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What did you do this weekend?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
My girlfriend and I dropped off her cat Marmalade at my sister's house, as my sister is adopting the cat. We stopped for a cuppa and a biscuit, and then got some lunch back at home. We played a bit of Magic the Gathering, ordered a takeaway curry, got monumentally high, and watched a bit of Sword Art Online. We sat up giggling with each other up until the wee small hours.
Sunday it was absolutely glorious weather, so we went out for a walk but got distracted 10 minutes into the walk by a hill covered in trees that looked eminently climbable. So we spent the next couple of hours finding trees to climb, fallen logs to dance on (Dirty Dancing style), and finding sticks to have sword fights with. Basically just spent an afternoon spent being a pair of massive kids. Best weekend of the year so far.
There was finally a day in the 50 F temperature range, so my partner and I made a point to go ride our bikes for the first outdoor ride of the year. It wasn't a particularly long ride (6 mi/700ft ascent), but about 10 of the 12 hills we rode were above 10% grade. No definitive data due to a bike computer bug, but whatever the grades were they were kicking our butt. The indoor trainer definitely can't match the intensity of the hills, but it was great to have some baseline fitness already.
I'm really looking forward to extending the route length or riding it in multiple laps to get ready for some bigger rides in the Appalachians this summer.
That sounds pretty fun. I'm in California, so thankfully the weather is almost always excellent for cycling.
One of my favorite routes sounds not too different from yours, but all of the ascent is packed into one hill. It's a totally different experience going clockwise vs. counter-clockwise. The latter option is much harder. It's a lot of fun and you get some great views.
Successfully rewired the heated bed and hot end of my 3D printer which included snipping the old wires, labeling as needed, adding plugs where possible, splicing, soldering, heat shrinking, mesh sleeve-ing all of the new wires (while gaining a newfound respect for the prices of individually sleeved PC cables and realizing I need to work on my cars more as the callouses on my fingers are apparently gone, it felt like I had rope burn on my fingertips), and testing to ensure that it all works!
My 3D printer has been generally unused or in a state of disassembly to do a number of upgrades ever since Cura decided to remove all of the settings and tweaks I've done over the years to make my individual printer run smoothly by sending a destructive update that included new and untested "default settings" that overwrote anything you had prior with their response to the unannounced forced reset being "well, it's too late now, you should have participated in the betas to stop us from making the changes we didn't tell you we were going to make nor tested ourselves, so use the new settings and start all over as we aren't going back and have no way of doing non-destructive updates."
During this time I've bit by bit made plans and purchased parts to stiffen the frame, upgrade the heat bed from the old (and undersized) PCB heater to a AC powered silicone heater (that is ah-mazing! when testing my wiring it's able to get to print temp faster than I could grab my temp gun to measure it and takes about 30 seconds to get to 100C, max temp, not that I'd ever use is 260C/500F), upgrade the hot end from bowden to direct drive as well as increase the maximum flow rate, and upgraded all of the fans on the printer and control box to decrease noise while also increasing cooling capabilities. As a result of this, even if Cura didn't nuke all my previous work, it's practically a brand new printer and so I'll be starting from scratch in PrusaSlicer to calibrate and dial it in before getting back to full speed printing.
It rained all weekend, so no work on the 7AGE project was done aside from thinking about my next steps to clear the hood.
I went out walking for the first time in literal months, and spent a lot of time sorting out the contents of my hard drives (mostly the anime. There's a lot.)
I participated in a local gamejam called Wonderjam. Usually you have 100+ people working in a cafeteria at the university but this year it was remote. Our team managed to make it still feel nice by being together on Discord with face cams.
The theme was
Resistanceand we could choose two constraints betweenRacing,Survival,Physics.https://totemastudio.itch.io/clockwork-combat
snip1 snip2
We made it in less than 48 hours. We were a pretty big team with one 3D artist, one 2D artist, one composer. Five devs. We got some pretty cool stuff in.
It's a clockpunk robot fighting game. At the start you can customize the modules on your bot. It works with Twitch so viewers can toggle the traps in the game. You can get some really kickass stuff happening with the different modules' physics.
Edit: snip3
I continued coding my match-3 game a bit more, but I've mostly been focused on installing software for and tweaking my "new" computer. It's still an awful POS, but compared to my old one, it's heaven. I can enjoy stuff like "starting Windows without stuff immediately getting paged into a swapfile" and "being able to run an IDE locally without random hiccups", among other luxuries.
Also, I started watching the Godfather series for the first time. I finished the first one and thought it was... pretty average, to be honest; I could see it being revolutionary when it came out almost 50 years ago. I feel that the second one is a lot better so far. (I thought I reached the end of the movie due to hitting the climax after 2 hours of watching, and then I saw "INTERMISSION" in huge letters, and ~1.5 hours left to go...) I'm finishing the second part right now.
I met up with some friends in a park on Sunday. I brought them a pizza I baked myself in a pizza box I made myself with a razor blade and a TV box (pic). They're all a bit less covid-responsible than me, but I had a mask on (except to eat a couple slices) and sat a bit away from the group. I'm really happy with how my pizza baking skills have progressed since the start of the pandemic. At some point I'll need to get a real pizza oven. I've seen well reviewed models that are around $350 and run off of propane.