Aaron's Status

8:00 am

Looks like I missed a day or two here, almost as if something was distracting me. Oh, right, my body is falling apart. Also, I spent yesterday morning fiddling with home automation shit instead of writing this.

Health

It’s been a weird couple of days. Two evenings ago I was standing here washing the dishes as I always do, and suddenly I started to feel rather extreme chest tension or pressure when inhaling. Not painful, and didn’t stop me from breathing, but an off-putting sensation.

Now, once you get to be about 40, you will begin to experience periodic reminders of your mortality, including (but not limited to) aches, pains, stiffness, and more! These are welcome signals that you are still alive, which is cause for celebration.

Still, I prefer to spend most of my time in a state of simply being alive and not being reminded by discomfort. This seemed non-emergency, though, so I slept on it. The next day (yesterday), I woke, and it was still there, and now had some mild pain associated but not all the time.

At this point, I’m thinking I have no idea what this is, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s really bad. I’m prone to this, plus I have a history of acute anxiety that I inherited from my dad (thanks, Dad!) so things did not improve from there.

I had a meeting in the morning and I saw myself through it without major issue, but following that I called out sick and tried to just relax, hopeful that a lot of it was anxiety and it would pass (which has worked before). But after a couple of hours of drifting in and out of sleep, nothing had really improved, and at that point my self-awareness had fully overridden every other executive function in my brain.

Already long story short, I got my lovely wife to drive me down to the urgent care just to get checked out and get some kind of external signal. A check-up and chest x-ray later and I had a diagnosis of “pleurisy” (also called “pleuritis”, you can look it up on Wikipedia). Basically an inflammation of lung tissues.

Relieved that I was not dying (faster than expected) nor did I have pneumonia (which is a real concern and it’s apparently going around), and with instructions to “just take Advil” (my favorite prescription), home we went.

They told me it could take days to resolve, and it’s definitely still there now, but a little bit of information goes a long way to calm my anxiety.

3D printing

I’ve been on a tear of 3d printing projects lately and I wrote earlier about replacing my aging Prusa i3 MK2S because the bed is now apparently all but shot, and they’re really difficult and/or expensive to replace. It is probably not worth it to spend upwards of $150 and put the effort into upgrading from 12V to 24V just to keep running the thing, especially given that I know the hot end is slightly bent (my fault), and new machines have so many more features now.

So I bit the bullet, as it were, and ordered an MK4S, which is right now awaiting pickup by FedEx somewhere in the Czech Republic. It’s a kit, of course, because I am not deterred by eight hours of assembly, and find it all rather meditative.

What I’m most excited about is input shaping, which is the new hotness in 3d printing. What they do is physically measure the vibration or resonance of the machine as a result of the carriage’s movement and create a profile from that, which is applied to incoming printing instructions such that the vibrations can be nullified.

The net result is that the printer can move even faster without the sudden changes of direction of the print head causing print errors. This is a profile that they’ve created ahead of time and all I have to do is load it into my slicer and I’m done (allegedly!)

The MK4S also has a higher-volume nozzle and all of this adds up to something like a 2x speed increase from the MK3S. I’m really looking forward to seeing what that will look like.

Since I already set everything up for two tandem printers in my basement print area, I just had to continue to have two. I mean, why not, right?