SeTec Astronomy @SetecAstronomy@hackers.town

Just found a whole batch of Hackers.town people languishing in my Follow queue.

Locals should drop me a line when following so I can approve. Not currently accepting outside follows.

#Reintroductions? But I never did #Introductions...

I'm a weird guy who decided to base his profile on the movie Sneakers. I love technology, probably more than is healthy. My interests tend to revolve in a cycle but in the spirit of hackers.town I try to keep it to infosec and general internet nerdery.

I live with a migraine 24/7 so don't be surprised to see the occasional related toot.

Fun STA Fact #4 (collect them all!): A Canadian goose once attempted to carjack me.

I wish I could remember *why* I wanted to know this.

Thing wasn't working, got fed up with it.

So now I'm laying in bed watching videos about how switch mode power supplies work, with an eye towards potentially tweaking some power adapters as the need arises.

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I needed to restart the mail server now that the new cert had been generated. My suspicion is that it was trying, and failing, to serve up the old one.

Wait. Is it refusing to get the new one, because the one it has now is expired, and it's supposed to use SSL or whatever?

AAAHHH

Ugh. My SSL certificate updated, and for some reason Thunderbird is refusing to get the new one from the mail server.

Is it supposed to do that? I thought that's how it got it last time. I don't remember setting it up manually.

I just want to check my mail...

When I was a kid (eons ago, in the 90s), I wasn't any good at sleeping at night. I'd lay awake for hours listening to the radio or just thinking. I liked to try and figure out how the world worked. I'd imagine a thing, and then "If this works that way, and that works like this, and then ... oh, no, those contradict, so that can't work." Basically try and understand the mysteries that I thought adults all knew, as I watched the moon rise past my window.

One night, for some reason, I imagined there was some disease. Any person could get this disease simply by touching another person. How would the world react? Well, I was naive and assumed something unified and positive, but basically with mass quarantines and careful support of required infrastructure to keep everyone fed, etc until it passed.

I figured all this out as a kid lying in bed on my own one night, years ago.

It irritates me to no end that so few take the pandemic seriously. I know those that read this do. But those in my local area? Nope! I feel like I'm the only one who masks anymore.

*sigh*

Ah yes, the cannons fireworks, of the fourth third of July.

Mom and Dad are watching the same live stream in two different rooms, and at two slightly different offsets.

It's mildly disconcerting.

I was going to do a thing today, but as usual, I've forgotten what it is.

I need to sort out the over-extrusion and bed adhesion issues on my 3D printer, but I'm not sure I have the spoons for it.

I've got something to print once that's done though...

I set all the things to printing, although the first go-round I printed the wrong bit for the camera. *sigh*

Eventually... It was time for assembly. This was the point where I discovered that the saw was necessary. Oops. I also wrapped the back of the camera PCB in kapton tape. I wanted to avoid components shorting on the top of the thumb screw, should it ever come loose.

Of course, there were *issues* with installation. At some point I had replaced the camera sensor with one that supports software focus, and it didn't quite line up the same when it came time to insert it into the face. There's a very short cable between the sensor and the PCB, and it needed to be bent a little, but my attempts at that during installation just pulled the sensor out of it's little window in the front bezel. So I had to tape it in place. Which was like building a ship in a bottle. Take note of the ruler it's sitting on. The numbered marks are at one inch.

Oh, and in order for that to work in the first place, I had to cut off a bunch of the tape that had wrapped around from the other side, as it was pinning down the sensor cable. Delicate work with a hobby knife, trying to cut tape and not PCB traces.

And it turned out that I was over-extruding when I printed it. So none of the friction-fit parts wanted to fit. And a bunch of stuff needed to be shaved down. You know, after the camera was taped in place. *sigh*

EVENTUALLY the camera was installed. And it even works! Though it could really benefit from some lighting.

Once upon a time, I wanted a mount for the Raspberry Pi camera for my 3D printer. And I tried one, and it broke, and I decided I needed a better design.

So I started with a silly idea. I have this 16+" goosneck from a broken microphone windscreen or something. Why not that? Adjustable! All the axis! But the threads on the ends were big and intimidating and the whole thing sat and nothing happened for Many Time Units.

Turns out that they were pretty standard in the world of audio and AV. One end was threaded to accept a 3/8"-16 bolt, and had a thumb screw in it already. The other end was threaded to screw into a 5/8"-27 nut. I acquired an adapter to convert the massive 5/8"-27 down to a manageable 1/4"-20, and was planning to make that the camera end. But the 1/4"-20 stud was way too short to bolt a 3D printed part onto it, and it sat around for Many More Time Units.

And then, during another project, I experienced the threaded inserts that are heated and pushed into plastic parts. Amazing. Turns out that while not the easiest to find, it is possible to get them in imperial sizes. Armed with that, and some further reflection that maybe the giant heavy adapter shouldn't go on the floating camera end, there was finally maybe a plan shaping.

I had a camera holder that worked, it was the mounty bits that failed. So with some OpenSCAD abuse I was able to replace the old mounty bits with a hole for the thumb screw. Although some dingus forgot to shorten the depth of the whole thing to match the length of the thumb screw before printing, hence the toot with the saw...

I also snagged someone's generic bed handle go-pro mount for my printer, and with more OpenSCAD abuse yanked the mount off and stuck an appropriately sized hole on for the threaded insert.

Print twice, cut once.

Or something like that.

I'm sure I had another thing I was working on, but I'm not so sure what it was.

Intelligent cheese swarms? That sounds like a good project.

TFW you thought all the parts printed overnight, but apparently one of them was the wrong version.

I can pay $4 and get one from China in about a month. I can pay $10 and get one in two days. I can pay $15 and get an assortment set in two days. A similar assortment is $8 from China.

Pretty sure this is another one of those things that nobody is making any money on, just sold on that razor thin margin.

I'm in the mood to solve tech problems with blunt objects.

I like this PC a little less each day. I can kind of deal with the under-powered bit. Whatever. I probably shouldn't have that many browser tabs open.

But I recently learned it can't even play video files properly. And this DNS thing is infuriating.

I don't know how much is hardware and how much is software, and I don't know whether there are any spoons to find out.

AAHHGG. My lab PC lost the internal DNS server again, because that's just a thing it does, which broke the OctoPrint UI. But only in one direction. Any data FROM OctoPrint was coming back to the browser just fine, so it all appeared to be working. But I couldn't interact to, oh, say, STOP THE PRINT.

I didn't discover the problem until after I had yanked the USB cable, cleaned up the failed print, discovered that I couldn't get OctoPrint to reboot (unspecified error), and then tried to SSH into the blasted box.

Oh. Can't resolve that host name. Well I KNOW how to deal with that.

Apparently that was what was wrong all along. Even though I just fixed it like an hour ago.

I hate everything.

If it makes a mess, I'm printing it on a raft, I don't care how much time that adds. I'm not in a mood to mess around.

Can't tell if the printer is doing OK, or if this is about to turn into spaghetti.

I don't have any spoons for spaghetti.