Thank you. Likewise! Hopefully you get your printer sorted out. If I learn anything when I troubleshoot by blobbing problem, I will share.

The freezer doesn't work. When it is 'freezing' at the beginning it stays near ambient temperature. The vacuum pump seems to work although we had to replace the oil after a relatively short while. What seems weird is the coolant compressor seems warm, but doesn't seem to be running. I did extend a run that seemed almost done until the morning so I could go to sleep. It looked like some water made it down to the pump the next morning, but we cleaned all that out. The no-freezing part we noticed on the next run before the vacuum would be on. I need to allocate some time to troubleshoot. It seems like a fairly simple system, much like the lyophilizers I have used at lab.

I'm no dev, but I love using my imagination (and a basic understanding of systems, CS, Python, etc.) to indulge my enjoyment of tinkering and building things. Nothing that I have released, but I may at some point share. I'm interested in a making a transaction explorer/tracer with good visualization that uses only queries to a local full node. Also playing around with BLE sensors & a Pi or old beaglebone to collect environmental data (temp, pressure, humidity, etc.), store it in a SQLite db & make visualizations. For me this has practical aspects since I'm trying to grow things at a remote site where the actual temps are more extreme than the NOAA data from the nearest weather station suggest. AI is such a great and fun tool. I used to do similar things with books & stack exchange and now it is just way faster and more focused on the ideas and architecture.

Honest question: how do you feel about linchpin libraries like secp256k1?

Is that support? My printer (a kossel pro that I built) prints most things pretty well, but recently I tried printing part of a meshtastic board case. One of the parts required support and my printer kept blobbing up while trying to do the support structures. I have always tried to do my designs to not require support, but this is someone else's .stl file. I spent some time with an LLM doing research and it seems like there are things I can try (e.g. slow things down, make the supports have a bigger footprint, et al) to tweak in how I slice the print, but I have not had time to get back to that project. On an unrelated note, our freeze drier decided to stop 'freezing'. We had a whole batch of bananas turn out with a chewy texture. Do you know of any good resources to troubleshoot? It sounds like the relay is clicking but the compressor is not coming on, even though it feels warm to the touch. Same model as yours, I think.

I'm in a similar boat, needing to raise funds for day to day activities while I try to find a decent job in science. Rolling month-to-month at this point, supplementing with other assets when I can.

My pleasure. Happy to find interesting, positive folks here!

I've been saving copper pennies for years. In 1982, they were mixed, so a non-destructive way to tell is weigh them: Zn pennies are 2.5 g and Cu pennies about 3.1 g I've also been saving all my nickels, which are 75% Ni & 25% Cu. Today, a copper penny has almost $0.04 of copper and nickels are worth around $0.07 Being both a sound money enthusiast and somewhat of a metal head, I figure some day I will melt these down (separately) and cast a cool piece of art. Or use the pennies in a project that needs copper to conduct electricity or heat. My partner's kid is into pennies since they are being phased out. They get all my zinc ones, but I did gift a 1964 50 cent piece for xmas that has done nicely since then.

Super cool!

This is a sound analysis. It is not easy to bring significant additional silver to market. Industrial demand is fairly inelastic. At some point the price will disgorge holdings from retail to meet the demand. As an aside, I have heard multiple reports from folks (some from my bitdevs group) who have had a hard time selling physical back to e.g. coin shops. They are getting -30% off spot if the store even offers to buy it.