Down the 3D Printer Rabbit Hole

6FPS V7#2: February 10, 2025

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

It’s February, and while the days are getting longer, it’s still winter, and we’ve just had our first snow of the year. This wasn’t much: less than an inch on the ground, and we expect it gone soon. What started out as a wet winter season dried up in December and January, but February is trending wetter (and sometimes white).

I’ve recovered pretty well from the Rapid Unplanned Vacation. I sat down with my doctor and he’s satisfied with where things are, but told me I still need to rebuild my red blood cells back to normal, so no donations until at least the end of March. Oh, well.

The “replace the dying backup generator” project is almost complete; we finally got the electrical inspection, which failed on one technicality which the electricians came out last week and fixed — literally a ten minute visit. I’m waiting to hear about the re-inspection and then I can schedule the final engineering inspection (if this seems weird, electrical inspections are done by the state in Washington, but the city/county still needs other inspect as well). I was able to get the trench filled in, so things look normal again….

Waiting for the inspector, though, delayed my plan to get to Ridgefield NWR (the primary delay here were the holidays so I’m not grumping about that). I finally gave myself three days down there where I could focus on photography and do some exploring. Now all I need to do soon is schedule in the maintenance on the furnace and HVAC and have the well pump folks come in to inspect and swap filters. Some days it seems it never ends (because it kind of doesn’t, but better to keep things maintained than play the urgent replacement game)

But I sometimes wonder why I’m not getting out and about more since I retired, but then I realize I lost the first two weeks of January to seeing my doctor and having to stick around waiting to find out when the generator inspection would happen — which was the right choice because I finally got the phone call, and they wanted to show up that afternoon.

My birding this year is off to a great start: with the Ridgefield trip I’m 70 species for the year already, compared to 50 this time last year, with 16 species here on the property. I am trying to make it a point to bird somewhat at least once a week, although I’m still learning how to bird in 40F weather without freezing — by a complete coincidence, I have a new puffy winter coat from North Face that is making that a lot more comfortable.

Like many of you, I have been watching the disaster that is happening in Washington D.C. — I have my thoughts and opinions but I’m not going to editorialize about it at this point. It is kind of horrifying watch this start to unfold, but much of if seems clear over-reach, so we’ll see where and how the push back happens and how they react to it. It’s going to be an interesting couple of years until the next congressional elections…

Dumping Washington Post to the curb

When Bezos denied the Washington Post endorsing Kamala Harris, it became clear that it was no longer a paper I wanted to support, so I cancelled the auto-renewal on my subscription and started considering replacement news sources.

What I ended up choosing as a replacement is Reuters. I’ve been watching both it and Wapo for the last couple of months, and I find the Reuters feed both balanced and interesting, and in some ways, I find it more useful than I did Wapo. I have removed the Post apps and bookmarks from my systems, and I’m no longer monitoring it — and to be honest, I don’t move it. If you’re searching for news sources that aren’t as biased towards Trump as so many of them are, consider Reuters as a source.

How can I make For Your Consideration more useful?

The “For Your Consideration” section of this newsletter is a thing I’ve been experimenting with for a long time — how to help people find things I find interesting in an easy to browse way. I’m curious how useful you find it (and if not, that’s okay!) — but also are there things I could do that would make it more useful and interesting?

My goal is to keep it fairly tightly curated: links should be fairly recent, and I try to figure out the most interesting 4-5 links in each topic so that I have to make sure I’m not just throwing everything into the mix.

Are there tweaks or changes you’d like to see here that would make them more interesting to you?

See you next issue!