My visit to Super Nintendo Land!

Super Mario Land - Universal Studios CA
There is just no describing the awe and magistracy of exiting that pipe to see Super Nintendo Land in all it’s glory!  I was very impressed.  However, that impression was short lived after i learned there was only a single attraction.  Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge’ ride was fun and included some novel new interactive play.  However, the interactive elements of the land were few and behind long lines and the required $40 NFC wristband. (my flipper read it as a NTAG I2C Plus 1K ISO 14443-3 NFC-a)  It seems that there is only one quest to do involving the collection of four keys. There also appears to be some interaction with the Mario Kart ride, though the specifics were unclear.  As the primary draw to the the park this visit, it was in turn the biggest disappointment.  i hope this 3D Bowser makes it worth it.

Super Nintendo World - Bowser Anaglyph 3D

Cartesian Geometry is for suckers!

be3n unboxing monoprice delta pro

I am very thankful for an early Thanksgiving toy!  It’s a Monoprice Delta Pro!  (originally $1400, they have dropped a few times and are now on sale for $550. Delta printers are so cool.  They do not move at all like traditional 3D printers. i can watch mine all day.  you can too, the live cam is back!

Delta Printerhttps://printer.be3n.com

It was a snap to get it setup. The opposite experience of my Maker Select V2. Oh i love the auto bed leveling. There is no official Cura profile for the Delta Pro, so i had to throw one together from the Delta Mini and the specs.  I did have a few failures.  I bought some inferior filament and it would continually get clogged. After switching to the good stuff, my prints were beautiful.  Then i started to play with the speed rate options.

S.S. Cheap rainbow filamentSpeed Printing with Delta Pro
That articulated slug is a great example.  you can see the first layer is a bit sloppier on the head segment compared with the other segments. I turned the speed rate up to 130%  I’m not sure exactly what that does, because it certainly doesn’t have that profound of an effect on the print speed.  but if you raise it high enough it gets very sloppy.  i shaved about 30% of the time for a print by upping the speed rate to 200% but the first few layers had much more serious flaws than the slug. On the whole it wasn’t a bad speed print.  I’m sure i can improve it with tweaks.

Pro Tools users struggling with plugin licenses after activation try this. . .

Antares Auto-Tune screen

Users of Antares plugins, or others using Codemeter license manger may be locked out of their licences in Pro-Tools.  The licenses show up in the various license managers, but Pro-Tools says NO. This is due to added file system security of Mojave.  Add Pro Tools to the “Full Disk Access” list in Security & Privacy System Preference. That should solve the problem.  good luck.

I hope everyone is having a Super Tuesday!

super tuesday - i voted

I got out to vote a little later than i hoped and encountered a longer line than i have ever before (at least from voting).  Only 55 minutes, nothing like some lines i have heard about. I got to play with the new electronic voting system.  “It’s not connected to the internet” was the response that i received when inquiring into the device security.  I have high confidence of the paper trail on these units, but I imagine that these machines do some sort of tabulation.  Unless we actually count the paper ballets, it is those tabulations that we are expected to trust.  These tabulation are trivial to manipulate if the devices are tampered with.  “Don’t worry, it’s offline” dissuades none of these fears.  Here are some pictures i took.  Not pictured are the 2 broken units that were taped off at my precinct. Also, i was told that they should not have allowed me to take these pictures.  i don’t know if that is true, but they did not seem to mind at the time.  (i wasn’t wearing that shirt at the time)

super tuesday - electronic votingsuper tuesday - paper ballotsuper tuesday - electronic voting - bernie

Finally retiring my last legacy windows box!

Final transfer from an ancient windows

This particular ancient server has stood as the glue holding several ancient record keeping systems together.  Today marks the last day that it was operating.  I supported this computer for almost it’s entire lifespan.  This Dell ran consistently for over 10 years with very little trouble.  Now your watch is over.

I have been retiring or upgrading unsupported systems all year. it’s to know that all the critical systems are up to date.  Let this be yet another warning if you are running Windows XP, Vista, 7, or 2008 Server (or anything earlier), you should upgrade immediately if you are online in any capacity.  Same goes for macs older then 10.13 (High Sierra). Seriously, don’t let it become a problem.