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More 3d prints!

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A pair of golden dragons

In a previous post, I mentioned that my wife is into Zodiac signs and all that mystical stuff. I’m not into it and actually actively discouraged her from enjoying it because I thought it was weird. Well weird or not, I’ve come to realize that just as I suppressed all of the joys in my life, so was I also suppressing something that brought joy into hers. So I’ve learned to at a minimum keep my mouth shut when she’s enjoying her thing. But when I asked her if she wanted me to print things, she started giving me a list. And here are a few of those. Above are a pair of Chinese dragons. I don’t know what the significance of them are, but thought they were cool and would look cooler with the gold filament I just picked up for the next project below. They came out so nice I ended up printing a second pair and have them in my office.

New Years dragons with posts
And here’s the finished product

I had a few failures between the golden dragons and these cool Chinese New Year dragons. My wife wanted some good luck envelopes printed out that I guess were too thin as the gold mixed with the red and turned into blotches. After two fails, I decided to kick off the red dragons above. This was also my first multi color print which I also discovered takes a long time. The four took almost 2 days to print! This was also the first print I made that required supports. I wondered how they would look and I don’t have to wonder any more. I’m going to end up printing another 4 here in the next week per request from my kids who want a pair each.

The dragons egg
It’s a surprisingly big egg

Sticking with the dragon theme, I found a project involving printing a dragon and placing it in a printable shell. This was my first multi part project as I had to first print the dragon, and then halfway through the print of the egg, I had to place the dragon inside before finishing off the egg. Of course I forgot to take a pic of the dragon before putting it inside. I plan on giving this away so I don’t want to break it. This has given me a few ideas on how to get rid of some of the basic cards I get out of the sports card boxes I open. I’m thinking of putting them inside an egg and giving them away.

Front of the lucky “envelope”
Back of the lucky “envelope”

Final project in the last couple of weeks. I was bummed about not being able to give my wife that lucky envelope she wanted so I searched for some that looked like potential successes. My first try was the one above. It’s also more like a really thing box than an envelope which is why I thought it would work out better. Being a box, the “walls” could be printed a little thicker so the contrasting filament would show better. The previous attempts were really thin and the red washed out the gold. I also used yellow filament (third trip to Microcenter!) to see if maybe it would be better contrasting than the gold. I think in this case it was the right call.

She was super happy about this one and wants me to print more of them so she can give them away. I have a month so I’ll space them in between longer projects. All in all, it’s been a fun couple of weeks with the Bambu A1! It seems like I find more things that I want to print, and my growing collection of filament reflects that. Now that I’ve tried four color printing, I’m starting to look at higher end printers capable of more colors. This is turning out to be a really expensive hobby, but the fact that my wife enjoys the results as much as I do makes it worth it. I can’t wait for my kids to ask me to print things. I’m sure they’ll come up with some cool projects. Have any interesting projects that you think I’d be interested in? #3dprinting

Fun with Linux

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Pic of the initial boot screen after a fresh install

Ok, gonna show some of my tech nerdy side. I work with computers all day so you would think, “Gee, how can you find playing around with computers fun when you work with them all day?” I would have to agree with you at first blush. I fully expected this to be a boring affair and was just doing it to earn a certification. But what really got me feeling the fun and joy in this project was the fact that while I am able to recreate my daily workflow on this laptop (the same workflow I would have on my desktop) there are enough differences that force me to do some research and extra steps that get my nerdy juices flowing. For example, the Bambu studio software I use for the 3d printer. On Windows, it’s a simple matter of downloading the software and then clicking on it to start the installation process. A few clicks later and I’m up and running.

For most people that’s all you really want. But for someone like me who does this every day, it does get tedious and mind numbing. Enter the installation process on Ubuntu. Ok, go to the site, download the software and click on it to start the installation. A prompt pops up and I click yes. After a few seconds? Nothing. Do it again. Same result. Third time, same thing. Ok, off to google. A few minutes later and on a reddit post I discover I need something called flathub to be able to flatpak copies of Bambu studio. Huh? What? I tried to read up on it but there’s a ton of info. Ok, let’s just look up how to install it. Find a walkthrough and follow the directions. Hit a few snags and had to look up the errors to figure out what’s happening and how to fix it. An hour later and voila! It’s installed.

Now again, for most people that would not be an ideal situation. It’s probably why more people don’t mess around with Linux; it’s 80% there but why mess with 80 when you can get 100 (ok 95% because it’s Windows and it has it’s own issues) out of the most commonly used OS out there? Ah, but I have that different use case! And the troubleshooting is actually stimulating parts of my work brain that rarely if ever get stimulated without the pressure of deadlines. The kicker is the fact that I was able to get pretty much everything I can do on my desktop to work on this laptop with Ubuntu. That’s the part that really got me. When I messed around with Linux even 5 years ago, I couldn’t get 50% of my daily workflow to work on it. Now? I can do everything (so far) I’ve been driving on this thing for a week now and while everything works generally, the laptop shows it’s age as applications take longer to open and they occasionally freeze here and there. But I could see myself buying another budget laptop that’s maybe 3 years old and absolutely screaming through things.

Pharoah: A New Era loading…

The real challenge happened this past weekend. While I had installed Steam on this laptop, my initial attempt at playing on this thing really taxed the system. I tried playing Dungeons 3 on it but I guess the game was too much for the laptop as it was really choppy. I gave up on that, satisfied that it was still capable of doing the other things I do. But I had some time this weekend so I took another shot at it. I queued up Pharoah: A New Era on it and the opening movie chopped badly. But once it got to the game, everything loaded up and played pretty well. Still a lot slower than my desktop but hey, it was playable! On a 6 year old laptop!

I was also able to install VirtualBox and started to build up my lab for my Linux+ studies. This is the most important aspect of this project and it went really well. VirtualBox installed with no issues, and works exactly the same way as it does on Windows. I got a copy of Rocky Linux as well as Ubuntu Server and got the VMs of each working. They even run concurrently without killing the CPU too badly. I had both running while watching the Udemy course which is probably the most common scenario and everything just worked. Perfect. What I’m really looking forward to is bringing this thing along on our outings and seeing how it compares to when it was in it’s prime. I used to bring this around with me to the mall where I would find a nice comfortable spot to sit and connect to the mall Wi-Fi and do stuff. There were many a weekend I spent with this thing and I do look forward to doing so again.

Joy Budget

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One idea I was toying with when I first created this blog was trying to see if I could ball on a budget. In this case, could I limit my hobbies to just $100 dollars a month? Looking at what I currently dabble in (3d printing, sports card collecting, retro handheld gaming, and playing with Linux) and it’s looking like a pretty tough order. Especially if you consider how much money I’ve already invested in all of them so far. But I realize that I am also going a bit overboard with these as well and I need some sort of accountability mechanism. So I’ve decided that as of today, I will challenge myself. I will create a joy budget and only use that joy budget for my hobbies. Will I be able to do it? Not perfectly. But hey, it’s more about the attempt.

I will give myself some grace and allow carry over. So if I don’t spend anything this month, I can carry that Ben Franklin over and buy something more than 100 dollars at that point. I will also allow myself to go over my current budget by $50 so I still have some play money for the next month. If I’m fortunate enough to sell something produced or otherwise acquired with my joy budget, I can add that to the balance. Oh, and if I get a monetary gift like birthday or Christmas money (highly unlikely, but still a possibility) I can add it to the joy budget balance if I intend to use it for my hobbies. Anything hobby related that I acquired prior to today is allowed and not counted against the budget. I mean, it’s the reason I’m trying to put the breaks on things because some purchases (like the Ayn Thor and the Emmitt Smith autographed card) are a lot higher than I expected to spend! Other than that I have my budget constraints so lets see how far I can go. Wish me luck!

Joy Budget balance as of Feb. 1 2026: $100

My initial foray into 3d printing

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In my previous post, I mentioned 3d printing as my most exciting project/hobby in 2026. I wanted to walk through in a bit more detail how it all broke down on day 1 and what was the first thing I printed. As I mentioned, I live in a small apartment and of course, space is a premium. The other issue is that this machine isn’t a small thing and it makes noise, shakes, and is generally something that needs to sit on something a little sturdy. I watched a ton of YouTube videos regarding 3d printing and noticed that the majority of the folks I watched put their printers on workshop shelves so I hit up my local Home Depot and bought one. It was already late in the afternoon and by the time I put the shelf together it was a bit late so I decided to wait until the next day to set things up. Unfortunately, I also work a part time job on the weekend and I worked the next day as well. It wouldn’t be until the afternoon when I got to it. So there it sat, on the newly built shelf.

The Bambu A1 with AMS Lite

Sitting patiently waiting to be set up

Filament!

The next day I was restless at work as I anticipated getting home, setting things up, and printing out my first 3d thing! After an excruciatingly long 8 hour shift, and another 45 minute drive home, I finally got to putting it together. The instructions were pretty simple, and there weren’t any real gotchas. Everything was set up and ready to go in a bit over an hour. Let’s do this!

The finished product!

With all the research I did, one thing that I had to really put some thought into was what I was going to print first. Most people print this test print of a boat called benchy, and I thought about doing that as well. But I also thought, what am I gonna do with it once I’m done? Just put it in a drawer and forget about it? No. I wanted something memorable. Something that I would always look at and remember fondly that it was my first. So I did the most memorable (and probably most people would also think) nerdy thing possible: I printed out a poop bin. Yes, it’s called a poop bin. And no, it’s not for actual poop. These printers constantly flush out unused melted filament, especially when you print out multi-colored things. That unused melted filament is what is affectionately known as poop. And the mechanism to remove this poop from the printer is a little metal plate that launches the poop away from the printer so it doesn’t get into the print. It’s actually hilarious to watch the first few times. But having all this stuff all over the floor isn’t too fun. So I printed out a poop bin.

Poop stopper
Poop net
Poop bin
final product

It was actually three parts, so I guess technically the first thing I printed was the Poop stopper. Essentially when the A1 launches the poop, this stopper is there to stop it from launching away and instead forces it to drop straight down into the poop bin. The poop net catches the poop and since you can remove it, you can twist it just in case some still melted poop falls and sticks to the net. Otherwise, you’d have to scrape it off of the bin which is a little tough. Then there’s the self explanatory poop bin. Soooooo… not the story I would exactly share to others to get them excited about 3d printing. But I do look at that bin every time I print something and remember that was the first thing ever. It started it all and continues to help grow my interest.

It’s only been a few days, but I can assure you that isn’t the only thing I’ve printed. First non poop bin print was a little cute lucky cat for my wife. It was a lot smaller than the pictures showed so she wanted something else. She ended up finding a horse figurine that she wanted for the year of the horse (she’s into all this astrology stuff) so I obliged. I also ended up printing a desk organizer which I’ve been hunting for the past few months. Those things are hard to come by nowadays, and this one had almost every element I wanted in one small package. Hopefully I’ll have more cool things to show off in the future. If you’re into 3d printing, what have you printed? #3dprinting

The RG CUBEXX

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Here’s another pandora’s box that was opened innocently but has unleashed upon my world (well, my wallet’s world I should say) all kinds of calamity. Facebook is the culprit here, as I saw an innocent ad for a little device that allows you to play all kinds of retro games. It even came with 15000 games installed and it advertised having Pokémon as a few of that number. All for the low price of $35! Plus shipping and handling. Oh and eventually I also discovered import fees as well. But that $35 only amounted to $44 total so not a whole lot of out of pocket expense. That retro handheld was the R36H and for a first time device, I was enamored. I could put it in my pocket and pull it out whenever I felt the hankering for playing a game. It charged quickly, getting to full in 2 hours from one bar. Oh yeah this was amazing.

Two problems quickly arose, however. First it didn’t have any Pokémon games as advertised. And while I did find a ton of games to play, it was really Pokémon that caught my interest. So I fell down the rabbit hole of ROMs while trying to scratch that itch. I eventually found what I was looking for and a week after buying it, I had Pokémon Blue working on this thing. But that lead to the second problem: it looked… weird. Now I did go online to see if I could fix it, and I did try some suggestions, but ultimately, the screen ratio is not a perfect square and so I either had to stretch the screen to fit it all, or there would be black bars (grey in this case) on the sides. Both were distracting in their own way.

So the Facebook ai, always listening, just happened to put up an ad for the RG Cube XX on my feed. Perfect 4″ square, optimal for my Pokémon fix. I then gifted the R36H to my wife, who basically just plays Tetris and Dr. Wario and doesn’t care about the screen, and ordered the Cube. Another quick week and soon I had it in my hands.

Don’t mind the white, I opened a box that had all this dusty powder in it :/

Luckily I learned how to copy over my ROM folders and this had 2 slots so I was able to save all of the games onto one slot and then have the OS installed on a second SD card in the second slot. This comes in quite handy because one thing that I also found out over the course of the last few months is that the OS copy gets corrupted a ton. It’ll be working fine one minute then the next nothing. I’ve learned that if you plug it on and the charging light comes on, it’s the OS. I had my original Cube actually fail (plug in, no light) and returned it to pick up a replacement (which is also the same time I picked up the rubber case) since then, I’ve had the OS get corrupted 3 separate times. I’ve rebuilt the OS on the SD card and recovered every single time. So remember how I said all the games are on another card? Well that includes the save games. Thank my lucky stars because I probably would have lost it after the second fail. All this to say, these retro handhelds aren’t a perfect experience. Would I recommend this to someone who doesn’t have any skill or interest in troubleshooting electronic devices? No. No I would not.

What greets me every time I boot it up. Well… when it boots up.

Despite having over 15k games, I really only play three: Pokémon Blue, Tetris and Mike Tyson’s PunchOut. The fact that I have so many to choose from makes me drop into analysis paralysis. Scrolling through so many, I eventually give up looking. Eventually I’ll start working through more of them but this is it for now. Anyhow, if you read my previous post, you’ll remember how I complained about the “look” of the game on the R36H. Well, below is a pic of the game in native form. I set it to that just to show you another feature, and that’s the fineness of the screen. There are a few options including native where you can make it look blocky like the OG Gameboy. But I set it to HD along with full screen (the grey border goes away and the game perfectly fits the screen) so my old eyes can enjoy the game better.

You can emulate the old pixelated look but there’s something about the smoothness of HD

I’ve had this device and I’ve enjoyed the last two months with it. There are so many different other versions of retro handhelds, some emulating old style hand helds (Gameboy shaped, GBA shaped, PS1 shaped oh my!) and others in some interesting form factors. But this is perfect for me and what I want to play at the moment. The only weakness is if I ever want to play a DS style game, I’d have to flip between screens. I imagine that it probably gets old after a while. So to get ahead of this, I ended up ordering an Ayn Thor which I’ll talk about when I get it. I don’t anticipate that replacing this for the older games and being much larger, won’t replace this as my carry around either. So barring any actual failure of this thing we’ll be together for a long long time. Do you play retro games? Have a handheld? If so which one(s) and why do you like them? #retro

Happy belated New Year!

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I started this blog, oh about a month ago, just prior to Christmas. At the time I was missing home (I just relocated to a new state about 15 or so months ago) along with dealing with some heavy issues. So I decided to start a blog to document my journey to rediscover what makes me happy. The funny thing is I was fully on board with the idea and actually had a few things lined up to post. I might still go through with a few of them but as is typical with the way I am, passion projects and hobbies took a back seat to what’s going on right now. So now that things on the outside have finally slowed down, I’m able to start going back to projects like this.

#Retro

Don’t get me wrong though, unlike in the past I did stick with a few hobbies with what little free time I had. I bought myself a retro handheld (the Anbernic RG CUBE XX) on which I was able to download a few of the Pokémon games and have been steadily working through Pokémon Blue from the Gameboy. That has absolutely been a blast. I’ve clocked in almost 68 total hours in game just levelling up the Pokémon I have so far to level 30 (just caught a Nidoran that needs to be levelled up; the current Pokémon project lol) while slowly making my way around. I must shamefully report that I have had to resort to using a walkthrough to figure out where to go next because I was totally clueless what to do after defeating the Sarge. This might pop up a bit more on this blog as there are a ton of games I’ve already downloaded that are just waiting in the wings as well. I guess I’ll tag them with #retro if you want to follow that thread.

#CardCollecting

Another thing I’ve started getting back into from the past is collecting cards. I used to collect sports cards as a kid and had a ton of boxes. I lost them all when my moms house was foreclosed and we were evicted with only 2 days to pack and move. So maybe subconsciously I related this hobby with that moment. But as I’ve started to rediscover what’s brought me joy, this and video games were at the top of my list. My first card collecting project is to collect the Collectors Edge 1996 Superbowl Dallas Cowboys signature series. From the greatest football team on the planet and the greatest Superbowl win ever. EVER! I’m looking for one more card. So if you have or know who has Michael Irvin DCA-24 and is willing to part with it, let me know! I also used to play Magic the Gathering and Pokemon as well, but I’ve shied away so far. That requires a time commitment that I might be ready to dedicate myself to. But it’s still on the list. That and my son is a huge Pokemon TCG player so it might prove to be a great way to spend more time with him. For now, I’m sticking with sportscards. I’ll tag posts with #cardcollecting if you want to follow that thread.

#Linux

Third thing I’ve started playing around with is something that originally off as a work related thing but is starting to evolve into something I’m actually enjoying. A back story will best explain why. Back during COVID, when we were all cooped up in our homes, I had to buy laptops for my kids who before then didn’t have a need for them but with school moving online they suddenly needed computers. My youngest daughter was only 10 at the time so she didn’t really need a high powered laptop. So I picked up a knock off branded motile 14″ laptop for her. Once they started going back to school physically, her need for that laptop disappeared and I ended up using it as a throw away laptop. Since it was so cheap (I think I got it for $175) I brought it with me everywhere. It served as my go to whenever I knew I was going to be somewhere for longer than an hour but potentially may forget it and possibly leave it behind. Plus it was way more portable than my primary laptop! I carried this thing around with me until I moved in 2024 and just recently found it again 2 months back in the closet. I booted it up but it was slow and unwieldy. Ok, maybe it just needs some updates and things should work better. So I tried to update it only to find out that Windows 11 requires TPM and this doesn’t have it unfortunately. Oh well.

I was about to put it up on eBay when I remembered that I was going to try to earn my Linux+ certification in 2026. So I thought to myself, maybe I can install Linux on this and use it as my study machine. Then I could sell it once I’m done and send it off properly, having been useful again to me one last time. Well, I just installed Ubuntu on it and… it works amazingly. It’s as if it’s got a second life. Things open quickly again, and work like a charm. Chrome tabs? Check. Email? Check. Virtualbox plus a few VMs running at the same time, I have 3 open and running with a little sluggishness here and there (which was pretty much it’s limit with Windows too so no complaints) Heck, for giggles I installed Steam and so far I’ve played one game on it. Granted, I don’t play super intense games but this is from 2020! The fact that I could play a game released last year at all, and on Linux as well, is amazing to me. I’ve spent the last week playing around with this laptop again, and I have found it fun learning how to recreate my workflows in Ubuntu. So far, with a little extra work occasionally, I’ve been able to recreate everything sufficiently that I think this might actually become my carry-around again. One thing I’m currently trying to get working is another new passion of mine. For those who can guess, it has to do with installing Bambu Studio and getting it to work. For those who want to know what it is, read on! I’ll tag any related posts with #linux if you want to read that thread.

#3dprinting

So the thing that has me most excited about 2026 is definitely 3d printing. I just picked up a Bambu A1 printer from Microcenter on a semi whim and I have not regretted the choice. I had been looking at this for a few months now, but space constraints (I live in a small apartment) and cost (while not the most expensive hobby, I had a few other pots stirring but I made room for one more somehow) were barriers to entry. Well, I was projecting my #joybudget (another idea I have for this blog; stay tuned) for February and I looked up the cost of the Bambu A1 printer on their website. I had that in mind when I happened to receive an email ad from Microcenter and wouldn’t you know it, they have the Bambu A1 in stock for the same price as the company does. Ok, compelling. So I headed out to my local store to see it in person. I saw it, saw a few printed figures and fell in love. But I always have a self imposed rule of going home and coming back the next day to make a major purchase. It’s saved me the headache because I avoid buyers regret (most times; it still isn’t a perfect science) as I usually get over that initial rush of excitement and by the next day I either forget about it or decide it isn’t necessary.

That wasn’t the case with the printer. The next morning I dragged my wife along to play devils advocate and try to talk me out of buying it. We get there and she sees a little figurine that she absolutely adores. She asks the salesman if I’m able to print it on the A1 and he says absolutely. But she could also take the figurine because they make those for funsies. We both walked out with a brand new 3d printer, an attachment that allows us to print in 4 colors, and a starter pack of filament. I’ve since gone back and bought 5 more rolls of different colored filament for different printing projects. I’ll tag those posts with #3dprinting if you want to follow that thread.

What’s next

So hopefully with a lot of passion projects that bring me joy, I can add regularly blogging to the list. I think one of the most important things about joy is to share it with others so I hope to humbly share it with you. I would also welcome your feedback as I’m sure there are things I’m doing or not doing that you might know would make my experience even better. and hey, if you end up picking up one of these hobbies because of me, let me know! I want to share in your joy as well. On that note, have a great day and stay joyful. -Gerald