The Fight Against Fifteen

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Jan 302017
 

polticians / shitheads

Last week, the Montgomery County Council approved a bill that would have made it the first jurisdiction in Maryland — and the second in the region after Washington, D.C., to mandate a $15-per-hour base pay by 2020.
…
Del. Derek E. Davis (D-Prince George’s), the chairman of the House Economic Matters Committee, has introduced a bill that would put the General Assembly in charge of setting minimum wage even for cities and counties.
Davis said the bill would help improve the business climate in Maryland by making wage and benefit rules more predictable and consistent, noting that Montgomery and Prince George’s counties current have their own minimum-wage laws in place, and Baltimore considered a $15 base wage last summer.
“We’re not a collection of 24 individual fiefdoms,” Davis said “We have to work together as a state so we can attract and retain businesses, keep a healthy, strong economy, and not put our jobs at risk.”

Who needs Republicans when you have Democrats like these. It’s not like a higher minimum wage is a majoritarian viewpoint or anything like that…

Zoom

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Jan 282017
 

This post brought to you by me finally overcoming extreme procrastination and general laziness and implementing fastcgi php support in domtool. Yep, we were spawning an independent php-cgi for each request…

Medicare For All

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Jan 272017
 

January 25th

A national physicians group today hailed the reintroduction of a federal bill that would upgrade the Medicare program and swiftly expand it to cover the entire population, saying it’s the only workable and equitable way to move forward in U.S. health care.

The Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, H.R. 676, introduced last night by Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, with 51 other House members, would replace today’s welter of private health insurance companies with a single, streamlined public agency that would pay all medical claims, much like traditional Medicare works for seniors today.

And yet, not a peep from the so-called “Real Media”. Shocking. This broke January 20th, and aside from an open letter published by Ralph Nader, some press releases from physicians groups, and a few recent endorsements from labor unions the supposedly Liberal Media™ hasn’t made a peep. How can anyone fight for something they don’t know exists?

Overdue update

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Oct 062015
 

It’s almost alive!

More Packages Arrive

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Aug 232015
 

My 600W 24V DC power supply arrived from mouser, along with my hobbed bolts and the NEMA14 motors for the dual extruder.

Preparing for mass production with my threedee printed parts tray
I’m running all three terminals — main power, heatbeds (yes, two), and a 12V regulator for the fans
Heatsinks on x, y, z, e1, e2
Installed the heatsink over the hotend mosfets
Mmm… MOSFETs
NEMA14 motors for the extruder
That’s not a power supply…

I’m wiring up the DC side of the power supply to use 12 awg wire and female disconnects for now. I’ve got the main board supply, a separate line for the heatbeds, and a third set that will be wired in voltage regulator to give me a couple of amps of 12V power for the fans.

And, yeah, heatbeds. The Wilson y-axis can be stretched to 400mm, and I figured it was worth a shot going all the way. I wanted at least 300mm in the x-axis as well, and I found 200x300mm heatbeds (cheaper than one 300mmx300mm) and a conveniently sized 16″x12″ piece of glass at Home Depot. Worst case, it proves to be too large and I have to downgrade to 200mmx300mm (keeping the second heatbed ready for The Future™). This might seem a wee bit insane, but, after having used the TAZ 4, less than 300mmx300mmx250mm seemed underwhelming.

For the controller, I got an Azteeg X3 Pro because it has dual heatbed MOSFETs and support for up to five extruders as a bonus. At the outset, I decided to sink some of the savings over buying a printer into dual extrusion, and wanted to leave open the possibility of at least triple later on… and the X3 Pro wasn’t much more than a RUMBA with steppers aaaand it came with eight stepper drivers (useful in their own right), was fully soldered, and, hey… a triple nozzle extruder plus a single hexagon in the next couple of years or something doesn’t seem too crazy does it?

Not much I can do now until my nuts and bolts come Monday or Tuesday. I have very boring things to say about crimping wire harnesses too.

I Guess I Actually Went Through With It

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Aug 202015
 

So I printed the parts for a three dee printer on a TAZ 4 my friend graciously let me borrow, and I may have actually spent weeks going over the BOM a few times … and ended up hitting order on a few too many websites. Packages started trickling in yesterday…

azteeg x3 pro and my hexagons (yes, plural)
I had to design a part to fit the dual extruder I wanted. I have no idea what I’m doing.
budgeted in some crimping tools too
I have bad taste and used uv reactive abs
Streeetch

This is going to be … interesting.

I made a thing

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Oct 232014
 

image

Master of electricity or something. I had meant to set up arduino controlled led strips in June…

Update

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Oct 012014
 

image

Not my best

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Jun 172014
 

image

Eeprom keeps resetting.

I made this

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Jun 042014
 

Prototype for interesting things to come. Controlled by lisp.

/afs/hcoop.net Upgraded to 1.6.7 and Rekeyed

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Apr 232014
 

Yesterday, I upgraded hcoop‘s openafs file and database servers from 1.4.10 to 1.6.7 (except for cantankerous old deleuze). Today I removed the 1.4.10 machine from afs service with no problems… and then rekeyed. With no problems.

On the one hand, no problems is great. On the other hand, it feels a bit anti-climactic after all of the work that led up to this moment. I think I deserve a beer.

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