No likely about it, mint is a weed. Great for fresh mint, not so great if you want to contain or get rid of it.

Thanks! I might be in the land of denial re: depression, but I’ve also had too many other things vying for attention. We have two younger kids, so sunlight hours are usually split between them and my job. Once they’re asleep I have 2-3 hours to do all adult things: talk to my wife 1:1, hang out with friends, meal plan, game, unwind, etc. They do like the garden, and help, but they’re only in it for a portion of the time it takes to actually do anything.

Us all getting sick cost us two weekends. My wie it a deer and I had to get her a new hood and replace a headlamp, which cost another weekend.

The reason why I prefer seeds over home cheapo starts is to have more variety of plants. We do have a local nursery that has an epic selection, but they’re a little further away. Stating seeds is also fun, and like you said it can be cheaper if you’re somewhat judicious about how many types of seeds you buy.

My plans: I got super lazy and didn’t start any seeds this year. I had the flu the week I wanted to do the starts, so I obviously missed that week. Then I just… didn’t start anything. I’m going to buy starts from our local garden center (non-big box) and I’ll put seeds for the usual bugger things directly in the ground.

Honestly, this will probably work out fine this year. One of my raised beds is 100% raspberries now. One of the others has two artichokes that may or may not have made it through the winter. I didn’t do enough research and didn’t realize they’re perennials and won’t flower their first year unless you cold harden the seedlings. Those things are big, but they certainly are dead down to at least ground level.

Nice selection!

I’ve grown Tromboncino before. They’re tasty, very hardy, and climb without any coaxing if you give them something to climb up. Their shape is also highly amusing.

Just in case you haven’t heard, raspberries - and I assume blackberries - spread pretty aggressively. I put one in my raised bed two falls ago. The beds are 4’ x 8’ and I planted it at one of the long ends. The next season I planted some pepper plants in the far end of the bed. The raspberry bush had overtaken 3/4 of the bed by the fall, but it hasn’t tried to escape the raised bed (yet?).

Odds are your phone has a modern connector so this isn’t necessary. I replaced my pixel 3a, which I bought in September 2019, last December. Thanks to wired phone projection, I cycled its USB-C connector twice a day for 5 years and 3 months. That’s ~4,000 cycles. The connector specification calls for a 10,000 cycle lifetime.

I did have to de-lint the connector from time to time, but other than that I had no issues.

Not to say that you shouldn’t use inductive charging of course :)

My old i3 clone came with a 1mm steel rod I use in these situations. Leave the extruder on your printer, cut the filament off, heat up the extruder to a normal printing temp, and push the gunk through the nozzle. If you have a cold side clog you’re probably going to have to add heat from something like a heat gun.

No problem! I’m glad you were able to get to the bottom of it.

If you add position sensors to the servos you shouldn’t need much calibration after the first go, no?

It looks a lot like a typical robotic arm used in manufacturing. A quick Google shows that there are a number of desk mounted versions available, but I have no idea what kind of accuracy they offer. It shouldn’t be that complicated of a design and since most approaches use encoders things like missteps should be a thing of the past.

I can’t see pulling this off at a home user price point without pretty big compromises on positioning accuracy and/or giving up on feedback.

I would strongly suspect a retraction/priming or mechanical related issue give byhe fact that it’s repeatable in the same area of the print.

Has the printer been used recently and put out good prints? Has anything about the setup changed including a slicer update or different slicer?

I have two knee jerk reactions

Is there an under-extruded section of the print, similar to the corner closest to the camera on the lower section of the print, on the top section of the print? You might have a retraction/priming problem. A quick retraction test print would make this pretty obvious.

You might have had a partial clog that resolved itself, but the fact that the extrusion issues change with the topology of the design makes me want to suggest something else. Try the print again. If you get the same outcome filament isn’t the primary cause.

Seedlings are pretty resilient, as long as they get enough care post transplant life will be good.

As long as you get most of the roots, tomatoes won’t really care. I start mine in red solo cups with holes in the bottom.

Really? I tend to start late Feb/early March for a somewhat later last frost date. I have decent grow lights so the seedlings don’t really get leggy. Our grown season also isn’t super long, so I figure the older the plants are by the time they get in the ground the better.

Very nice. I’ve started seeds the past three years, but came down with the flu when I was planning on doing it. It looks like I still have a month until our last frost date and that’s probably enough time. Maybe I should stop being lazy.

If you can, get some black plastic over the soil to help get temps up.

I tend to plant early after our last frost, when soil temps are still pretty low, and they plants don’t really seem to care. They just don’t take off that fast, but they do get less leggy.

Most of the kits on both sites are going to be pretty solid. You’ll be able to find reviews for most of them, as well as a bunch of forums like audio karma and what not.

As for cost/benefit of DIY speakers, DIY speakers that are well designed will punch well above their BOM cost (eg a $300 to build diy speaker will generally outperform a $300 retail speaker). But if you have a pair of decent hifi speakers already it might not be worth the dive. Most commercial speakers tune for a “house sound” so switching brands can be a bit off-putting at first. Let’s just say that burn in is a two way road and part of that road is your ear acclimating to the sound profit of the speaker.

Thanks for taking the time to type out that reply, it packed a ton of information. I think you’re under selling the eye and the technique necessary to sand well. I’ve done some DIY auto-body and paint work and I really struggled to know when I had sanded well enough. Yeah, I knew I needed to sand more, but I had no idea where to focus my efforts and couldn’t easily distinguish a high spot that needed to get knocked down vs low spot that needed to get filled. Building that skill to the point of it being intuitive seems like something that would take a decent amount of practice or a great coach.

I hadn’t considered polishing ASA. I’m somewhat tempted to give it a go. The hardest thing for me would be figuring out how to sand large curved surface in such a way that doesn’t result in lots of obvious flat spots. I can absolutely see sanding/polishing making prints a bit stronger.

I’m sorry to hear about your physical condition and wish you as much additional recovery as possible. I totally get having very limited time with two younger kids in my house. I think all in the build took 4-5 months starting from printing parts, ordering a kit, and finishing assembly. Even though my kids are not new to me anymore, I don’t know that I’ve fully come to grips with the fact that I can’t complete projects as quickly as I once could and I should probably slow down my rate of project accumulation.

No problem! If you’re already designing speakers, printing vs making them out of something else will come down to your CAD skills/speed vs how long it would take you to make a finished enclosure out of a different material like wood.

I wouldn’t call anything about the process hard, but it can be a bit time consuming if you’re not a CAD ninja already. Either way, doing this will probably improve your CAD skills.

If you’ve never designed a speaker before, you could purchase a kit for one of the many DIY speakers out there and print the enclosure. My first DIY bluetooth speaker was an Overnight Sensation MTM stuffed in a very undersized, and ported, wood enclosure with a built in bluetooth board, basic BMS, and amplifier. Parts-Express, Madisound, and a number of players make getting a complete DIY kit easy.

I’ll take a stab at the colors: slicers are very good at consistent extrusion widths. They do the best they can with varying width, but rarely nail it the first time. The only thing you can really do is fiddle with print settings or change the design to have consistent width extrusions, but that will obviously impact the design. Even with consistent width extrusions you might have to fiddle with extrusion width to nail it.

As for your first layer, are you seeing different squish in different areas of your bed? If yes, are you using a bed mesh?

Grab a few of Ellis’s first layer patches, spread them around your bed, and focus on getting them all to look the same.

Edit for link: https://ellis3dp.com/Print-Tuning-Guide/articles/first_layer_squish.html