grouchyfarmer

Weather and Updates

If you’ve been following the news you know that we got hammered here in Wisconsin on Monday, July 27. A massive storm system roared through here about mid-day with grapefruit sized hail, high winds, downpour rains and tornadoes. The town of Menasha (just 10 miles from me) and the surrounding area got a direct hit from an F2 tornado with winds of up to 135 MPH. Massive damage, buildings destroyed, streets blocked with uprooted trees, power outages for over 100,000 people in the area. Miraculously it seems that no one was killed by the storms but there were some people hurt. At least one large facility, Christ the Rock Church just outside of Menasha opened up as a storm shelter for those displaced. Making things worse was the heat with temperatures well above 90F.

The worst of it missed us, thankfully. Power went out around 1 pm but we hardly noticed because of the solar power system. We can’t run the central AC system off solar but we do have portable AC units that run off the solar system in the bedrooms so we had a place to retreat to when the temps in the main part of the house got intolerable. So all things considered, we were extremely fortunate. The internet was down but we still had cellular service so we could keep track of friends and family and keep updated about weather conditions.

Meanwhile…

I’ve been busy cleaning down in the basement, moving things around, putting things I haven’t used in a long time in storage, etc. to make room for the 3D p Put up new shelves for storage in the main part of the basement.

I don’t plug a lot of products here but I have to mention these Origami shelving units. I have about 8 of these things now and they’re fantastic. Takes just a couple of minutes to assemble them. Basically just unfold them, screw in the wheels and they’re ready to go. All steel construction. No flimsy plastics. They hold an astonishing amount of weight. We have them packed full of canned goods, equipment, paint cans, electronic equipment, you name it. Yeah, they are expensive but damn they’re good. And even better they show up on Woot once in a while for almost half price for some reason and when they do I generally snag a couple more even if I don’t need them. So I had three of them out in the garage still in their packing cases that I got off Woot when they went on sale a few months ago at half price so I set two of those up in the basement to take care of the overflow. One is now dedicated to just holding supplies for the lasers: various bits of hardwood, plywood sheets of various thicknesses, plastic sheets, coin blanks, etc. Also stuff associated with the lasers like the rotary tools, sliding table, paints for the airbrush, and all that fun stuff. I actually should have done that long ago because it makes it a lot easier to find what I need when I need it instead of having it scattered around wherever I could find room.

If FedEx can find my place the 3D printer should be here today. It’s a Bambu P2S with a 4 spool filament changer. The spool holder on top also doubles as a filament dryer so the filaments don’t absorb moisture. A lot of the filaments for 3D printing absorb moisture from the air and that is not a good thing.

This thing makes my old Flashforge look like my Buick compared to a Model T Ford. 3D printing technology has advanced enormously in just the last few years and this thing has capabilities that I could only dream about when I was running the old Flash Forge. And it costs less than my Flash Forge did on top of it all.

Okay, I do remember that once upon a time I swore I would never get another one of these but… Well, things change, okay? My priorities have changed.

When we first moved into this house back in around 1998 or so, one of the rooms in the basement was reserved for my model railroad. I had an HO scale railroad that occupied almost the entire room. But the house also needed a lot of work and having all of my woodworking tools out in the garage just wasn’t a viable option, especially in winter. So the railroad came down and the room became my woodshop and it’s been that way ever since.

Priorities change, as I said. I’ve lost interest in woodworking for a variety of reasons. I don’t foresee having to do major carpentry work on the house in the future, and for some reason I want to get back into model railroading again. And that’s one of the things I’ll be using the P2S for, making models and parts for that. That’s also partly why I got the laser, to cut out parts to make structures and accessories for the upcoming railroad.

Of course considering how I procrastinate and how lazy I am I’m probably going to be, oh, 90 or so, by the time I actually start building the railroad….

GoPro stuff

I really want to like GoPro cameras. I’ve had a couple of them over the years even though I don’t dabble much in videos. But I did buy an older model on sale early last spring with the intention of putting it on the bike. Well first my hip and then the smoke and heat dome and all of that shut that down. But now I’m feeling up to getting out on the bike again and after the storms the weather has cleared.

GoPro’s have their problems. The most notorious is heat. Every single one I’ve had, no matter what model, had heat problems. You’d have thought that they’d have figured out how to deal with that by now but they haven’t.

The other is battery life. For what is supposed to be an “action camera”, battery life is, frankly, abysmal. They claim a battery will last up to 75 minutes. That is a lie. I’ve never gotten more than about 30 – 40 minutes life out of the batteries.

The batteries also self-discharge at what I feel is an alarming rate. Every battery, no matter what its chemistry is, self discharges a bit. That is, they lose power when they’re stored even if they aren’t being used. I can charge the goPro batteries to 100%, set them aside for a week or two, and when I want to use them I find that they’re down to 75%. There is simply no excuse for that with modern battery chemistries.

I’ve reached the point where I don’t think I could ever recommend a GoPro camera. Not unless you can pick up an older model at like half price. There are cameras out there with longer battery life and capabilities almost as good for a heck of a lot less money.

Finally Getting Laser Figured Out! Plus Yes I’m Going To Get Another 3D Printer Even Though I Swore I’d Never Get Another One

I’m finally getting the new Lumos Flex laser figured out. It took a great deal of experimentation and time and burning through a lot of test materials but I finally accomplished something that turned out as good as the sample projects Wecreat shows in its advertising.

for some reason my iphone messed up the color. It is indeed brass and the actual color is what you see in the image in the next paragraph. The design is from Wecreat’s website.

This photo will give you some idea of the size of the coin.

In case you’re wondering, here’s the settings I used. Emboss mode, Fiber laser, Convex mode. Power 100%, speed 500, line density 300, layers 200, frequency 30, Z-step per layer 0.01. And another little trick I figured out is that it works better if I had the laser ever so slightly out of focus before starting.

What was really frustrating was the amount of time and effort I wasted trying to nail down the right settings. Wecreat included absolutely no instructions at all when I got the Flex replacement head for my Lumos except showing how to mount it. About using it? Absolutely nothing. Zilch. The diode laser was no problem. It works just like the one in the original Lumos, only more powerful. But the new fiber laser works entirely differently than the IR laser in the original Lumos does, and the only “instructions” I was able to find were a couple of utterly inadequate 5 minute videos on the company’s website. I wasn’t the only one who had issues. I even resorted to (shudder) joining the abomination that is Facebook just so I could get on the Wecreat Flex forum looking for answers. Anyway I got it figured out now and it does work.

But embossing like this is not something I am likely to do again. Why? Because guess how long it took to emboss that little coin up there. Go ahead. Guess.

Try six and a half hours. Just to do one side of that coin.

And that brings up the topic of money. The Lumos Flex costs about $2,000. Or you can upgrade a standard Lumos to the Flex version for $1,000. No matter how you look at it, that’s a hefty chunk of money.

A lot of craftspersons out there do this as a side gig. They use lasers, 3d printers, etc. to make products that they sell at craft shows, on outlets like Etsy, etc. And when the Flex was first announced everyone got excited because now we could get our hands on a fiber laser at a cost that was almost unheard of. And everyone had visions of making a few extra bucks using it to make things like engraved challenge coins, deep metal or wood engravings, etc.

Only no, you aren’t. Not if your maximum production rate is going to be 2 coins per day.

The Flex is a very nice machine, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t think it’s worth spending $1,000 more for this when the standard Lumos works just fine and dandy for engraving things like lockets. rings, pendants, bracelets, etc. with the IR laser, and does a perfectly fine, even excellent job engraving wood, leather, etc. with the diode laser. Spending an additional $1,000 just for the ability to turn out a single, embossed coin in 12 hours? That doesn’t seem even remotely cost effective to me.

3D Printing

Now I gave away my Flashforge 3D printer some years ago, swearing off 3D printing entirely as being little more than a silly gimmick and only being good for making trinkets, crude decorative items, etc. And swearing that I would never, ever, get another one.

And here I am about to get a Bambu Labs PS2 in a couple of weeks.

So what happened?

Well, a lot, really.

Here’s the thing… When I gave up on 3D printing it was because no matter what I did, no matter what settings I used, no matter what materials I used, the results universally looked like cheap, crappy, 3D printed junk, that degraded rapidly if exposed to moisture or direct sunlight, that was extremely fragile and could stand little or no stress, etc. It was good for little more than making figurines for gaming or models and was useless for any kind of serious application. At least with the equipment and materials I could afford to buy.

Well things have changed. A lot. Amd they’ve changed both with the equipment and perhaps more importantly, with the materials.

On the hardware side everything has gotten better. I mean a lot better. Much better accuracy, much better temperature and ventilation controls, much better stability, and, yes, AI control systems that help with improving the entire printing process.

On the materials side, things have improved even more dramatically. We now have materials that are less moisture sensitive, far stronger, more shock resistant, even flexible materials that let you do things like, oh, print balls that actually bounce. And even engineering materials reinforced with carbon fiber and things like that. You can now make 3D printed objects at the consumer level that are strong enough and shock resistant enough to use for things like gears in RC racing cars, for heaven’s sake.

Anyway, more about that when it happens. I am still dithering about which one to buy. I’m leaning more and more towards the Bambu Labs P2S. It looks like it has the most “bang for the buck” at the moment. I’ll make a decision this weekend and once things start to happen I’m sure it will turn up here.

Smoke

Peer down towards the end of the street there past that red truck and you’ll see just how hazy it has been here today. That isn’t fog or normal haze, that’s smoke. Thick, reeking smoke from wild fires raging up near the Canadian border with Minnesota. So not only are we putting up with temperatures in the mid 90s (it hit 99F in Milwaukee yesterday and 98 here at the house south of Green bay) but the heat dome is pushing the smoke down right on top of us. We’re under a severe air quality alert until tomorrow afternoon and that might be extended farther unless conditions change. They’re saying children and elderly shouldn’t even go outside unless necessary.

We’ve had the house buttoned up tight with the AC going for days now already because of the heat, plus we have the three big HEPA filters going full time so i the house here we can’t even smell it. But as soon as I step outside it… Wow… Just the smell is enough to make my eyes start to water.

This is getting to be a regular thing every summer now. Because of the changes in wind patterns and the increase in wildfires because of droughts, both caused by climate change, we’ve been enduring this every summer for the last three or four years now.

We’d been running the house completely on solar for about 5 days now but I’ve had to switch back to grid power by 5 this afternoon because we just aren’t getting enough power from the panels to keep things going. I could just run the house off batteries but we’re supposed to get thunderstorms tomorrow so I want to keep the batteries topped up in case the storms take down the grid.

Catching Up: Signs Finished, Solar Stuff, Flowers Everywhere, Engraving Lighters, Silly Cats, No More Hip Pain Somehow?

MrsGF finished up the last of the welcome signs the other day with about three coats of all weather polyurethane. We did four all together. We’re keeping one and these three are already spoken for. They turned out pretty nice I think.

We hit a milestone with the new EG4-12000XP inverter. We hit half a megawatt of production earlier today! We’re going to need every watt we can get out of that system because the big central AC unit is still on the grid and it’s been going for something like 3 weeks straight now since we shifted into this hot weather pattern. We decided to leave it on the grid because while the 12000XP would have enough oomph to handle it, I suspect it would would discharge our batteries to a point where I would become uncomfortable overnight. It’s the old style AC system, but it’s only a few years old so replacing it isn’t in the cards at the moment. If we’d known better at the time we would have gone for a heat pump system which is much more energy efficient but at the time we weren’t even dreaming of putting in whole house solar. I looked into it but a heat pump system would have been around twice the cost so I never seriously considered it. Oh, well. Live and learn, as they say.

Our electric rate here isn’t bad, about 20¢/KWh, which is cheap when compared to what those poor buggers out in California are getting hit with thanks to Newsome and the California legislature being owned lock, stock and barrel by the utility companies and the hundreds of thousands of dollars of ~~bribes~~… (cough cough), I mean “campaign donations” and lobbying $$ they pay out every year. But the handwriting is one the wall, as they say. Thanks to the huge amounts of power the massive data centers being built here in the state are gulping down now and will gulp down in the future, the utilities are going to have to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in new generating facilities, substations and high tension power lines to feed them, and you can be damned sure that if Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and the others building those facilities have anything to say about it, it’s going to be us consumers who are going to foot the bill, not them.

But on to a more pleasant subject. Laser engraving.

I had no idea but apparently Zippo lighters are still a thing with some people? I thought that with the rate of smoking going down every year the market for lighters would have shrunk as well but I guess I forgot about the people who smoke “recreational substances”, shall we call it? That’s still illegal here in Wisconsin but all you have to do is nip across the border to Illinois, Minnesota or Michigan if you want to light up.

I did the first one with the brewery logo on it to give to Kyle, one of the owners. And then I started playing around using the Lumos Flex from Wecreat and the fiber laser and wow, it does a nice job engraving stainless steel! Doesn’t take long, either. With the IR laser in my old Lumos it would have probably taken half an hour to do something like this. With the fiber laser it takes about 4 minutes. It actually eteches right into the metal so that design isn’t just discoloration, it’s actually etched in there and will never wear off. I’ve done about four of these for various people to give as gifts and they keep telling me I should put these up on Etsy or somewhere, but no thanks. I do not want to get into that rat race. Plain, genuine Zippo lighters cost me about $18 each. In order to make it worth my while I’d probably have to charge $35 – $40 for one and I don’t think anyone would be silly enough to pay that.

And then we got flowers! Wow, do we have flowers! Here are a couple.

As for the rest of the gardens I’m too lazy at the moment to go out and get pictures so you’ll have to settle for a description. The tomatoes are going gangbusters. They’re already loaded with green fruit. We have 6 plants this year. We were only going to put in 3 but we had 3 or 4 volunteers pop up and MrsGf didn’t have the heart to just pull them so she transplanted them to a better location and they’re looking just as good as the ones we grew from seed ourselves.

The carrots are thriving and we really need to thin them out. The beets? We’ve already been picking some and eating them. They’re doing fantastic. The celery is looking beautiful this year. When I’m mowing the lawn I can’t help but snip off a stalk to nibble on when I’m riding on the mower. If you’ve never grown celery yourself, please give it a try. You won’t believe how intensely flavored the home grown varieties are when compared to the commercial varieties they sell in the grocery store.

The onions are getting to the point where we’re thinking of starting to pull some and curing them off and putting them in storage.

We have a few zucchini plants as well and they’re producing beautifully. The nice thing about zucchini is that it has almost no flavor so you can slip it into anything and nobody will notice they’re eating something healthy. Tonight I’m going to do a zucchini-mushroom stir fry with lots of garlic and onions and parmesan cheese.

I’m eagerly awaiting the tomatoes. Absolutely nothing compares to the flavor of a ripe tomato fresh off the plant from the garden.

Let’s see, what else?

Oh, the hip! Almost forgot about that. I suffered for something like 3 weeks with pain in my right hip that was almost excruciating at times when I bent my leg the wrong way. It started to oh so slowly get better over time. But then the other day I woke up and got out of bed and suddenly realized that the hip didn’t hurt. At all. It was like someone just threw a switch. There’s a bit of soreness there but that’s because the muscles in the leg are stiff from not being used normally for so long.

So what happened? I have no idea. MrsGF thinks it might have been a pinched nerve and I suppose that’s possible?

Anyway, I’m still taking it easy because I’m terrified of doing something that might bring it back. But otherwise things are back to almost normal. I’m even back on the bike again but I’m keeping the riding limited to just a few miles and at a relatively slow pace for the time being.

Let’s see… Oh, almost forgot! Silly cats, right?

That’s Charlie over there in her new favorite stot to sit. If I scoot forward to type on the computer and there is any space at all between me and the back of the chair, she’ll squeeze in there. She is an absolute sweetie. I’ve never seen a cat that loves people as much as she does. She belonged to our daughter in law’s aunt but she had to move into an apartment that doesn’t allow pets so we volunteered to take her in and we’re so happy we did. She’s getting up there, about 14 or 15 years old now, and she has a heart murmur and a benign cyst on her neck that puts some people off but doesn’t seem to bother her at all. The cyst is inoperable because she can’t tolerate anesthesia. They tried once and her heart stopped and she almost died so unless it’s a genuine emergency neither we nor her vet are willing to try it again.

And that’s about it for now!

Hm? Oh, oh, wait… Oh no… That’s not a 3D printer on a truck heading this way, is it? No, it couldn’t be. I swore I’d never buy another one, didn’t I? I seem to distinctly remember saying that, didn’t I?

OMG it’s been hot and a Finished Project

Do I really need to mention how hot it’s been here the last few days? We’re under one of those “heat domes” and it’s been sweltering. Daytime highs have been in the mid to high 90s with the heat index topping out at around 107. So far the AC has been holding up (he said keeping his fingers and toes crossed)

Meanwhile life goes on. MrsGF and I have been cooperating on a “Welcome” sign project. We finished up the first one and have two more to go. Here’s what the first looks like.

We still have to put a few coats of polyurethane on it to seal and weather proof it but we’re rather pleased with how this one turned out.

Astro image from last night

We finally had some clear skies again and I had the scope out and got a few decent images.

This was the best of the lot, IC 1318B, sometimes called the Butterfly Nebula. It’s about 4,000 light years away and is an emission nebula. Emission nebula are caused by intense ultraviolet radiation from a dying star that ionizes the interstellar gas around the star.

Catching up

It’s been a rather dull time around here with me more or less laid up because of first my hip and then my back. But my back is almost normal and while the hip is still giving me some issues it’s getting to the point where I might be able to get back on the bicycle in a week or so. Damn that’s been frustrating.

But meanwhile life goes on, right?

I got bored and was fiddling with Photoshop and came up with this black and white image of a stag standing in the woods and then found a plack with a sort of illuminated frame around it that I picked up for the heck of it at Walmart or Hobby Lobby and hadn’t used, and thought engraving that image on the plack might be interesting so I tried it using the Vision Pro and that’s the result over there on the left with the frame lighted up.

Bad lighting but you can get the basic idea. I though it didn’t turn out too bad. I sent that photo to Kyle and Sarah down at the pub and they claimed it so it has a home already.

I do wish there was some kind of retail market for stuff like this locally, some shop that would market arts and crafts from local crafts persons on a consignment basis or something like that. If I were about 10 years younger and had a bit more ambition I’d be tempted to do something like that myself.

Meanwhile the gardens are growing like crazy.

We’re already harvesting onions and small beets and MrsGF just thinned out the carrots and we have a whole dish full of baby carrots we’re going to be having for supper tonight.

The celery up there is looking amazing and it’s gotten to the point where I don’t think I can resist snipping off a few stalks for snacking or salads.

Even the “Stump Garden” is looking good.

The weather has been clear today so I’m hoping we’ll have clear skies tonight so I can get the telescope out.

One of our kitties, Charlie, loves to go outside. We put a harness and leash on her and she has great fun exploring the gardens. But one of the local cardinals took exception to her presence the other day and actually flew down into the lilac to yell at us.

Ooo, he was upset! How dare I bring a cat out into his territory! He kept giving me an earful until finally Charlie had enough and we went back inside.

M 101 The Pinwheel Galaxy

Got this one yesterday evening.

I’m still not entirely sure how all of this post processing stuff works because the results I get after processing are often much, much different than what I’m seeing in the original images. For example, here’s what the original image looked like before processing.

I’m still very, very impressed with the results from this scope even before processing the images. I’m getting better images with this little scope than I ever saw with my huge 11″ Celestron

Well the last couple of weeks have been rough here…

… at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters. I somehow managed to entirely mess up my right hip and only now am I getting back to normal. I could stand or sit, but transitioning between those two situations caused such excruciating pain I could hardly stand it. The consensus was I severely strained or perhaps even tore some muscles in there somehow. Going to the bathroom was pure torture because sitting down on the commode or standing up after sent a pain through my hip that made me want to weep. And I could forget completely about getting out on the bike.

So even though it’s now early summer and absolutely beautiful out there and the gardens are thriving, I’ve been more or less cooped up in the house being more grouchy than usual and not having enough ambition to do much of anything.

Anyway I’m about 80% back to normal now. I’m at the point where I might try taking the bike out for a run around the block in the next day or two just to see how it goes.

Another thing that had me grumpy is that except for the first night I had the new Sestar 30 Pro telescope, every single freaking night we’ve had has been overcast. Do you have any idea how incredibly frustrating it is to have a brand new telescope and having cloudy weather every single night? Arrggghh!

But now, finally! We had clear skies early last evening and I was able to get the scope out…

Well I say able to get the scope out. And it was out, but I was sitting inside comfortably at the kitchen table having a snack while running the scope from my iPad. If you’ve ever had to endure dealing with clouds of mosquitoes, freezing temperatures and the other inconveniences of using a visual telescope, you can imagine just how amazing it felt to be running the scope comfortably from inside the house. It almost felt like, well, cheating, somehow. And I suppose some amateur astronomers will claim that it is. Spending hours outside in the dark, having your blood sucked dry by mosquitoes in the summer, or trying to keep your fingers and toes from freezing in the fall and winter, is, according to some of them, part of the “joys” of amateur astronomy.

Yeah, sure it is…

I got some neat images despite the fact that it wasn’t even fully dark yet when I started this. Last night was the shortest night of the year so at about 10 PM or so when I started it wasn’t even completely fully dark yet.

Let’s start off with this.

That’s a globular star cluster designated as M 13. It’s the great globular star cluster in the Hercules constellation and it is an astonishing thing when you discover what it actually is. Globular clusters are groups of hundreds, even tens of thousands of stars tightly packed into a tiny, spherical group. In this case several hundreds of thousands of stars packed into an area less than 145 light years across. Exactly how many stars are in there isn’t known but it could be as many as a half million.

Above is M 51, the Whirlpool galaxy and its companion. That this one turned out this good surprised me a bit because even though it was high in the sky, near the zenith, my conditions here at the house are horrible with light pollution so bad you can almost read a large print book sitting in the backyard at midnight, plus it wasn’t fully dark yet. All things considered I’m pleased that it turned out this good.

The one that really surprised me was this one, though:

That’s NGC 6888, the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus. Nebulas like this can be a pain in the neck to image in light polluted locations like mine so I was surprised I was able to capture anything at all. That this not only showed up but even shows some color was a bit amazing to me.

Now let’s do a little experiment. I’m going to take that same image of M51 up there and run it through some AI filtering and see what happens. I’m not entirely sure how this is going to turn out because this is the first time I’ve tried this.

M 51 — The same image as above but “enhanced” with AI

Hmm… I’m not entirely sure what to make of this. I don’t believe for a moment that there was enough information in that original image of mine for the AI to come up with what looks suspiciously like an image that was taken with the Hubble from NASA. I’m suspecting that instead of enhancing the image it’s sucking up data from NASA’s telescope database and adding it in.

Let’s see what it does with that nebula

Hmm, again, I’m not sure where it’s getting the data from to do this because I don’t believe there was enough information in the original image to get these kinds of results.

Anway, that’s it for now. Just wanted to share the new images from the scope.

A One Paragraph Record Review. You Too Can Experience the Horror that is The Smurfs All Star Show!

OMG the horror… Every single person involved in the production of this abomination should be locked up before they can commit further atrocities. It is difficult to describe the experience of listening to this — this thing. It sort of resembles, well, the nearest comparison I can come up with is Alvin and the Chipmunks on a particularly bad batch of acid singing lyrics written by someone with a smaller vocabulary that my cat and who was told by a cynical marketing agency to “Just write whatever crap you can come up with” and was about 3 martinis into a 4 martini lunch. About halfway through the first track I wanted to wash my ears out with bleach.

Yes, you too can experience the horror of the Smurf’s All Star Show for just $1 at the Hilbert St. Vincent de Paul thrift store.