laser cutter cutting

Fiddling around with the laser cutter at Techshop. I used inkscape to vectorize some doodles, then cut then out of paper using the Epilog laser cutter at Techshop.

Paper cuts very well, with pretty good detail (see the hatching cut out from the doodle in the front for example). I’ve tried cutting acrylic as well, and it cuts well too, but in some of the detail areas, it unmelts into a bit of a blob that makes detailed parts harder to extract. Need to try it again with more power to see if it will cut a wider kerf.

I also tried engraving/rasterizing an image. I think it turned out pretty well, almost exactly what I was looking for. It did burn through a little bit in one section, but I could fix that in the image. The image itself started off kind of “pointilist”, which I vectorized with some of the settings tweaked a bit so it would blurb some of the points together so it would hold together. Then I “engraved” it instead of cutting it out, but with the power set high enough to burn through the paper.

Battle of the monitor and the… monitor?

I’m not sure I understand the point of wide screen monitors.  With my useage patterns, about 25% of the screen is wasted, over there, off to the side, full of white space.

Most of the time, I find myself wanting more vertical space than horizontal. Especially, when writing code, or web browsing, or reading email, or running commands in a terminal. Aka, 99.9% of what I do with a computer.

I kind of miss CRT’s for that big, almost square aspect ratio. I’ve been tempted to find a wide screen LCD that I could rotate vertically. Never really been able to get a hardware/software combination that actually worked that way, though in theory, it should be easy.

I think it’s about time to put a new desktop machine together (and probably a new laptop as well).  So I’ve been thinking a new monitor setup as well. Currently got a 21″ dell.

[And of course, the Civil War nerds will point out the Monitor was actually called the CSS Virginia]

ring ring, fedoraphone!

I managed to get one of my machines installed with a os version I didn’t want, and no way to change it. Normally, this means it’s time to koan/cobbler to get it re-provisioned. But I couldn’t log into the machine to do anything. I could of reinstalled it from a cd/dvd, but I hate burning cd/dvd’s for that. I could of written an image to usb key and installed from that, but I didn’t have any with me.

So I decided to try what Mark Cox; did and try to boot it from my phone. I more or less just followed the steps he mentioned, though I had to get some 3rd party software to expose the storage card as a usb device.

But that aside, it worked. Not the fastest way to boot, but it got the live image running so I could do a hard drive install.  Kind of cool. Wonder if there is anyway to support i386/x86_64 live images on the same card?