The Mission: To Terraform Mars - on the Kitchen Table (for now)

The plan was simple: load up the model, hit print, and come back in a few hours to some shiny new tiles for the kids (and us too). It is all an adventure in additive manufacturing of toys. Of course, simple plans rarely survive contact with reality. There was just one problem: the spool of dark grey PLA was looking suspiciously light. The thought of a potential AMS jam meant one thing: I wasn’t going anywhere. I was on printer babysitting duty.

A nice set of 3d printed cities for Terraforming Mars.

Staring at a printer for an hour is a special kind of meditative boredom. It’s also the perfect incubator for those ‘you know what I should finally do?’ ideas. For me, it was time to brush up on my GitHub skills, have a look at this Ruby thing, learn the basics of Jekyll, and get a blog running on GitHub Pages.

Well, as it is with quick “great ideas,” before the printer finished its job, I checked the loads on my Windows 11 workstation (which already runs at 75% of 2 CPUs calculating my Digital Ocean project, which is was somewhat non restartable), installed Ruby, Jekyll, and Git, and promptly drove the whole project off a cliff.

The next hour was a focused deep dive into the digital engine room. No frantic multitasking, just a methodical attack on a chain of frustrating errors. It was a quick tour of wrestling with system variables in Windows, untangling the mess of failed Actions on GitHub, deleting the custom workflows that were causing all the havoc, and finally, the satisfying brutality of a single git push --force. And then, silence. It worked.

What about the DigitalOcean project, you ask? The deeply focused fix involved three commits that now allow the process to be safely restarted exactly where it has left off. I guess you could call that a feature now - and a much-needed one, since a day without a crashing Python kernel is a day lost.

The Final Boss: The Capital

So here I am. The kids have their nice new tiles—or they will, once this last piece is done. I’m writing this while waiting for the “capital” to print. It’s the only tile that needs that last bit of dark grey, and the printer is back on the final, dwindling centimeters of filament. The risk of a jam is back, a tiny bit of suspense to cap off the project.

It’s not like I needed another blog. I already have one for teaching navigation and high-latitude sailing. Another that’s somewhat personal, PM’y stuff. And now… this one. So the question is, what shall I do with it? Maybe - eventually - during ‘mythical free time’, so around two thousand thirty never - I’ll write an aggregator. A tool to collect all my stdout from everywhere and pipe it to a single domain. One blog to rule them all.

Then again, with blogs, it’s like… hoarding no, wait. It was herding cats. Wasn’t it? And it’s official I’m hoarding blogs. I guess I’ll just keep trying new things and writing about the chaotic journey it takes to get them done. Welcome to the workshop. Oh, wait. It’s “the lab” these days.

Welcome to the LAB.