Ross of Ottawa @ottaross@mastodon.social

Here's my #Introduction. I'm Ross and live in Ottawa, Canada where I've worked in various tech-research niches. Currently, a biz-of-tech consultant and spare-time maker/coder of gizmos, ideas and loaves of bread.

Been here for a few years, mostly tooting on tech-projects, cooking and mundane activities in my daily life, with an occasional sprinkle of poetry or art.

I have too many interests and probably find you interesting, particularly if you're enthusiastic about something.

I did the initial version last year, and it seemed pretty good for the switch action mechanism, but I hadn't solved the location for an Arduino ProMicro to fit in there somewhere. That seems to be settled now, with a brief slice printed to check and tweak the fit.

Hopefully a usable full assembly next. Added a few features in the form a personality-changing switch, and an LED for some as-yet unknown illumination effect.

A bit of a view of my MIDI pedal project. Just getting some 3Dprinting going now. This is in #Blender.

Oh look at that it's time for a cup of #tea.

#LifeHack Tip: one can easily check this by looking at a clock. If it indicates the time, or is broken, or you can't find the clock, it's clearly time for a #cuppa.

…aaand my problem went away on its own, so this time I learned to 'just try it again' a few times.

The upside is that with every problem there's lots of learning of something new.

I do mechanical CAD with #Blender mostly, so I'm always aligning a vertex with other vertices or faces.

Suddenly the alignment shortcut sequence has stopped working. I typically do a 'scale to zero' along the X-axis (or another axis) with the 3D cursor set to another vertex as the reference or 'pivot point.'

'Align' discussions always refer to other features. 'Scale' discussions refer to making things bigger and smaller.

Search continues.

I guess that's the other issue, that you can accidentally turn something off and have no idea what happened.

I'm doing a few days of #Blender and a challenge I have is if some feature stops working, and I go to search for a solution, I often don't know what that feature is called. Makes searching a bit hard.

So the first part of the search is trying to find the terminology that everyone else is using before I can find what has happened to my UI.

Just wrapped up the bake, and the loaves are on a cooling rack. These three #sourdough fellas are pretty standard for my baking efforts. Sometimes I do a boule loaf as well though. Or a few buns.

My builders' centre store purchases have made all the difference to my bread making. I use a couple of heavy (but not-shiny glazed) ceramic tiles in the oven for a baking surface. Also a wide cedar shim is a perfect peel for transferring loaves, costing only pennies.

Here I load the last #sourdough loaf into the oven.

For a change, here are a couple of videos of the process:

Slashing the top of one of the three #sourdough loaves I just baked up. Doing it one-handed, I almost threw the loaf onto the floor, but thankfully not quite.

Happy with the results. They were eager to go and the timing worked out nicely. #sourdough

Squeezing some bread making into my day. Was up a bit early, so got my primed-up starter into a dough, and formed the loaves over lunch.

They've just emerged from the oven now.

In fact, if I could get a device with a 4cm (cubic) build size but ability to do sub-mm detail, I'd be all over that.

Surprisingly I haven't often found myself wanting a larger bed capability. A few times others have wanted me to print something for them that I've been unable to help them with, due to size. But for my projects, I can usually work that limitation into the design without trouble.

My #3Dprinters are bottom-of-the-line Monoprice models. I have both an original and a second generation version. They are a smaller format, allowing only up to 12cm in any axis.

But they're both working pretty well, and when both are humming away building some complex part I've been designing for too long, it's rewarding to see.

Finally bailed out on that movie at about 25min. It was trying way too hard, and not succeeding.

Watching an animation festival thing now instead. Lots of short films. If you get a bad one it's over fast. :) All fun to look at.

Trying to watch a movie called The Water Diviner. Staring and directed by Cameron Crowe. The first 15 min is cliched and overly precious. Hoping it get better.

At any rate, too much food for lunch, so supper will be a snack at most.

Weird weekend, hard to know what day it is most of the time.

Had a nice pint and lunch with our friends. The food was mediocre tho. Not a lot of skill in the kitchen, sadly.

Best remedy, like many places, would be a shorter menu, smaller portions of better-made food.

I had a steak and kidney pie, which I was happy to see on the menu (rare - usually just steak & mushroom). It had a flavourless puff-pastry lid, not a proper short-crust pie.