Cupcake155 has been endowed with a sweet lighting system. I built it in an open way, so others can re-trace my steps without having to start from zero. It’s actually a pretty sweet system, I call it Illuminatrix. Check out Cupcake155 episode 4 here.

Episode #3 of my Cupcake155 project has been posted. The key jist being that I found on complex prints, I would typically get a few major slips in the print. There often were also places where the print delayed in a location for a time, this left scars too. Ultimately, a $10 SD board and a quick firmware change later …

(updated: I’ve switched from ustream to YouTube Live, this post has been retroactively updated as there’s no point with linking to old junk) I’ve been working on Episode 3 for a couple weeks now, but until I slay a certain dragon, the episode shall remain enroute. In the mean time, I’ve updated my main printing page …

After roughly a month of effort, I’ve now got my old Cupcake heavily retro-fitted and running pretty well. Cupcake155 Episode 2 gives the key details of how I modified my old MakerBot Cupcake in to something modern and unique. Others may find it helpful to re-trace my steps and perhaps get printing sooner!

I’ve missed playing with 3D printing since I mothballed my printer years ago. It was shelved over major pains in getting the extruder to work properly. I also wasn’t especially fond of working with ABS plastic, which feels pretty toxic to me. A few weeks back I decided that my old printer, while in bad shape, was …

I often find myself banging my head against a wall watching tar compress with a single execution thread. PBZIP2 is the solution to that problem. Here’s my few recipes for using this: Compress: tar cf archive.tar.bz2 –use-compress-prog=pbzip2 archive/ Uncompress:�pbzip2 -dvc archive.tar.bz2 | tar x Enjoy!

In my quest to keep my 2008 era Mac Pro (MacPro3,1) reasonably well suited to my needs, I recently decided to attempt to add USB 3.0 support. I recently bought myself one of these babies, Inateck KT4004. I like that it has 4 ports and no external power required. The Amazon page claimed this card is for the Mac Pro. I …

To the chase… It took me a long time to find this, but someone’s made a guide for building Ubuntu 14.04 from scratch for the Utilite. But better still, they’ve included a dropbox location to fetch images from. Here’s the URL to the build guide. Here’s the URL to the download directory. For installation, I’m�ripping-off …

I’m a fairly heavy user of trac. I’ve got various software projects I organize using trac. I decided to upgrade one of my Ubuntu 12.04 servers to Ubuntu 14.04 and of course ran in to the typical apache2 headaches that are born out of this particular transition. After remembering to rename my virtual host files with …

Here’s the tale of getting USB 3.0 working in a tolerable regard on my 17" MacBook Pro. In short, it cost me about $10 and I had to install a custom, but generic kext to enable USB 3.0. Thankfully, all the heavy lifting was done for me by people with far more free time (lucky freaks). Here’s a visual of my final …