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If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know I mess around with laser engravers/cutters and my two machines are both from a company called Wecreat, the Vision Pro and the Lumos. Wecreat recently came out with some very significant new galvo style lasers under the Lumos model name, the Lumos Flex and the Lumos Ultra. The Ultra is way outside my price range, about $3,500. But considering it’s a UV and MOPA laser all included in one package, that’s an extremely good price.

It was the Flex I was interested in. It’s a significant upgrade from my mine. I had a 3W infrared laser and a 10W blue diode laser in mine. The Flex looked like it was exactly the same as mine but with a new laser head that replaces the IR laser with a 15W fiber laser and upgrades the blue laser to 15W.

The blue laser upgrade is significant, but it’s not so much more powerful that I’d really be tempted by that. It was the fiber laser that made things interesting. Fiber lasers generally produce enough energy to cut metal. And they’re capable of doing some very interesting tricks like 3D embossing. They’re pretty slick stuff. And yes, I wanted one but fiber lasers have always been way outside of a price I was comfortable with. Wecreat wants about $2,000 for the thing and I’d already dropped way too much money this year on laser equipment.

But then I was reading the fine print at the end of the hype/advertising for the Flex and noticed a brief mention of the fact that my original Lumos could be upgraded to the Flex by simply replacing the laser head module, and for half the cost of the complete Flex. Now I was interested again.

I sent an email to the company and said “Hey, how can I get one of these upgrade modules?” And they wrote back and said “send us some money and give us about 2 weeks to build one and we’ll get it to you in about 3 weeks.”

And well here we are, 3 weeks later and it is now in my hot little hands. It took all of about 3 minutes to replace the old laser head with the new one, download a new version of their Makeit software, and away we go.

I haven’t had much of a chance to do more than fiddle with it a bit because I’ve been busy with the old unit making a batch of humorous drinks coasters that need to get finished up. But I’m going to have time to put it through its paces this weekend and I’ll let you know how it goes. The bit of fiddling I’ve had a chance to do indicates that it has a heck of a lot of potential. I entertained myself for some time cutting holes in thin sheet metal and engraving things on various bits of metal I had laying around before I had to get back to work. Long enough to see this thing is going to be a hoot to play with.

It’s going to take some time to figure out the exact setting I’ll need in order to get it to do what I want. But once I figure that out this thing is going to be very useful indeed.

Roses

Every year we think this dopey rose bush in the front yard by the sidewalk has finally died, and every year it surprises us and somehow manages to come back. This year I was sure it was dead. When MrsGF pulled on one of the branches something like 3/4 ths of the rootball came out, completely rotted away. I was sure it was dead. Only no, it isn’t, somehow.

I have no idea how this thing manages to survive. Amazing plant. Just saw the first flower of the season and it’s absolutely loaded with buds.

Cats and Backpacks

MrsGF got me a new backpack to carry stuff when I’m out on the bike, but the cat seems to have fallen in love with it. If I put it anywhere where she can get at it, she’s immediately sitting on it. Cats are weird.

I just had to share this one.

I got this photo entirely by accident the other day when I happened to be holding my cell phone when this little guy turned up. This is the first time I’ve ever gotten a halfway decent photo of one of beautiful little birds.

{Fiasco: A complete, often ridiculous, embarrassing failure or disaster. It typically refers to an event or ambitious project that goes horribly wrong and completely fails to meet expectations.}

Yes, I said fiasco, because that is what this is. Look, I’ve been reading science fiction almost my entire life. I actually pretended to be sick so I could skip school to watch the original moon landings. I would dearly love to see people back on the moon. But even considering all of that I am also a realist and this whole moon landing scam that NASA is pushing is… Well let’s take a look at it in detail, shall we?

There’s been a lot of hype and, frankly, a lot of 100% pure bullshit being spouted by NASA’s proposed landing of human beings on the moon again. NASA is now claiming that the much delayed moon landing is going to take place in early 2028.

Yeah. Sure it is. The chances of that happening are about the same as me winning one of those billion dollar lotteries which I would never buy a ticket for in the first place.

This whole moon landing fiasco is now years past it’s original launch date and of billions of dollars over budget and while the SLS and Orion ship have flown, we’re probably at least 5 years away from NASA actually being able to pull off a moon landing. They sure as hell aren’t going to be able to do it in something like 18 months. Especially after Blue Origin’s “New Glenn” rocket lit up the whole space coast in Florida with one of the most spectacular explosions seen in decades, taking out not only the rocket itself but its transporter and most of the launch facility. And the New Glenn rocket is (or was) an essential part of this plan to put people back on the moon.

And as for plan itself, it is so bizarrely, hilariously complicated it would have made Rube Goldberg proud. A plan that’s so ridiculously nonsensical that one might even claim, with some justification, that it was more about finding a way to flood private companies with taxpayer money than it ever was about actually landing on the moon.

This plan depends on SpaceX to get specially designed variants of its Starship developed, including a human rated lander. Maybe. It depends on Blue Origin (and SpaceX too, maybe?) to develop landing craft. Maybe. It depends on in orbit refueling of ships. Maybe. It depends on dozens of other private vendors being able to deliver promised equipment, almost none of which is actually in existence except as computer models.

Did you see all of those “maybes” up there? That’s part of the problem. Nobody seems to know for sure who is going to do what or how or why. Both Blue Origin and SpaceX are supposed to be developing some kind of lander either to carry humans down to the surface or at least cargo. Maybe. SpaceX is maybe going to be using Starship to deliver cargo to the lunar surface. Maybe. SpaceX is maybe going to be using another variant of Starship as a tanker to do in-flight refueling of other space vehicles. Maybe.

SpaceX? It hasn’t even managed to pull off a completely successful test of it’s basic Starship. It doesn’t even have one that’s done a full orbit, for heaven’s sake. The last launch looked promising with the new Type 3 ship and booster, but that had issues so serious that the FAA has put a hold on any new launches. And even if that particular ship is successful, it’s not the one that would be used for the lunar program. That would require an entirely different variant of the starship. The variant of Starship that is currently being built and is in testing has nothing to do with the lunar mission. It is one that has a single, specific purpose, to deliver huge numbers of Starlink satellites into orbit.

But at least we know that SpaceX can move fast. And once it’s new Gigabay production facility is up and running in Texas it can crank out its heavy lift booster and Starships in a fraction of the time it can now. But even so, to come up with an entirely new variant of the Starship, put it through testing and several launches to make sure it actually works? Build one rated to carry human beings? In less than 18 months? Sorry. No. Isn’t going to happen.

Then there’s Blue Origin. SpaceX has the infrastructure to crank out boosters and starships in an astonishingly short period of time at least. Blue Origin doesn’t.

It’s New Glenn rocket was supposed to be the launch platform for the Blue Moon Mark I and Mark II landers which were supposed to deliver cargo and eventually also land humans on the moon. (Maybe) And while the New Glenn launch platform has worked, you have ot remember that one out of the three previous flights failed to deliver its payload to orbit and now this one blew up on the pad taking most of the launch site with it.

Then there’s NASA’s SLS, made out of cobbled together parts left over from the shuttle program, including 40 year old space shuttle engines they found in a warehouse somewhere, and that has been plagued with hydrogen leaks, and a Orion space craft which has a highly questionable and potentially dangerous heat shield, thruster problems and non-working interior plumbing.

And then there’s the cost. I don’t really know what the dollar amounts are going to be to cover the costs of SpaceX and Blue Origin for their part in all of this but you can be damn sure it isn’t going to be cheap. But I do know what the SLS is going to cost and it is going to be mind bogglingly expensive. You ready for this? Hold onto your shorts.

NASA’s own inspector general is stating that the first four Artemis missions are going to cost $4.1 billion per launch.

That is not a typo. Four point one billion dollars per launch.

And as I said that number doesn’t include the costs from the required equipment and launches from SpaceX and/or Blue Origin according to the information I have.

Then there is the one question that no one seems to be asking for some reason.

Why?

Seriously. Why? Why do we want to put people on the moon again? Ignore all of that bullshit about somehow mining ice to create rocket fuel to launch Mars missions and all of that guff because it is exactly what I said it was, bullshit. It is not going to happen. Period.

Ignore the bullshit about mining the moon for exotic minerals or other nonsense like that. That is also exactly what I called it. Bullshit. There are no exceedingly rare, exotic minerals on the moon to be mined in the first place. None. Zilch. Zero. If you believe there are, please tell me what rare minerals are worth about $20,000,000 per pound? Because that’s about how much it would cost to retrieve material from the moon, about twenty million dollars per pound.

NASA is planning on an eventual 25 missions to the moon. At current prices, that would work out to about $100 billion.

Let’s look at this a bit differently, shall we? $100 billion would be enough money to build a basic house for every single homeless person in the entire country. Seriously. Run the numbers yourself if you don’t believe me.

There are about 770,000 homeless persons in the US according to the most reliable numbers I can find. A basic, small, 1 bedroom house can be built for about $100,000. We could literally build a basic 1 bedroom home for every single homeless person in the country for less than the total cost of NASA’s moon landing program.

So someone please explain this to me?

At 7 AM Thursday morning I threw the “big switch” in the basement and switched the entire house off-grid. It is now 10:30 AM Friday morning and despite some cloudy conditions not only are we still running the entire house off-grid we’ve already almost made up all of the energy we used from the batteries during the hours of darkness. And that’s with less than ideal weather conditions. It’s been partly cloudy all morning but despite that we’re making more than enough energy to power the house and recharge the batteries.

I’m of an age where I am still astonished that we can get enough energy out of a handful of panels that look like just a few sheets of black glass to power an entire house. I understand the science behind it. I know how it works. But I’m still amazed by it.

Well the experiment can only be described as a success. At 9 pm last night I switched the house completely off-grid. We ran the house off the battery bank all night. Solar power began to come in almost before the sun was over the horizon somehow. Not much, just a couple of hundred watts, but even so, I was surprised. We made no effort to conserve electricity. We just did what we always did.

By 8 AM we were running the entire house off the solar panels and putting a few hundred watts back into the battery bank. By 8:30 we were making 2.5 KW of solar and dumping almost 2KW of that into the batteries. By 11:30 AM the batteries were fully charged and the house running on the panels. We made 12 KWh of solar power just from sunrise to noon today.

I’m very pleased with how well this all worked. This means I probably won’t need to put the ground mount panels back up against the back side of the garage. We should be able to handle everything with just the new panels on the garage roof. Putting the other panels back up would remain an option of we ever ran into a situation where we’d need more power for some reason. But as of right now, we don’t need them.

We finally got the solar panels up on the garage!

It’s hard to see in that photo up there but that’s the best angle I could get because MrsGF won’t let me up on a roof. (But she has no problem making me climb a rickety old stepladder in the house to clean the tops of the kitchen cabinets) The guys did a very good job. They ran out of daylight before they could get the wiring done but we jury rigged some connections to test them and they work quite well.

They’re 420W bifacial panels. Because they’re roof mounted like that the bifacial bit isn’t going to be very helpful, but at the time I bought them they were the cheapest panels in that wattage range. If I remember right I picked them up for about $107 each plus shipping, which by today’s prices, is ridiculously cheap here in the US.

Anyway we were testing them at the time I took that photo. You can see that not only is it cloudy, but it’s already starting to get dark. Much to our surprise they were still putting out 400W.

Of course the weather had to turn bad right after they were put up and it rained all day today. I switched them in just for the heck of it and the dopey things were putting out 300 – 500w. In the rain. I’m not entirely sure how that’s even possible.

So now we have about 4.2KW of solar up on the roof. Once I put the ground mount panels back in place we’ll have over 6KW total. That’s going to be quite a change from having only about 2KW solar.

Is this the most boring video on Youtube? Probably not but it should be in the running.

Now, coming to a screen near you soon, The Compost Pile!

trying to figure out how to post files to be downloadable by my readers. This should be simple. I hope. If you click the link below it should let you download a file called “reader.zip” which is a .SVG file of the image over there on the left. I have to compress it into a zip file because for some bizarre reason WP will not let me upload a .SVG file to my media library.

Anyway you should be able to download a file called “reader.zip” by clicking on the “DOWNLOAD” link below.

.SVG is a vector graphics format that is commonly used with laser engravers and you should be able to directly import it into the design software used by most brands of engraver. So try downloading it, unzipping it, and checking that you get a usable image. If you have problems please let me know.

This image is public domain, a scan taken from an image published well over 100 years ago and is available free from several other sites on the internet. Feel free to use it for whatever you wish.

If this works I hope to be able to share some of the designs I make myself for the laser in the future.

So I got this real deal on a Gopro 12 and I’m thinking of using it to make content for this place but here’s the thing, I only have a limited amount of storage space here. A lot of space, really, but these videos can run many hundreds of megabytes in size so it doesn’t take long to suck up a lot of storage space. So I’m experimenting with uploading them to my Youtube account and then just linking to the video from here instead of storing them here. I tried this once before with some other incredibly boring stuff that was almost as mind numbingly dull as these new ones are, like this one of me

So here we go. If all goes well, this should be a video of a cat being petted.

That’s Marvelous Mercy the Wonder Cat. She’s about 13 years old and was a shelter kitty. She got adopted once, then the brought her back to the shelter for some reason. Then my youngest son adopted her. But she didn’t get along with his other kitty. She got along pretty well with our other cat and here we are. She was very shy and nervous at first but she’s turned into an absolute sweety.

Now this should be a video of this silly and ridiculously complicated marble run thing I just finished building a couple of weeks ago.

Finally I stuck the Gopro inside of the Vision laser and got this. The fun stuff doesn’t start to happen until about 1 minute into it.

When it’s actually cutting it looks like a blowtorch for heaven’s sake. I’d never seen what it looks like underneath the workpiece before. No wonder they tell you to never, ever, leave a laser engraver/cutter running unattended!

Well darn, this seems to actually work. So maybe you’ll have some more incredibly tedious, boring, mind numbingly dull videos to look forward to in the future! I even got a mount for the bike. Ooo, just think! The possibility of hours and hours of videos of nothing but endless miles of backroads while you start yawning and falling asleep at the computer! Ooo, the excitement!

Why Does Doc Rivers Still Have A Job?

Seriously. Why?

I’m not really a fan of pro sports in general and my interest in the Milwaukee Bucks is little more than that of someone who likes to see the home team be successful. But even a casual fan like me has to start wondering what the feck is going on here.

They fired Budenholzer in 2023 after establishing a record that could only be described as bloody amazing and which included 5 trips to the playoffs and a championship in 2021, and a record of 271 wins vs. 120 losses. And his reward for that was being fired? After one year with Griffin as coach, they hired Doc Rivers with great fanfare for -for “reasons”? And since he came on board, well the Milwaukee Bucks have turned into an absolute mess.

I don’t know what kind of back office politics or other BS is going on down there in Milwaukee but it’s got to stop. It’s gotten to the point where fans can’t even be bothered to boo them any more, they just get up and leave at the start of the 4th quarter to beat the traffic home.

AI Stuff

I am getting sick and tired of all of this AI BS and I suspect you are as well. The thing with all of this is that so far we’ve had investors sink hundreds of billions of dollars into the development of the software and the building of massive data processing centers, and what are we getting in return? Not much, it seems. According to a study done by Goldman Sachs that just came out AI added exactly zero value to the GDP last year. So far it seems that about the only thing AI seems good for is cranking out deep fake images, political propaganda, the flooding of social media with extremist garbage, faked photos of celebrities having sex, and child exploitation material. And now we’re hearing of mentally fragile individuals being led into actual real psychosis and even suicide from their interactions with these things.

One of the biggest problems with AI is that because of how corrupt our political system is, there is virtually no regulation of this crap at all. None. The billionaire tech bros who are behind a lot of the development of these systems have so thoroughly corrupted our political system with what amounts to legalized bribery that they seem to be completely immune from prosecution for even the most flagrant abuses being committed by their shiny new toys. Even when they are held accountable, it is the company, not the individuals actually responsible, who end up being penalized. If ordinary individuals were responsible for some of the abuses taking place, they would be locked up. We have several cases in the courts here in Wisconsin right now of people being held accountable for producing indecent images of children or deep fake images of others through the use of these AI systems. But the people who make the tools that allow this to happen? Nothing.

We need to have the actual people behind these abusive systems held accountable. The boards of directors, the CEOs, the officers of the companies, and yes, the owners as well, need to be held personally liable for the abuses being committed by the resources they create and control. If you or I created an app that permitted someone to make child sexual abuse images or deep fakes of real people in the nude or engaging in sexual activities, we’d be in jail, not laying out the specifications for our latest mega yacht.

Journaling

When the dickens did what we used to call “keeping a diary” turn into “journaling”? And what is the difference between a diary and a journal anyway? Oh, sure, if you want to be pedantic about it the exact definitions of the words are different. A diary is supposedly little more than a list of the events that take place in your life while a journal is supposed to be more thoughtful and full of ideas and observations. But come on, in the real world? Has anyone who has ever kept a diary ever refrained from jotting down things that technically should have gone in a journal, or vice versa?l

I suspect it turned into “journaling” simply because it sounded more, oh, more pretentious. Keeping a diary is something an adolescent girl does. Journaling is something posh people do.

And I’m as pretentious as the next person so yes, I do “journaling”. And because I’m a firm believer in the old adage, “anything worth doing is worth doing to excess” I’ve turned it into a full blown affectation. I get these leather bound volumes with archival quality paper, each engraved with “Name’s Little Book Of Stupid Shit Volume xx”. And I use what is allegedly the best pencil made, the Blackwing Palomino 602. I do that because I have a reputation of being “eccentric” to maintain.

And imagine the surprise of anyone who ever reads one after I’m dead and discovers they are completely filled with utter drivel. Bad sketches of cartoons I’m working on for some project, project ideas, bad jokes and even worse puns that might eventually get worked into something useful for some of the promotional stuff I crank out, random observations about utterly trivial nonsense and outright lies.

Yes, I said outright lies. Hey, here’s the thing. Write a journal. But remember no one said you had to tell the truth, now did they? Your life, like mine, is probably mind numbingly boring. I mean let’s face it, for most of us the most exciting thing in our lives is the weekly trip to the grocery store, or if you’re like me, its getting up early on Friday mornings to watch the garbage truck come through with its automated can picker.

(I wish I was joking about that last part. I really do.)

So you’re going to do what? Write about that? Hell no! Just make shit up! Tell about the time you rode on the back of a Harley with Elvis to go to the New York World’s fair in 1964. Wax poetic about your memories of the year you spent in the south of France. Sure, you’ve never even been out of the state but your great grandkids won’t know that, now will they?

There, I feel better now. Now back to fiddling with wood and lasers and stuff…