Just in time for the nip in the air, the Nordic Breakfast is back at Receiver Victoria Row!

There’s a new shop in the C1A 4R4, ANN Wellness, at 120 Prince Street, the space formerly occupied by lawyers, psychologists, dancers and, most recently, silk scarf merchants.

The new shop, which is amidst a “soft opening” this week, sells “nature-made” products; when I dropped in today they had a modest selection of food (granola bars, sugar, coffee, quinoa) and personal care products (shampoo, soap, toothpaste). I’m hopeful that their selection will expand into the kind of staples that having a shop on the block would make very handy–milk, bread, and the like. 

The greeting card market is getting very particular.

Earlier in the month I found myself on the north shore, between Rustico and Cavendish, and I took a photo with my iPhone. Yesterday my iPhone suggested that it could automagically transform this photo into an animated GIF if I wanted. So I took my iPhone up on its offer.

It’s a remarkable effort on my iPhone’s part, with waves that seem like they never end. You can see the edges of the loop if you stare carefully, but otherwise it looks like endless waves.

As seen through the front doorbell camera. Ladders in every direction.

I’m getting the eavestroughs replaced on 100 Prince Street this morning, and the crew from North Shore Eavestroughing needed the parking spots in front of the house for their truck.

Irrationally, this is the kind of thing that gives me anxiety. So I nipped my anxiety in the bud, invested $5 in a set of four safety cones at Home Hardware, and affected a professional-grade street-blocking with absolutely no legal right to do so.

It worked.

Oliver is over on the couch, with his laptop on his lap.

I assume he’s surfing the net, or watching YouTube, or doing any of the myriad other things he does online.

Except he’s talking to someone.

“Who are you talking to, Oliver?”

He doesn’t answer.

I stand up, walk over, and take a look at his laptop screen.

He’s on a Zoom call with the Green Party candidate for District 10.

Of course he is.

There was a story told in the composing room of the Peterborough Examiner that, during the days the type was cast from hot metal, a typecasting machine got stuck–perhaps while its operator was distracted, perhaps distracted by the drink–and started spewing freshly-cast type out the window onto Water Street. I suspect that the story was apocryphal, but that newspapering was well-lubricated by alcohol, and typecasting machines among the most complex ever created by 19th century humans, led some credence to it.

A few weeks ago, after hearing the word “unprecedented” used dozens of times in a single day on the news and in advertising, I started to imagine a letterpress print that would capture the word and its role in the COVID zeitgeist, I thought back to that story, and imagined type waterfalling out of the composing room and onto the sidewalk below.

Setting type in straight lines is, relatively speaking, easy. Setting type meant to be falling out a window, hmmm. Outfitted with confidence from this summer’s daredevil printing workshop, I set out to find a way to translate what was in my mind’s eye into the chase.

What resulted, as described here, was a 3D printed piece of letterpress furniture to hold the cascading letters; it took some jimmying, but I got the type slotted into the furniture and locked into the chase with the typically-set type, and the result, once inked, looked like this:

Getting to the point where the printing of UNPRECED and ENTED matched took some makeready (I had to increase the packing under UNPRECED); the resulting print, which matches what was in my imagination to a very satisfying degree, looks like this:

I find myself getting a little destabilized every time I look at it. Which, of course, is kind of the point.

Ten years ago in Copenhagen I heard my friend Elmine’s brother Siert Wijnia, with Erik de Bruijn, talk about the RepRap project:

Democratizing fabrication - The beginning of this talk will be about the RepRap, a Replicating Rapid Prototyper. In short, it is a fabricator, or 3D printer, that makes things that YOU want. Besides being able to make products as you like them best, it can make parts to assemble another RepRap machine. Hence, it has a viral distribution model.

The next year, Siert and Erik, along with Martijn Elserman, went on to found Ultimaker, a company that, in the intervening years, has grown into a major manufacturer of 3D printers.

Cura is the software that drives Ultimaker printers and, because Ultimaker is a company that has openess baked into its DNA, Cura is a remarkably open piece of software, capable of driving a variety of 3D printers that aren’t made by Ultimaker, including my own Monoprice Select Mini.

Until today, my use of Cura had been limited to using its ability to render 3D printed objects I create as STL files into the G-code files that my printer needs to print them.

For example, here’s an object, a piece of custom letterpress furniture I designed, in Tinkercad:

I exported a STL file from Tinkercad and loaded it into Cura, which tells, me, among other things, that it will take 5 hours and 14 minutes to print:

At this point it has been my usual practice to save the G-code needed to render the object to an SD card, pop the SD card out of my Mac and insert it into the 3D printer, and use the printer’s controls to select the file and print it.

Today, though, I discovered a plug-in for Cura that allows it to print to the Monoprice Select Mini directly, over wifi. And it worked, out of the box. So my new practice is to simply click “Print over network” in Cura and wait for the printer to start.

Because I wasn’t eager to spend 5 hours and 14 minutes waiting for the printer to finish, but also not eager to let the printer, and its 210ºC head, alone to malfunction and catch fire, I wanted a way to monitor the printer from afar.

Fortunately, under the aegis of another side-project, I’ve been experimenting with video streaming from a Raspberry Pi Zero; following the helpful instructions here, I set up the Pi to stream video to YouTube, pointed it at the 3D printer, and, presto, I had a remote monitoring solution.

From the office side it looks like this:

That’s the 3D printer on the left, and the Raspberry Pi Zero on the right, stuck into an iPhone box (it’s really really tiny, has the camera built-in, and only needs to be plugged into power to operate). With the YouTube stream set up, I was able to watch the printer from my phone:

Even more helpfully, though, for something that I wanted to keep peripheral attention on for several hours, I was able to stream YouTube to my Chromecast, plugged into my screen projector, resulting in a hard-to-miss 3D printer monitor on my living room wall:

I kept an eye on the printer over supper, and afterwards, and came back to the office once things were getting close to complete.

In the end, it took 5 hours and 41 minutes to print, and this was the result:

And here’s a sneak peak at what this was all in service of:

The first on-street EV charger in Charlottetown sprouted this week in front of Maritime Electric‘s headquarters.