A new year, I suppose I'd better do a blog post :p

Wow, I really lost my momentum for writing these blog's. I guess that's what happens when I get into the habit of posting anything I do on Facebook; I end up not having the motivation to put it into this blog.

Shapeways catch-up...


So on the run up to Christmas last year I splurged a bit of money (on my credit card) and bought some of my designs. Thus enabling me to get them out of "First to try" and take photos of them.
My pre-Christmas order.
The designs shown are :
The potion bottle is my first colour 3d design. I wasn't that happy with how it came out. The detail-level didn't turn out a good as I thought it would.
The "test piece" enabled me to make sure that the fitting of M20 nuts & screws would fit nicely and they really did. I'm very happy with how it turned out.
It's a pity Shapeways charge so much, it'll be yet another design that won't be bought because of being more expensive than it's worth.

My sales this year, especially around Christmas, where an improvement over last year's. The D20 of Fail dice selling the most.
By request, I've have since created a D20 of Evil (Each side has 20 on it).

Today I enabled two of my full-scale Six Bottle Project designs to be purchasable in porcelain.
Even though I haven't ordered test prints.
They're the Victorian themed and Chinese Fang-yi themed bottles.
I'll eventually enable them all, since I initially had issues with ordering the Greek Amphora (Some of the walls were too thin, despite meeting Shapeways' guidelines), I think it best that enabling two at a time will allow me to cope with any issues that crop up and get them fixed as quickly as possible.

There's nothing more frustrating than ordering something and to have it cancelled because of a printability issue. I've been lucky in the past, in that as soon as I've fixed the issue, the customer reordered them.


My collection is building up. Sorry about the poor quality photo.


Robotics side of things...


Since abandoning the nylon-muscle project and moving towards the solenoid-muscle style, I have further moved to another project.
It's going to be my attempt at a Movement OS and will hopefully be something I work on when I progress to full-time study at university. If it works, I'd like to make it creative commons or equivalent one day.
Well, best intentions...



PC upgrade and move to Windows 10...


I was able to do a decent PC upgrade around Christmas and the Black Friday sales, managing in the end to get a new PC and windows 10 for around £200. Again my credit card helped, something I don't normally use to this extend.
In the end I went for a refurbished DELL R410 1U server with two quad core processors. The aim is to have something more powerful when I'm designing in Blender.
There's been some decent performance improvements, and I'm happy with them. Overall I've now got a machine I can upgrade and it kind'of works as a gaming rig too. :)
I'm also finding Windows 10 a good OS to work with, they've really improved since last time I used it (Windows XP was the last I think).
The reason for my switch is mainly to do with cost. Apple products no longer have any sort of value of hardware versus cost. There's no upgradability and in recent years glitches have started appearing more and more in their OS X. They're adding features without addressing little bugs or even streamlining ageing app user interfaces.
There's even weirdness with the Launchpad icons not appearing on first access. I have no patience when it comes to their support website either.
For me, Apple have gone downhill. Far enough that I've got back to Microsoft. A decision I'm finding that I don't regret at all.
I'm still happy with my MacBook Pro, as far as a crippling 128Gb of hard-drive space can be.
At least it's back to being portable again, rather than always tethered to a monitor.


Open University studies...


My current two study modules are now in full swing. I'm quite enjoying the Maths module (My last marked assignment came in at 98%), but the science one is a bit of a motivation strain.
It's mainly because of the online nature of the course. I need to work from books.
If I'm having to do something online, I need the source material as a book in front of me. This is essentially the same problem I had with my previous science module.
All I have to keep remembering, is to push forward and get things done. Regardless of how annoyed or frustrated I get.
Getting this blog post written is the result of me putting off working on my current science module's marked assignment :p

Eep, I'd better get back to it...or maybe have some toast first. Mmm, toast...

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