on things.
- The Virtoba S1 Daydream VR Bluetooth Controller
The Virtoba S1 is a Daydream compatible controller from China that costs around £15 ($20). Let me just start with saying I’ve got a lot of cheap Bluetooth controllers – and for the most part they’re crap. I hit the “Buy now” button for the Virtoba S1 half expecting this to be the case, but I was quite happily wrong.
- Enabling Google Daydream Support on OnePlus 3T
I enabled Google Daydream support on my OnePlus 3T today and I’m pretty impressed.
- My workflow for discovering new VR content
Since launching the UX of VR website last year I’ve been looking for ways to keep on top of new VR content. For most of the last year I relied solely on a mixture of Google Alerts, manually using the search functionality on websites and browsing VR blogs daily. Here’s how I improved on that process.
April
- The GPD Pocket Ultra-mobile PC UMPC Laptop
The GPD Pocket is a 7” Ultra-mobile PC that at first glance resembles a shrunken Apple Laptop, but it’s metal unibody exterior is where the similarities end.
- Children of Time book review
I’ve been using Good Reads lately to track what I’m reading (mostly sci-fi and dystopian), and this week I’ve been reading my first suggestion from Good Reads: Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time”. So far I’m hooked. This is a great take on some common themes. As usual I can’t help but thinking “This would make an awesome movie” after each chapter. Synopsis: A race for survival among the stars… Humanity’s last survivors escaped earth’s ruins to find a new home. But when they find it, can their desperation overcome its dangers? WHO WILL INHERIT THIS NEW EARTH? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age - a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind’s worst nightmare. Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth? Soo yeah. Worth reading. Follow-up To follow-up. I finished this. It’s an awesome book. I have recommended it to others. Even my wife is reading it, and she typically loathes sci-fi books and spiders!
- The inevitable HTC Vive post
I bought an HTC Vive last November (a week before the Black Friday sales, doh!) and have spent the time since trying to get the most out of it. So here are some highlights, thoughts and other musings about the HTC Vive.
March
- Useful bash aliases for VPS
Some useful bash aliases that I use on my VPS’: www=/srv/www conf=/etc/apache2/sites-enabled alias ra='/etc/init.d/apache2 restart' alias ownit='chown -R www-data:www-data .' Create an Apache conf and directory for a new domain: function makeconf { primary=${1} conffile="${conf}/${primary}.conf" site_path="/srv/www/${primary}" mkdir -p ${site_path} echo "<VirtualHost *:80>" >> "${conffile}" echo " ServerName ${primary}" >> "${conffile}" echo " ServerAlias www.${primary}" >> "${conffile}" shift for i; do cat >> "${conffile}" <<EOL ServerAlias ${i} ServerAlias www.${i} EOL done echo " DocumentRoot ${site_path}" >> "${conffile}" echo "</VirtualHost>" >> "${conffile}" } Grab the latest Wordpress tar and extract it to the current directory: function wordpressitup { wget --no-check-certificate https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz tar xfz latest.tar.gz cd wordpress cp -R * .. cd .. rm -r wordpress echo "Wordpress installed" } Some shortcuts to go to common directories: function dwww { cd /srv/www } function dcache { cd /var/cache/mod_pagespeed/v2 } function dconf { cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/ } See which directories and files are using up all of the space: function fsizes { du -h --max-depth=1 | sort -hr df -BG }
- Well that has been a crazy couple of months... Onward!
In October 2016 I spent every day of the month creating something for Google Cardboard using JavaScript — Cardboctober. Since then I’ve been preoccupied with a couple of other mostly VR-related things…