shinyhappyrainbows

First there was the Tronxy, a Prusa i3 clone, which was rebuilt more than grandad's axe. Then there was some cheap-assed, no name brand delta printer with a tiny, circular bed that really couldn't take the size of prints I wanted. These two overlapped with my Ender 3 Pro which, quite frankly, wasn't as good print quality as the $150 nameless delta but it sure was reliable... well, except for the stock hotend. Those old hollowbox extruders with the hidden, red, undersized heatsink... ugh. Then there was the Ender 3 Pro II. Same shit extruder and hotend, but, yeah, 32 bit control board. Now we're taking. The Tronxy and the Delta are now retired due to beyond economical maintenance. You can only throw so much money or effort at a steamer, and the more you print, the more stuff wears out. They were also fire risks, no thermal runaway protection. The E3 Pro II churns out basic engineering prints up at Splodgenoodles' place, but nothing pretty, really, it needs work. and...

Go brought me to a shuddering stop. I think I may have had some environment issues because I had some early install problems. These seem to be tricky to fix, so I may come back to Go later. Meanwhile, I've been trying Rust, learning from " The Rust Programming Language ", AKA "The Rust Book." So far, the experience has been as easy as Arduino and C/C++ was when I started that journey 8 years ago. Challenging, but steady progress. And in sorting out a problem with my Rust installation, I may have hit upon the solution to my Go installation issues, too. Looks like Homebrew language installs might be a little problematic. Maybe my Homebrew install is buggered. Will come back to that, too, but after my Rust learning. So, I'm as far as Chapter 2, "Programming A Guessing Game," where the reader is guided through constructing a command line guessing game. It has been a surprisingly easy experience. Rust has a syntax like C but feels... "easier....

I am more than a little over indexed shifting. In the days of 3x7 (ah, the 90s) you could setup chainrings that would give you near 500% gear range, while never having to change more than one step at a time - eg: righthand 1, 2, 3, lefthand 1 to 2, righthand 3, 4, 5, lefthand 2 to 3, righthand 5, 6, 7 and back down. Indexed gearing really helped with this at the end of a really long day. Now we do the same thing over 10 gears on a single chainring and only the righthand shifter for no better ratio, but the indices are finer, trickier to set up, bump your derailleur, and you're tweaking for the rest of the day's ride. Ugh. On the other hand, in the days of friction shift, the setup only needed to be right on the derailleur stops, the shifting was tuned with every gear change, and it wasn't a hard knack to master. My first adult bike was a Roadmaster Grand Tourer 12, 2x6 friction shift on the downtubes, the best bike money could buy for under $200 Aussie in 1982. That bike t...