John's useless tinkering

There's a rather deep mastodon thread that preceded this video - if you feel like unrolling it: https://mastodon.linkerror.com/deck/@jns/117277758300433910

... A continuation of the previous video.

In the previous video we engraved the front of the Spirit board, painted and stained it, and glued it to the middle piece, and started on the back.

This time, we are finishing the back, or at least, try to,... the previous attempt was flawed, so I re-did it, and that failed again quite catastrophically, but after the 3rd attempt we finally got somewhere...

... what I don't mention in the video is that I lost most of my video footage due to sd card corruption. I had to pull a bunch of data recovery kung-fu to recover the footage, but eventually got there. That plus the editing took me the entire day again 😒

Hopefully it makes for a slightly less boring watch than the last one 😃

I was planning to upload more video's regularly, but I was out of commission for a while due to illness.

Probably very boring.

Unsatisfying too because my camera dies in the end before I can show the end result 😃 -- But if I finish it tomorrow I'll upload another video.

What you're seeing is me weeding out the masking tape from a spirit board that was engraved, then spray-painted the day before. After that, I engrave the middle piece out of an old piece of scrap with a failed engraving, and glue it to the other piece.

Monitor layout:

xrandr --output DP-0 --off

source:

https://linkerror.com/git/jns/awesomewm_config/src/branch/main/my_window_decor.lua

This video shows some of the stuff involved in creating a Spirit board.

Unfortunately, I did not end up filming a lot of the finishing. Whenever things go a bit wrong and I go into trouble-shooting mode, I always forget to start filming 😃 (especially if there's a time constraint).

I did not film:

... but at least you get to see the end result. 😉

The drag chain in our co2 laser would keep popping up whenever the tension of the cables within it was a bit too high, which would then cause it to slam into the camera built into the enclosure lid.

The web is a cesspool of disgusting corporate excrement, and as such, when I needed a web-store the only reasonable option seemed to be to write one from scratch.

I hate web development with the fury of a thousand suns, so I decided to make it slightly less painful by implementing the whole thing in Pascal.

This is a (maybe not-so?) quick overview of how it all works.

Wrote a little irc client for the honeywell terminal. Works alright! 😃

It's kind of a cliché at this point, engraving slates. Everyone who owns a laser seems to be engraving slate coasters.

But that's because they are kind of neat. The source material is relatively cheap and the results are usually pretty good as it's a very forgiving material to be lasing. The dark color of the slate makes for a nice contrast, and you can get fine detail into your engravings.

Don't let the plethora of low-cost available engraved slate coasters fool you into thinking that engraving slates is always quick and easy, they do take some prep work if you want them to look good. And it definitively takes extra time if you want to make a nice little box to put them in.

I did end up messing up the box in this video, and because of that, the entire process took me about 5 hours for this single set of slates 😦 Sometimes that's just how it goes though!